The Impact of Jews on the American Economy

Economics involves the allocation of resources in pursuit of varied objectives. The main things affecting decisions made on resource allocation are income and the price of goods and services. A good or service's price is made of two parts: time and money. Most people think in terms of income and budget, but every thing one consumes also takes time and of course we only have twenty-four hours in a day. Economic goods are considered to be time-intensive if the money portion of their full price is small in comparison to their time component. Any religion. but especially Judaism, is an example of an economic good- something that cannot be had without consumer participation.

The American Jewish community enjoyed a period of increased economic mobility during the twentieth century, and many Jewish-Americans are involved in high-paying jobs. This fact explains why there are so many time-intensive American Jewish movements (such as Conservative, Reconstructionist, and Reform), and why these movements are so prevalent in America's Jewish communities. In most cases, those with high incomes can spend and do more or less as they please, and Jews are no exception to the rule. Among people making comparable wages and paying comparable full prices, those with bigger budgets will almost always spend more on their Jewish observance along with other consumer goods and services.

During the first part of the twentieth century, wage effect was strong enough to override the income effect, and religious observance apparently declined commensurate with income. In more recent times however, America's Jewish community has shown more diversity in where it gets its income, resulting in a looser association between higher wages and income. Although the majority of Jews in America have higher wages and attend time-efficient American synagogues, their incomes are no longer a measure of their religious orthodoxy.

Wages' effects on religious choice are frequently confused with those of education. If an educated American Jew is not observant, that might have more to do with the wage rate the person's education commanded as opposed to the substance of the education. As was the case with Einstein, many well-paid American Jews continue to be observant but seldom attend synagogue. Secularism is appealing to educated Jewish-Americans, either as an alternative to the synagogue movements described above or to orthodox Judaism.

However, secularism is not the province of the educated. As is true of income, higher learning may be linked with less-frequent synagogue attendance because of the higher wages an educated person typically gets. Although school can be seen as an investment for the future, an investment that will pay off in higher future wages, it can affect all aspects of a person's life and how they fit into the world. Education is often a consequence of an economic decision, and it has indirect effects on the level of religious observancy.

The field of religious economics is relatively new, but it has already provided evidence of the ways that religion affects many of our investment decisions. Jews behave differently in many ways when compared to people from other religions, but they share many things as well, and the economic underpinnings of this relationship are not fully understood. No one knows exactly what quality of Judaism causes its adherents to differ in economic practice, and we are still trying to predict how Judaism will affect America's future economy. Jews have many economic relationships all over the world that might affect the business world.