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"Economic and educational opportunities may have a lot to do with explaining why the Roman Catholic seminaries in India today filled with young men studying for the priesthood, while the Roman Catholic seminaries in the United States are largely empty. Increasingly, educated English-speaking Buddhist monks in Sri Lanka have opportunities to travel and teach in the United States and Canada. Though they be sincere and serious Buddhists, still the visa and the plane ticket are nice perks. Perhaps also some of the appeal of Pentecostalism in Sri Lanka today is linked to hoped-for material benefits in this life, more so than in the next. Certainly, conversions to Christianity during the colonial period often involved subtle and not so subtle economic coercion. In all cases, membership has its privileges." |
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This essay was significantly revised and is now chapter three in my book The New Sciences of Religion:
The Economics of Religion: Presented at the Society for the Integration of Science and Human Values (SiSHVa) Abstract: This paper presents an overview of a new research program under the heading “Spiritual Capital” or “Economics of Religion”. The program expands and refines the concept of human, social, and cultural capital to focus on how religion and spirituality impact economic development in diverse contexts. The paper also explores economic and competitive models for understanding religious and spiritual phenomena. Preface At the outset I want to layout some of the assumptions and biases behind this paper and the lecture series that I will be conducting this year at the University of Peradeniya. I am trained in Comparative Religion. While I try to understand religions from the Inside, as committed believers understand themselves in their idealized forms, I also try to understand religions from the Outside, as a social scientist and philosopher of religions. And while I am attached to the Department of Pali and Buddhist Studies at the University of Peradeniya this year, I am not an expert in Buddhism. For that matter, I am not really an expert in any major faith tradition. I know just enough about Buddhism to get into trouble. I have a lot to learn about Buddhism, so I very much look forward to the months ahead and the dialogue with my colleagues here at the University of Peradeniya and throughout Sri Lanka. When studying a religion from the Inside, one is generally motivated by a desire to learn about the ideal insights of a tradition as expressed in its sacred texts and practices. Here, the focus of study might be on learning ancient languages – Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Arabic, Sanskrit, or Pali, for instance – and reading and interpreting ancient scriptures, as well as commentaries about those sacred texts, all with the goal of obtaining a normative and more authentic understanding of the wisdom of the ages. Such a course of study would naturally also be drawn into the study of the history, the rituals and practices, the saints and sages, all with a normative desire to preserve and advance a body of literature and teachings perceived to be invaluable to individuals and society. In the comparative study of religions, we can also be motivated by a desire to understand the ideals of diverse traditions. I am very fond of Huston Smith’s now classic text, The World’s Religions: Our Great Wisdom Traditions. Smith takes a values center approach to religions, trying to present each tradition in the best possible light in order to illuminate what is most wholesome and insightful about its worldview. He is unapologetic about ignoring all of the stupid and evil things done by and in the name of religions. He argues by analogy. “Probably as much bad music as good has been composed in the course of human history,” writes Smith, “but we do not expect courses in music appreciation to give it equal attention” (Smith 1991). I have brought a number of copies of Smith’s text with me and look forward to reading it with you this semester. It is important to understand the idealized values that people see in their religious traditions, even if the reality generally falls painfully short. Without these ideals, religions and their adherents would be unintelligible. A comparative approach to religion appreciation can help us develop empathetic understandings of other traditions and a renewed appreciation of our own. This is also a valid point of departure. A social scientific understanding of religion, however, needs to look at the whole phenomena, the lived realities, including also the ugly warts, and try to see how these functions and dysfunctions are causally linked to the particular faith and practice in very specific settings. A social scientific understanding must take full account of the data and develop theories about how religions function and why. Here, we employ the tools of psychology, sociology, anthropology, and more. By way of an introductory text, I have brought a number of copies of an excellent book by Daniel Pals entitled Eight Theories of Religion (Pals 2006). Pals introduces us to the theories of Marx, Freud, Durkheim, Weber, Eliade, Geertz, and others as applied to understanding religion. Again, I look forward to reading and discussing this book with you over the course of this year together. There