Consciousness-Based Education - Maharishi University of ...

consciousness-based education and governmentmethods used in this study were not upwardly biased (in absolute value)by the exclusion of these economic explanatory variables.Further evidence supporting a causal interpretation of these findingsis provided by Cavanaugh and King (1988) who found that the SuperRadiance group significantly contributed to large reductions in the rateof change of crude materials prices over the period 1979 to 1988 (p =2.6 x 10 –5 ). In the long run, a Super Radiance group of 1500 to 1699was estimated to reduce the percent rate of growth of crude materialsprices by 8.79 percentage points, with an estimated reduction of13.68 points for a group of 1700 or more. This result suggests that theMaharishi Effect may have helped to dampen the negative “supply-sideshocks” that are widely believed to have been the leading cause of theworldwide high inflation and unemployment in the 1970’s and early1980’s (Bruno & Sachs, 1985; Helliwell, 1988). Such reductions in thevery rapid rate of growth of food and energy prices, which significantlycontributed to the decline in both inflation and unemployment in theU.S. and Canada, together with the remarkably sustained economicgrowth in North America since 1983 following the rise of the MaharishiUniversity of Management Super Radiance group to a level consistentlyexceeding the √1% of the U.S. population, are fully consistentwith Maharishi’s prediction of economic improvement due to greatersupport from natural law through the Maharishi Effect.Additional support for the hypothesis of a causal effect of the TM-Sidhi group on the misery index is provided by Cavanaugh, King, andTitus (1989), who found evidence of a significant unidirectional influenceof the Super Radiance group on the misery index, with no significantinfluence of the misery index on the size of the group. Theirfindings demonstrate that fluctuations in the size of the Super Radiancegroup temporally led the misery index, while the reverse is nottrue. Also supporting a causal interpretation is the fact that more than35 other studies of the Maharishi Effect using other measures of thequality of life have similarly rejected the null hypothesis of no effect ofthe Super Radiance group.Particularly powerful support for a causal relationship between theSuper Radiance group and the misery index is provided by prospective,quasi-experimental studies of the Maharishi Effect. In such prospectivestudies (e.g., Orme-Johnson et al., 1988; Davies & Alexander, 1989), pre-432