Believing in economics

Economics as Religion: From Sam­uelson to Chicago and Beyond.
By Robert H. Nelson. Pennsylvania State University Press, 378 pp., $35.00.

There can be no fundamental separation between theology and economics, argues Robert H. Nelson, econo­mist by training and professor in the School of Public Affairs at the University of Maryland. Nelson's ambitious 1991 text, Reaching for Heaven on Earth: The Theological Meaning of Economics, Economics as Religion (Rowman & Littlefield), offered a sweeping  overview of the primary pre-20th-century schools of economic thought that have shaped the development and self-understanding of modern Western societies. His distinctive contribution is to attempt to uncover the sometimes explicit but usually implicit value assumptions and normative visions that stand behind and give coherence to these schools of thought--an exploration he continues here.

Economics as Religion critiques the 20th-century American schools of economic thought that have most decisively shaped our society's self-understanding and development, notably Paul Samuelson and his followers, the Chicago school of economics and its successive generations, and the new "institutional" economics.

Using explicitly Christian theological categories, Nelson attempts to show how the assumptions of prominent economists seem to mirror, and sometimes contradict, fundamental theological assertions (e.g., about human nature, the purpose of wealth, the nature of society) found within various Christian traditions, most notably the Roman Catholic, Calvinist and Lutheran. He provides a huge service to students of religion in his attempts to place economics (viewed by many as a highly technical field far beyond the conceptual grasp of non­economists) in conversation with theology.