is no reason why a critical social scientific approach to religion from the Outside cannot also be a helpmate to the more authentic and wholesome practice of religion from the Inside. So lets begin by taking a step back from our deepest commitments and take a look in from the Outside. ∞ My topic today is "the Economics of Religion”. Let me be clear, that I am not taking a normative approach in which we might begin with religious perspectives and then try to apply these to a critical appraisal of the contemporary world economy. We can argue that there is a lot wrong in the world today -- poverty, extreme inequality, environmental degradation, violence -- or for that matter in the economy of Sri Lanka. We can argue that Buddhism and/or some other tradition provide a critical perspective from which to criticize and transform individuals and societies. We can assert that there is something called “Buddhist Economics” a term made popular by E.F. Schumacher (Schumacher 1999 (1973)). This is also the approach taken by J.W. Wickramasinghe in his recent book The Economics of the Buddha…(Wickramasinghe 2006), in which the author argues that Buddhism provides a people-friendly alternative to orthodox development economics. We can return to these perspectives at the end of our discussion. Instead, let us begin by asking two questions about religion as social scientists:
The New Economics We begin as economists (and also sociologists and political scientists). So lets take a moment in reframe human history in economic terms. In his recent book, The Origins of Wealth, Eric Beinhocker (2006) gives us this simple overview ;
Human economic activity is complex, dynamic, and adaptive. It is accelerating. In the last 250 years, world GNP per person has increased 37-fold [9]. The miracle of economics is that 6.4 billion people today participate in a $37 trillion global economy that is predicted to continue growing. No one oversees it. No one designed it. No one can control it. Economic complexity emerges from the bottom-up. How has this marvelous self-organized system evolved? What is the something new and more in economic growth and how is it created? What is the origin of wealth and how can individuals, business, and societies get more of it? Beinhocker opens his book by comparing the economic life of Amazon aborigines, as a stand-in for how our hunter-gatherer forbears probably lived 15,000 years ago, with people living in the concrete jungles of New York City or for that matter Colombo:
Beinhocker compares the market diversity of the Yanomamö tribe to that of the New Yorker by using stock keeping units, or SKUs, those barcode numbers that retailers use in stocking their shelves and reconciling their sales, a unique code for each item sold. Total SKUs in a Yanomamö tribe are estimated to be in the hundreds, while the SKUs on the shelves of all the stores in New York City are roughly estimated at ten billion unique items (1010). Beinhocker’s The Origin of Wealth is an extended argument against traditional neoclassical economics, which is based on mathematical models of market equilibrium. The human agents in the traditional model were assumed to be selfish and rational with access to perfect information. The mathematics of neoclassical economics was mostly borrowed from 19th century physics. It was elegant in theory, but falsified by the empirical evidence. Beinhocker turns to evolution, complexity theory, and other disciplines to try to understand economic history and the rapid growth in wealth we have witnessed in the last few generations. He argues that new wealth depends on new physical technologies and new social technologies. We see new physical technologies all around us, like the mobile phone in my hand or the computer on my lap. These did not exist the first time I lived abroad as a young man, and so I wrote messages home on Areograms and postcards and waited patiently for many weeks for some news of home. In the history of economics, social technological innovations include the use of money, property rights, double-entry accounting, limited liability joint stock corporations, the rule of law, effective banking systems, economic transparency, lack of corruption, family networks, social capital, trust, and reputation. All of these play a profound role in determining economic outcomes in communities and nations. Social technologies, as well as physical technologies are necessary for unleashing the non-zero sum dynamics through which new wealth is created to the mutual advantage of the community. Religions can be understood as part of the social technologies that humans have created that have helped advance and also hinder economic growth. The Impact of Religion on Economics What Beinhocker calls social technologies are generally referred to as human capital or social capital, sometimes also cultural capital. Social scientists now recognize the importance of human, social, and cultural capital in economic activities. I will collapse the distinctions and refer to these all as simply human capital. The concept of human capital recognizes that individual, groups, and cultural resources, skills, education, relationships, values, family and friendships can have a profound effect on economic opportunity, successes, and failures. By equating these more intangible human relational qualities with the concept of “capital”, we draw attention to these