Anatoly Karlin writes: On the global scale, the Protestant world comprise nine of the world’s top 10 most financially literate countries, and an amazing 17 of the world’s top 25 – which is also a convenient threshold representing 50%+ financial literacy. (By which point the stock of both developed world Protestant countries pretty much ends). The world’s offshore bank, Switzerland, is a relatively disappointing 15th.
9 of the top 10 countries are within the Hajnal line of Europe, or are their descendants; and 17 of the top 25.
Predictably, the non-Protestant exception in the top 10 is Israel. The Jews can sure count their shekels.
Another correlation that seems to exist is with time preference. Countries where people displayed a willingness to wait to get a greater sum of money in one month’s time, as opposed to getting a smaller sum right now (inflation-adjusted), also tended to perform much better on financial literacy metrics.
The Catholics and Orthodox Christians tended to do a lot worse, even though as we know IQ differences between them and the Protestant world are fairly minor. Likewise with the Confucian civilization.
This suggests that Protestant populations have tended to culturally evolve (or gene-culturally evolve) an “intuitive” understanding of finance like things, while the rest of the world pretty much has to figure it out from zero. More intelligent populations with financial experience, such as the Japanese, tend to be relatively better at it (43% financially literate); less intelligent populations without much financial experience, such as the Indians and Iranians, do much worse at it (<25% financially literate).
