Believing in economics

Christian Century, May 8, 2002 by David A. Krueger, Thomas H. Schmid, Franklin Gamwell, I., Ronald Goetz

Nelson continues this provocative analysis through other major schools of economic thought, notably the Chicago school with its various "disciples" (Friedman, Stigler and other Nobel laureates), which rejected Samuelson's progressive optimism, especially regarding the role of government. He finds the more recent disciples of the "New Institutional Economics" more promising, in part for their more serious attention to history, culture and a wider array of human motives for economic behavior.

What's the future, then, of economics? And how ought religion to inform economics? Having uncovered many of the flaws of economics and even evidence of its waning social influence and its potential decline as the predominant 21st-century secular theology, how does Nelson think "economics as religion" should operate? Here, Nelson is less clear and by no means systematic, providing only fragmentary hints and suggestions for future reflection and development. At the very least Christianity and ethics, he occasionally implies, could more effectively inform "the fundamental value system" that sustains and restrains modern market-based society.

While Nelson seems to affirm a role for self-interest in the marketplace, he argues for its restraint and inappropriateness in other spheres, which call for other virtues. More boldly and critically, Nelson sometimes suggests the potential bankruptcy of modern material progress. He notes that many studies suggest that increased wealth does not seem to correlate with increased happiness. He argues for fuller and more adequate conceptions of human nature within economic theory. He suggests the potential for libertarian and environmental intellectual strains to reform economic thought. He muses about the need to redefine and reorganize the social sciences within the intellectual life of universities. One hopes that the articulation of a systematic agenda for an economics that is appropriately shaped by, or more closely coherent with, the fundamental truth claims revealed by religion will be the subject of Nelson's next volume.

Reviewed by David A. Krueger, who holds the Charles E. Spahr Chair in Managerial and Corporate Ethics at Baldwin-Wallace College in Berea, Ohio.

Aging Well.

By George E. Vaillant. Little, Brown, 373 pp., $24.95.

READING THIS book will not grant us an escape from eventual death or the inevitable losses of old age. But it can help us to learn from those who have aged well. Since two or three decades of advance notice may be helpful to people as they consider the exigencies of the later years, those in their 40s, 50s and 60s will benefit most from reading the book.

For the past 30 years George Vaillant has been part of the progressive Harvard Study of Adult Development, which began in 1939. A group of Harvard sophomores was interviewed extensively, answered biennial questionnaires, submitted physicians' evaluations every five years, and participated in personal interviews every decade or so into their maturity and old age. As Aging Well was written, these subjects were nearing 80.