resources that are also “invested” in the world of production, services, markets, and exchange. Economists, sociologists, political scientists, and psychologists have developed multiple models, measures, and theories about how human and social capital impact economic development in diverse individual, microeconomic, and macroeconomic contexts. In evaluating sources of human capital, we must acknowledge that religion and spirituality, however they are understood, play a significant role in their development. We suggest calling this “spiritual capital”. We have loosely defined spiritual capital as: “The effects of spiritual and religious practices, beliefs, networks and institutions that have a measurable impact on individuals, communities and societies.” The question is how do social scientists refine the study of human capital to focus on how religions and spiritualities in particular impact economic development in diverse contexts. A few years ago, the Metanexus Institute on Religion and Science launched a major research initiative on the topic with major funding from the John Templeton Foundation and is now working with three university centers and ten research projects. We are hardly alone in this academic vineyard. In particular, I would call your attention to the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion (SSSR) and the recently formed Association for the Study of Religion, Economics, and Culture (ASREC) which will hold their joint annual meeting in a few weeks. I will share more about that latter. A little over one hundred years ago, the German sociologist Max Weber wrote his famous book The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (Weber [1905] 1958). Weber argued that the values of worldly asceticism, independence, and self-discipline nurtured by Protestant Christianity, particularly Calvinism, played a central, albeit unintended role, in the development of European capitalism. He contrasted this with Catholicism. In other writings, Weber argued that the religions of China, India, and the Muslim worlds were antithetical to the rationalities and sensibilities of modern capitalism. Weber himself was not a religious man. He understood science to be an “iron cage”, which required the disenchantment of the world (Weber [1922] 1963). Whatever the origins of modern capitalism, it has certainly changed dramatically from the time of Calvin and the Protestant Reformation. Gone is the worldly asceticism to be replaced by ever new forms of consumer-driven hedonism. Hard work and hard play are the motto for many ambitious entrepreneurs. Thriftiness has been replaced by conspicuous consumption. Unearned income through investments is the Holy Grail, if not now, than at least in the dream of a wealthy and leisurely retirement. It may be that little of early Protestantism remains in modern capitalism. Some of the societies that Weber thought inhospitable to modern capitalism have done quite well in the interim, though often with different cultural strengths and weaknesses. South and Southeast Asian societies, for instance, often lack an independent legal system capable of enforcing business contracts, which Weber thought essential to capitalism’s success. Instead, these Asian societies rely on vertical family ties and horizontal networks of friends to bind together economic exchange with the catalyst of trust. The Chinese refer to this social solidarity as guanxi. Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and now Mainland China have done quite well in adapting to modern, now global capitalism. Chinese immigrants also play an important role in the economies of Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore. Later we will consider some of the sociological reasons why minorities often play an important role in a nation’s economics activity. Social scientists in the last century, reflecting also Weber’s antipathy towards religion, predicted that religion would fade away with the rise of capitalism, increased levels of education, and democratic cultures. This was referred to as secularization theory. It turns out to be wrong, as we have witnessed a resurgence of Islam in Muslim countries, the rise of Hindu nationalism in India, the growth of congregational Buddhism in Southeast Asia, the renewal of Eastern Orthodox Christianity and other religious movements in the Former Soviet Union, and the penetration of Christian Pentecostalism in Latin America, Africa, and Asia. Peter Berger, the famous sociologist of religion, predicts that the 21st century will be the most religious century in five hundred years. How this global religious revival impact economic and political life is perhaps one of the most important questions of the 21st century, perhaps even more important than developments in science and technology (Berger 1999). In promoting the term “Spiritual Capital” or more broadly “the Economics of Religion” to identify this area of study, we have resisted wanting to define, constrain, or distinguish the concept too narrowly. There are macroeconomic issues about religion, culture, and economic performance that need to be considered. There are microeconomic issues about particular industries or companies. And there are individual issues about discrete persons, entrepreneurs, and families. How does one measure the economic impact of a spiritually motivated person like Mohandas Gandhi, Atagarika Dharmapala, Martin