Does Capitalism Have a Prayer? Economic Ideology, Religiosity, and Satisfaction with Life

This article examines the relationship between an individual's satisfaction with life and latent character traits such as economic ideology, religiosity, and political ideology. To conduct the analysis, the authors use original survey data gathered from Amazon's Mechanical Turk, which results suggest that religious respondents are significantly more satisfied with their lives, while individuals with a less-capitalist economic orientation are significantly less satisfied than the mean respondent. The most satisfied individuals are those that have a high level of religiosity and a more-capitalist economic ideology. These results suggest that religious beliefs and economic ideology may be complementary traits for one's satisfaction with life.