Despite the old saw that money can’t buy happiness, the two tend to be correlated. Up to about $75,000, the higher your income, the happier you tend to be.
Correlation, of course, does not equal causation. It’s quite possible that the connection between money and happiness is not a direct one. It’s hard to root out the causal mechanism because so many of the good things in life correlate with one another. Income, marriage, sobriety, health, and education all tend to coexist in the same people and communities.
That’s why Ramadan can be so educational. The Muslim holy season may actually separate wealth from happiness.
Thursday night at sundown, Ramadan 2018 comes to an end with a feast called Eid al-Fitr, “Fitr” referring to the breaking of the fast.
Throughout Ramadan, Muslims fast during all daylight hours. And this isn’t the sort of fast Catholics do on Ash Wednesday and Good Friday, where water is allowed, along with a mini-breakfast and mini-lunch. Ramadan fasting means no food, no drink, no water from sunrise to sunset.
A quirk in the Muslim calendar that makes the current Ramadan more brutal than most. The Islamic calendar doesn’t coincide with the Gregorian calendar or with the earth’s orbit around the sun. The Islamic calendar is based on the moon, and every month comprises the approximately 29 days from new moon to new moon. Twelve of these months, an Islamic year, is about 354 days.
As a result, Ramadan cycles through the calendar year. Ramadan began December 9 in 1999, for instance. In 2016, Ramadan lasted from June 7 to July 5. Because of the longer summer days, Northern Hemisphere Muslims have fasted far more in recent years than they did 18 years ago. Muslims in D.C., for instance, face nearly 15 hours of fasting this year, compared to 9.5 hours in 2000.
So why does this have to do with anything? Economists Filipe Campante and David Yanagizawa-Drott saw this variation in fasting duration as something of a natural experiment. How do longer religious fasts affect a country compared to shorter ones?
So they compared Bangladesh, which is near the equator and thus experiences very little variation in Ramadan fast duration over the years, to Turkey, where the longest day of the summer has nearly 6 hours more sunlight than the shortest day during the winter.
A month with a lot of fasting should affect the people of a country differently than a month with a moderate amount of fasting. Sure enough, the researchers found two correlations.
First, “longer prescribed Ramadan fasting has a robust negative effect on output growth in Muslim countries.” That is, with all sorts of controls in place, the economists found that Turkey’s economy seemed to be dragged down by the longer fasts in years where Ramadan was in the summer — an effect that didn’t pop up in Bangladesh, where summer Ramadan isn’t much different in fast length than winter Ramadan.
It’s not hard to guess why: More fasting means more hours being hungry and low on energy, which means less economic productivity. In these years of longer fasting, GDP per capita fell in Muslim countries with longer fasts, but not in non-Muslim countries.
But here’s the more interesting finding: “increased Ramadan fasting requirements lead Muslim individuals to report greater levels of both happiness and life satisfaction.”
Longer fasts, then, might make Muslims poorer but happier, the study suggests.
As always, the mechanism and causality could be endlessly debated. Maybe it’s a fluke. Maybe the key is the camaraderie formed by sacrifice. Maybe the key is the extra joy of the nighttime meals after the long fast. Maybe it’s the ability to eat outdoors in the warm weather after fasting.
Whatever the actual cause, there seems to be an important lesson that we can generalize beyond Islam and beyond Ramadan: Sacrificing, together with family and community, for a higher cause, can bring happiness, without the need for riches.
This is something to recall in America, where the working class is retreating from religion at the same time it is suffering social and economic woes. When we’re reduced to a secular culture, there’s no escaping the connection between wealth and happiness. The only way to detach those two seems to be through religious sacrifice.
