Directly Unproductive Prophet-Seeking Activities.

The article merges two themes that have been prominent in recent years in economics. The first provides economic explanations of seemingly non-economic phenomena. The other studies the allocation of resources to the activities of creating and capturing rents in the economy. With given endowments of factors and for the moment omitting any other-worldly uses of their services, a conventional transformation curve TT is formed. Let p be the world price of guns in terms of butter, again assumed constant for expository convenience. The next world is considered by introducing a heaven, which consists of a fixed number of places. It is recognized that the model as it stands is too simple to allow drawing dogmatic conclusions. The willingness to pay for a place in heaven can be endogenized by the introduction of promotional activities. This will allow us to model rent creation as well as rent-seeking religious activities. The result that religious activities can raise or lower welfare depending on the circumstances has obvious policy implications, and leads to the general question of separation of church and state. But this is too difficult an issue to be pursued here.