Luther King, Jr., or Nelson Mandela? We will call them “spiritual entrepreneurs;” and what they have helped create also has economic value, though it remains largely invisible to the social scientists. In thinking about spiritual capital, there is an obvious link between religion and social values, vices, and norms. Weber has already called our attention to thrift and a work ethic in the formation of investment capital and productivity, but we might also include concern for waste, the role of charity, truth-telling, and a sense of fairness, as important, often religiously motivated values essential for healthy economies. The understanding of family versus societal obligations is also important. In the West, publicly held corporations and government offices define nepotism, the employment of family members, as a crime, where in other cultures, this might be considered a moral obligation and quite normal. Similarly, the West understands bribery to be corrupt and illegal, whereas the payment of what is referred to as bahksheeh in Arabic is a normal part of “greasing the wheels” of business in many Muslim and non-Muslim countries. Some argue that the Christian ethic presented by Jesus, for instance in the Sermon on the Mount, is fundamentally incompatible with capitalism, while others argue that Christianity cultivates capitalist “bourgeoisie virtues” (McCloskey 2007). Let’s contrast Jesus and Adam Smith. In The Wealth of Nations, Smith understood capitalism to be about individuals rationally maximizing their economic self-interest and thereby promoting the good of all (Smith 1776). In the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus tells us:
This does not sound like the description of an energetic entrepreneur trying to selfishly maximize his self-interest or the rest of us simply trying to pay our monthly bills. Jesus goes on to say “it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God” (Matthew 19:24). It is a wonder that anyone calls himself Christian. I am not going to try to do exegesis on the Bible. Like other sacred texts, the Bible is a subtle, sometimes paradoxical text. It is enough merely to point out that there is a lot of debate about whether and how capitalism can be reconciled with the values of Christianity. There are many similar debates within Buddhism, Hinduism, and Islam. The point here is to say that religion matters in how individuals and societies engage in manufacturing and commerce. Religious and spiritual phenomena are complex and operate on many, some times contradictory levels for individuals and groups. A balanced study of religion and economics must consider both positive and negative aspects of both with reference to particular goods accrued or forgone in different business situations and cultural contexts. In order for this to count in economics, there must be some way to quantify and measure these seeming intangibles. One positive measure of spiritual capital is in health care. Epidemiological studies suggest that religiosity is often correlated with better health and life out-comes. It should be possible to quantify and measure the cost savings, increased productivity, and other economic savings in medical care that result from this form of spiritual capital. One caveat, however, is that these studies need to be careful about apologetic biases leading to poor research design and results. There is no clarity about how one measures religiosity and spirituality, though dozens of instruments have been invented. For instance, in the U.S., social scientists often survey weekly church attendance as a measure of religiosity. Does this mean that observant Muslims, who pray five times each day, or thirty-five times per week, have on average thirty-five times better health outcomes than their Christian brethren? The question itself indicates some of the challenges involved in this field (Hufford 2005). Of course, there may also be negative implications of religion and spirituality, and we need to try to measure and model these too. Religions are often used to support exclusivist ideologies and promote violent conflicts. Wars destroy not only human life, but also a lot of economic capital. Is it possible to isolate and measure religions’ contributions to war or for that matter the prevention and resolution of such conflicts? To these examples, we must be very clear that there is a great deal of diversity among religions and cultures in the world, so there is a profound comparative challenge in understanding the varieties of spiritual capital. Weber’s misinformed comparison of world religions is no longer sufficient. In a situation analogous to what we now understand about racial genetic differences, it turns out that there is more diversity within a tradition, than between traditions (Grassie 2007). Using Economic Models to Understand Religion Another aspect of this research program is using economic models to understand religion itself. One of the first to advance such a theory was Karl Marx, who argued that religions were a product of the economic system. In other words, feudalism created Catholicism and capitalism created Protestantism. Religion belongs to the superstructure, a reflection of the economic base. Marx’s analysis of religion was too simplistic, most would agree today. Weber’s Protestant Ethic was written in part to be a rebuttal to Marx. To reverse Marx’s metaphor, religions can also be part of the base, the foundation that shapes the economic structure of a society. The directions of causation run both directions. To the extent that economic structures influence religiosity, we should be expecting and are witnessing dramatic changes in religion in the era of global capitalism. In a still different approach, University of Chicago economist Gary Becker has developed competitive models of religious markets. Not unlike corporations, religions seek monopolistic control over religious markets. He uses state religions in Europe as the example, but we might also consider Islam in Iran or perhaps Buddhism in Thailand or Sri Lanka. Becker argues that competition is good for religions. In those countries, where there are religious monopolies, religiosity declines, i.e. Western Europe. In those countries where there is healthy religious competition, like the United States, religiosity thrives and grows (Iannaccone 1998). Certainly, the complex mixture of faiths and temples on the Kandy-Peradeniya road is a microcosm of an increasingly global phenomena. We must make sure that this competition between faiths does not turn into violence, in which case all of us will be losers. Another version of economic modeling of religion is Rational Choice Theory of Religion promoted by Rodney Stark and others. In this view, people are making rational choices about perceived benefits, temporal and eternal benefits, to adopting a religion. Stark uses these insights to explain the rise of Christianity in the Roman Empire (Stark 1997). Now there are a lot of problems with rational choice theory in classical economics. This is a gross distortion of real human economic activity. UCLA Economist Axel Leijonhufvud notes that traditional economic models assumes "incredibly smart people in unbelievably simple situations," while the real world involves "believably simple people [coping] with incredibly complex situations" . Nor is it clear that the economics of religion can be said to be a free market. How would one actually be an informed consumer and what would it mean to select “the best” religion? Most people are simply born into and raised in a tradition. If they become disillusioned with that tradition, they do not necessarily convert to another tradition. Sociologically they tend to drift back to their tradition when they begin to raise children. In many cases, there are severe penalties for conversion including social ostracism or even death in the case of strict Islamic law. Increasingly, we also encounter what might be called “supermarket spirituality”, in which people mix and match a little bit of this and that – yoga on Monday, AA on Tuesday, Zen on Wednesday, hedonism on Thursday, Sufism on Friday, Kaballah on Saturday, and Catholic Mass on Sunday. While some of this approach is crass and superficial, it is important to note that the real history of religion has involved lots of cross-fertilization, borrowing, and out-right plagiarism. It is just that now the pace of this cross-fertilization is accelerating in our globalized world. Whatever the reasons, “Rational” Choice Theory leads to lots of interesting hypotheses about the decisions of individuals and the behavior of religious movements. For instance:
We might also add that there are often perceived material benefits to conversion, i.e., joining the “right” church for access to social elites. Economic and educational opportunities may have a lot to do with explaining why the Roman Catholic seminaries in India today filled with young men studying for the priesthood, while the Roman Catholic seminaries in the United States are largely empty. Increasingly, educated English-speaking Buddhist monks in Sri Lanka have opportunities to travel and teach in the United States and Canada. Though they be sincere and serious Buddhists, still the visa and the plane ticket are nice perks. Perhaps also some of the appeal of Pentecostalism in Sri Lanka today is linked to hoped-for material benefits in this life, more so than in the next. Certainly, conversions to Christianity during the colonial period often involved subtle and not so subtle economic coercion. In all cases, membership has its privileges. In a related development, some use evolutionary models to study religion. In his book, Darwin’s Cathedral, evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson uses group selection theory to argue that religions function to promote in-group altruism and therefore promote group survival in competition with other groups. Willingness of some to sacrifice for the group is necessary for the survival of any society. With that also comes a dangerous side of religion in promoting inter-group competition (Wilson 2002). This will be the subject of my next lecture. The Case of Economics and Islam Several of the research projects funded in the Spiritual Capital Research Program are looking at issues in Islam and economics. By way of background, I encourage you to read the UN Arab Development Reports. The studies published in 2002, 2003, and 2004 look at 22 Arab countries, a total of 280 million people. It looks at all dimensions of development – economic, social, civil, political, and cultural. It notes some progress, for instance in increased life expectancy, but economic development is in decline, under- and unemployment severe. Poverty is increasing in the Arab world. The Gross Domestic