An Economic Approach to Religious Communes: The Shakers

The Shakers were a religious society well known for their commitments to celibacy, pacifism, joint ownership of property, and communal lifestyle. John E. Murray wrote the first economic analysis of the Shakers in his Ph.D. dissertation in 1992. Proposing that Shaker membership and prospective entrants responded to the incentives created by the difference between Shaker and worldly living standards, he developed a model of community formation and faith requirements, quality of life, and entry and exit behavior. He tested the implications of the model by using demographic, epidemiologic, anthropometric, and economic data recovered from Shaker manuscripts. He went on to write a series of articles, some coauthored by Metin Coşgel, which examined various aspects of the Shaker lifestyle and business organization. These articles showed that membership decisions within Shaker communal societies were influenced by both religious belief and economic incentives; despite communalism, Shaker farms and shops generally performed just as productively as their neighbors; the organization of Shaker communes under the Family system was a compromise that balanced communal ideals with the costs of motivation and coordination; eastern and western Shakers farmed in ways that were more similar to their neighbors than to each other; and Shakers’ dairy operations were just as productive as nearby family farms or larger commercial operations. This essay examines these topics in a coherent manner with the dual objective of discussing Murray’s contributions to the literature and uncovering the basic elements of an economic approach to understanding the behavior, organization, and relative performance of the Shakers.