Lang Pritchett about his background from the interview with Shruti Rajagopalan

 Lant Pritchett about his background:

”Both of my grandfathers were just completely working class. They finished grammar school but not higher, and one became a cement finisher and benefited from the fact that they were building a freeway across Utah. He used to say that he knew Utah well because he crawled across it backwards, finishing cement. And one was a carpenter.

I always felt that I am in some ways closer, by being a nonelite, not that far from pretty hardscrabble, rural backgrounds. I have an empathy with the development experience that sometimes is harder today for kids coming from the generation behind me. They have to look back several generations to find equivalent conditions of how people survive and thrive. Whereas, again, my parents were born in the Depression, and my grandparents survived it and lived in Utah in a time when it was a very poor place. My grandparents cut ice out of the lake in the winter to keep their food cool. I do think that background has helped.

The second thing is—and I’ve never said this to anyone before—but Mormonism is an American religion that was founded because a 14-year-old kid named Joseph Smith was living in upstate New York during a religious revival in which there were all these tent preachers and denominations coming around, preaching the true word of God. And Joseph Smith at 14 years old said, “It sounds like a bunch of nonsense to me. I don’t believe any of it,” and went off and had his own revelation and started his own church.

He believed that organized religion conveyed dogma but not any true, sincere truth. I’m a member of a denomination who believes that the devil had introduced religion into the world. I think I came away from a religious upbringing with a really enormously high level of doubt that anything that anybody says to me is true, which I take as a characteristic of the founder of our religion, that it was a religion that was grounded. That before you had faith, you had to have doubt because if you just believe what you’re told, that’s not even real faith. I’m a huge believer in doubt, if that makes sense.“