Product in all Arab countries stood at $531 billion in 1999 (less than Spain at $595 billion) and this with all of the enormous oil wealth. It turns out that oil may not be such a good thing. Known as “the Resource Curse”, there appears to be a negative relationship between extractive industries and economic development. Oil rich countries have generally experienced poor economic performance, especially when compared to developing countries with few natural resources. While Iran is not part of the Arab League and is not included in this study, some of the analysis might well apply to Iran as well. One project that considers the relationship between Islam and economic development is led by Timur Kuran, an economist at the University of Southern California. His approach is historical, looking at the history of economics in the Middle East and its interplay with Islamic culture. For instance, while Islamic laws on inheritance were far more progressive than the laws of primogeniture in the Christian world at the time, in the end, Islamic inheritance laws ended up preventing the accumulation of capital over generations, as businesses and estates were generally liquidated upon the death of wealthy individuals. Similarly, the idea of the corporation did not take hold in the Islamic world until the 20th century. There were business partnerships in Islam, to be sure, but they were usually limited in scale to a few partners and a single trade mission or production project. At the time of a partner’s death, the partnership ended and his assets were passed on to his heirs. The dynamic consequence of this was that commerce between the Middle East and Europe fell under the control of Westerners. As the West industrialized, the Middle East could not exploit the new technologies. Timur Kuran also explores how the Waqf system unintentionally contributed to economic stagnation in the Islamic world. Waqfs, as you know, are unincorporated trusts established under Islamic law by an individual owner of immovable property to provide a service in perpetuity. Services provided by waqf’s included building and maintaining mosques, schools, orphanages, and lighthouses. The private provisioning of public goods through the creation of waqfs tended to retard the development of effective municipal governments. By the 18th century, waqfs owned a quarter to half of the real estate in the Ottoman Empire. Waqfs were also popular as a “tax” shelter for private property, which was not otherwise protected from autocratic rulers. The founder of a waqf could appoint himself as its mutawalli (trustee) for life, set his own salary, make appointments, and designate successors. The endowed assets of a waqf circumvented liquidation of an estate under Islamic inheritance laws. While there were many benefits to waqfs, they were economically stagnant organizations, unlike corporations, which are self-governing organizations. Thus, the waqf did not cultivate strong civil societies in the Islamic world. Civil society organizations were weak in Middle Eastern societies and could not resist the formation of autocratic governments in the 20th century. Timur Kuran emphasizes in his research that Islam has a positive attitude towards commerce and industry. Islamic institutions are not inherently static. Nevertheless, there is an important relationship between Islam and economic development and these need further exploration by economists, historians, and Islamic scholars, particularly as we look forward to what will hopefully be a more positive future for the region. Muslims in Sri Lanka, however, have a different socio-economic profile, than their co-religionists in the Middle East, in part because they are a minority within a larger society (Ali 2004). We might call this the “successful ethnic minority syndrome”. Whether we are talking about the Chinese descendants in Southeast Asia, the Pharsee in India, the Jews in Europe and North America, the Tamils in Colombo, or Iranian, Indian, and Sinhalese immigrants in Los Angeles and Toronto, within a generation or two, these groups are often very successful in socio-economic terms. The reasons for their success have a lot to do with the sociology of being a minority group within a larger society and the perceived need to stick together through mutual aid, hard work, and education advancement in reaction to real and perceived insecurities from the dominant group. Minorities often becoming “middle-men” in economic production and exchange, so ethnic minorities are often well-placed to take-off in capitalist societies. Religion may be part of the glue that holds the group together and prevents assimilation. Tragically in these situations, envy, resentment, and scapegoating by the dominant group often leads to communal violence, for instance in the 1998 riots in Jakarta, Indonesia, when Chinese Indonesians shops were burned, women raped, and thousands killed in mob violence. I need to emphasize, however, that minorities are not always successful, as in the case of African Americans in the United States or Muslims in India, for many complex and vexing historical reasons. Back to the larger point of this essay, religion is one of the markers of majority and minority status in any society, and this can have positive and negative repercussions for the group and the society as a whole, including economic development. Current Research A survey of paper topics being presented at the sixth annual meeting of the Association for the Study of Religion, Economics and Culture (ASREC) to be held next month in Tampa, Florida, gives us some idea of the wealth of empirical and theoretical insights derived from this new research program in the field of economics, sociology, and political science. I can only list a few here and refer you to the website for the details:
Conclusion This paper is meant to be a survey of some of the interesting research being undertaken under the rubric of spiritual capital or the economics of religion. It is difficult and challenging research, but potentially also very important. I believe that this research can better help us also address normative, moral concerns that are typically the domain of the world’s religions and help these great wisdom traditions themselves be more effective, wholesome, and holy. So let me end by returning to a normative perspective, which I eschewed in the beginning. Global capitalism is a dynamic, creative, and powerful force reshaping the world as we speak. While we have witnessed enormous progress and prosperity in the last century, we should also be aware that almost half of the world’s population lives on less than two dollars per day and are confronted with life-threatening poverty, not least of all here in Sri Lanka. All of us have a responsibility to look beyond mere supply and demand, profits and losses, the fluctuation of stocks and bonds, to address the needs of the poor. Here too, religion and economics overlap.In the end, we can also turn religion and economics upside down and realize that economics can also function as a religion for some. Economics as religion manifest itself not just in the excessive pursuit of wealth by individuals and nations, but in many of the guiding and unexamined assumptions embedded in the academic discipline of economics (Nelson 2001). Like religion, economics is also based on a symbolic system of value that radically changes the world. However, the symbols of economics, i.e., money, are not of ultimate value, only relative values. Money only has value and power when we vest it with exchange value for things that are really useful, like food and shelter, goods and services. Religions seek to find and manifest something much more precious in human life, however imperfectly. Without this spiritual quest, I fear for our common future and have difficulty contemplating my own existential finitude. Mind you, I think it is more the seeking, rather than the finding, which is inherently wholesome. Whatever we think of economics, we need to recognize that markets are complex distributed systems with their own logics and rationalities that we cannot fully understand, predict, or manage. Religions are also complex distributed systems, but religions point beyond themselves to questions of ultimate meaning and values. I close by recalling the words of Socrates, “Wealth does not bring goodness, but goodness brings wealth and every other blessing both to the individual and the state.” I am sure Lord Buddha would agree.
References Ali, Ameer (2004). "The Muslims of Sri Lanka: an ethnic minority trapped in a political quagmire." Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 5(3): 372-. William Grassie is a U.S. Fulbright Fellow teaching in the Department of Buddhist Studies at the University of Peradeniya, Kandy, Sri Lanka, 2007-2008. I would like to express my thanks to the U.S. Fulbright Commission and Dr. Tissa Jayatilka of the US-Sri Lanka Fulbright Commission in Colombo for supporting this work. See my review of Beinhocker’s book: Grassie, William J. (2007) Re-Reading Economics: In Search of New Economic Metaphors for Biological Evolution. Metanexus Global Spiral 8, DOI:
The question of limits of growth and sustainable development are real and serious. See McNeill, J.R. (2000). Something New Under the Sun: An Environmental History of the Twentieth-Century World. New York, W.W. Norton & Company.and, McNeill, Robert and William H. McNeill (2003). The Human Web: A Bird's-Eye View of World History. New York, W.W. Norton.
One can also argue that religions are discovered, that the fundamental insights are about the nature of ultimate reality, while also recognizing that religions create and invent new forms of thought and behaviors. The term “social capital” first appeared in 1916. The term “human capital” first appeared in a 1961 article by Nobel-Prize winning economist, Theodore W. Shultz. See also Robert Putnam, Making Democracy Work, 1993 and Bowling Alone, 2000. For other citations and a review of the literature, see article by Theodore Roosevelt Malloch “Social, Human, and Spiritual Capital in Economic Development”, http://www.metanexus.net/spiritual_capital/pdf/review.pdf . See also a literature review by Laurence R. Iannaccone and Jonathan Klick at http://www.metanexus.net/spiritual_capital/pdf/malloch.pdf .
See article by Peter L. Berger and Robert W. Hefner on “Spiritual Capital in Comparative Perspective” at http://www.metanexus.net/spiritual_capital/pdf/Berger.pdf Karinna Horta, www.theglobalist.com, 2005.01.1 Notes from lecture given by Timur Kuran at the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion, November 5, 2005 in Rochester, NY. For the complete list of papers, including the names of the presenters and their institutional affiliations, go to http://www.religionomics.org. |
