Promoting the Common Good: Bringing Economics and Theology Together Again (Paperback)

Economics teaches that people exchange goods and services to meet basic needs, reduce scarcity, and create wealth. In 17th and 18th century Europe, as business attempted to satisfy these goals by creating a social division of labor (through individual specialization) and economies of scale (through national and international production and distribution networks), theology and moral philosophy were a vital part of economic theory and practice, providing a moral compass for individual decisions in the marketplace. As a result of the Enlightenment, Rationalist Science, and the separation of Church and State, however, economics began to shed these spiritual influences, and by the 19th and 20th centuries it had adopted a formal determinism that became increasingly mathematical, behaviorist, and devoid of moral and transcendent values.

In their timely and inspirational book, Promoting the Common Good: Bringing Economics and Theology Together Again, Reverend Marcus Braybrooke and Dr. Kamran Mofid examine the reasons for this divorce of spiritual and economic values, drawing on Aristotle, Augustine, Calvin, Smith, Mill, Marshall, Keynes, and Hayek, through the present policies of the G-8, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Bank. Reverend Braybrooke, an Anglican priest and President of the World Congress of Faiths, observes that free market determinism, which has now spread across the world, denies the moral equity arising from human interdependence, selfless service, common values, and social consciousness. Dr. Mofid, an economist and organiser of 'An Interfaith Perspective on Globalisation for the Common Good', cautions that the very efficiency produced by the division of labor and economies of scale - intended to alleviate human need, reduce scarcity, and increase common wealth - has now become an end in itself, generating even higher poverty levels, the misappropriation of bountiful resources, and a frantic competition to hoard wealth.

In the face of this Market Monism, the authors dare to ask: are human beings really just self-interested actors whose only goal is to optimize their material utility? Braybrooke and Mofid are confident that the growing alliance of Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhism, Islam, Judaism, Christianity and other faiths through interreligious dialogue and interfaith initiatives is bringing a wider global ethic back to these traditional teachings - and into the global marketplace as well. In the end, they say, religion and economics must reunite through a more equitable form of globalisation in which self-interest is informed by moral judgment and utility is guided by social interdependence. At a time when the public's acquiescence to the principle of 'rational maximization' has reduced virtually all human choice to the cost and benefit measures of the free market, Promoting The Common Good issues a stirring plea for sanity and hope across the gray chasm dividing spirituality and economics.