Having A Good Time

Matthew Yglesias reports from Paris:

I was a little bit taken aback to realize yesterday that a large share of French businesses were closed for All Saints Day. It put me in a mind of some some old Weberian saws about Protestant work ethic and prosperity. That, in turn, reminded me of the fact that for Eurocrisis purposes, one of the main “southern” European countries is Ireland, which if you look on a map is actually the second-most-northerly (after Finland) of Euro member states.
The ECB turns out to have a new paper (PDF) on precisely this, which looks at Switzerland and compares Catholic jurisdictions to Protestant ones. They find more inequality in the Protestant areas and also harder working people: “Our empirical results suggest that ceteris paribus in a Reformed Protestant electorate support for increasing leisure time will be about 13 percentage points lower than in a Catholic electorate, and that support for government intervention will be about 11 percentage points lower.”

This reminds me of the Simpsons, when Marge goes to Protestant Heaven and Homer and Bart go to Catholic Heaven.  Give me Catholic Heaven, please.  I couldn' find that footage, but here's a few clips from that show, in an interview with the Simpsons producer after the Vatican claimed Homer as a Catholic: