Religious Life on M.A.R.S. ???

Sometimes, you just know that the authors of an article you are reading, have had a lot of fun while writing it. The amount of fun just radiates from the pages (or your screen, in the digital age), and somehow, these articles are often the really interesting ones as well. Perhaps this has something to do with the authors feeling certain about their work and their grasp on it.

It must have been pleasant days in the `laboratories’ of Iannaccone and Makowsky when they wrote their article in `Agent-Based Explanations’ of religious dynamics. They start their article with a thought-experiment concerning a magic trick, have named the model they propose MARS (multi-agent religion simulation), and titled their paragraphs with variations as `Life on MARS’ and `Exploring MARS’. 

Despite all the fun, the authors have addressed an important problem in the study of regional segregation of religious (and non-religious) people. Regarding this religious regionalism in America they describe an apparent paradox of persistent mobility and persistent regionalism. The standard-approach to tackle such a problem (variants of regression analysis) fails, for it does not provide a “coherent model linking individual behavior to aggregate outcomes and vice versa”, thereby “ignoring social structure”. I gave an example of this problem of aggregation earlier (in Dutch), which illustrated how one can easily be led to the wrong conclusions, when the social restrictions people act within are not taken into account. 
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