Show the relationship between religion and riches.
Answers
Answer:
Why are some parts of the world rich, and other parts poor? In the west many of us live in conditions almost unimaginably more comfortable than billions of people in regions where economic growth and development have been slower. Inequality defines our world. As the Nobel prize-winning economist Robert Lucas put it, once you start thinking about what causes these stark differences, it can become hard to think about anything else.
This “great divergence” is even more intriguing given how relatively recent it is: 500 years ago the west was no richer than the far east, while 1,000 years ago, the Islamic world was more developed than Christian Europe in everything from mathematics to philosophy, engineering to technology, agriculture to medicine; the medieval German nun and writer Hrotsvitha called Islamic Córdoba “the ornament of the world”.
By 1600, however, the Islamic world had fallen behind western Europe, and for centuries the Middle East has been beset by slow growth, persistent poverty and seemingly intractable social problems. North-western Europe, by contrast, became the richest corner of the world, the hub of industrialisation and globalisation. In this sweeping and provocative book, the economic historian Jared Rubin asks how such a dramatic reversal of fortunes came about.
Rubin has no time for those who see the answer in any supposed “backwardness” of the Muslim faith. The successes of medieval Islam alone show that there is nothing against progress in its religious doctrine: “The superiority of the learned man over the devout is like that of the moon over the rest of the stars,” states one of Muhammad’s hadiths. Instead, Rubin argues that differences in the way religion and government interact caused the economic fortunes of Europe and the Middle East to diverge.
The driving motivation of most rulers is not ideology or to do good, but to maintain and strengthen their hold on power: “to propagate their rule”. This requires “coercion” – the ability to enforce power – and, crucially, some form of “legitimacy”. In the medieval world, both Islamic and Christian rulers claimed part of their legitimacy from religious authorities, but after the Reformation, Rubin thinks that European governments had to turn away from religion as a source of political legitimacy.
By getting “religion out of politics”, Europe made space at the political “bargaining table” for economic interests, creating a virtuous cycle of “pro-growth” policy-making. Islamic rulers, by contrast, continued to rely on religious legitimation and economic interests were mostly excluded from politics, leading to governance that focused on the narrow interests of sultans, and the conservative religious and military elites who backed them.
Explanation:
Ohm's Law is a formula used to calculate the relationship between voltage, current and resistance in an electrical circuit. To students of electronics, Ohm's Law (E = IR) is as fundamentally important as Einstein's Relativity equation (E = mc²) is to physicists. E = I x R.