Tyler Cowen weighs whether a massive conversion of low-income people to Mormonism would reduce poverty, since Utah's numbers are so low:
A viable policy, no, but a viable solution yes. Many of the costs of poverty are sociological rather than narrowly economic per se. In other words, many of the poor do not have what could be called Mormon lifestyles. This point holds all the more strongly in Latin America, where alcoholism is arguably a larger economic problem than in the United States. It is not uncommon for a rural village to have a male alcoholism rate of up to fifty percent.
A political conservative is more likely to make this point than to simply focus on the lack of money earned by the poor. A political liberal is more likely to assume that the rate of strict religiosity can rise only so high, and take that as a background constraint.
He concludes that "almost everyone ends up a little screwy and off-base on this issue, victims of the fallacy of mood affiliation."
The Dish 