There is no question that the global economic system is a mess. Inequality, both between and within nations, continues to widen to obscene levels and the destruction of the eco-system continues against a backdrop of ineffectual handwringing and outright denial. There is no shortage of analyzes of the problems: the much bigger and trickier question is, how can things change?
There are some signs that the urgency of such existential questions is enabling a more fruitful engagement between the traditions of the great world faith communities and disciplines such as economics. The so-called ‘New Atheism’ seems to be waning, perhaps as a tacit recognition that the world’s problems require something deeper than a technical ‘fix’ informed by a simplistic utilitarianism and that ancient traditions retain a timeless relevance. To some extent, this book exemplifies this trend. Co-authored by a social ethicist who is also a cultural anthropologist and a former bishop of the (US) Episcopal Church in Europe, it draws specifically on the work of the Jesuit theologian Bernard Lonergan, whose interest in macro-economic questions is well-known, to proffer an alternative, and promise-filled, economic model.
A project of this kind has to negotiate at least two intractable dilemmas. First, how far should it major on the ‘big ideas’, or on the pragmatic questions of feasible implementation? Secondly, as in any interdisciplinary study, what weight should be given to each discipline – in this case, Christian theology and modern economics – especially in terms of addressing a specialized, or a general, readership?
This is a large-scale and complex project. It starts by treating Lonergan’s methodology as a transformative approach that can rewrite the principles of modern economics. Lonergan’s ‘General Empirical Method’, outlined in his 1972 work, Methods in Theology, is here expanded with reference to his functionally specific approach. This, is abbreviated throughout the book as GEM-FS (i.e. General Empirical Method – Functionally Specific) and it is a weakness that this pivotal element in the authors’ argument is already reduced to initials by p.xxv of the Introduction and receives precious little unpacking thereafter, functioning more as a formula than an argument. GEM-FS is described as Lonergan’s ‘breakthrough’ and, if it is to carry so much weight in the book’s thesis, really deserves a much more critical and analytical treatment to establish why, exactly, GEM-FS is so radical and unique.
If GEM-FS is taken at the authors’ valuation, the section that follows, applying the principle to questions in modern economics, is well worth reading in depth. It is especially good at outlining how market theory has evolved from the time of Adam Smith into something that functions very differently, and more perniciously, today. This is important in an era where simplistic pieties about the market and the nature of capitalism are promulgated as truths, although the reality has shifted into something much darker. There is, of course, no shortage of arguments about the failings of global capitalism, and both supporters and critics of capitalism may find plenty to quibble with here. This hardly matters when the deleterious impact on the planet and on human flourishing remains incontrovertible. However, the analysis of the problem will come to matter when the authors start to specify remedies, and this is where it is important to see the book’s arguments as a contribution to debate and not as a universal panacea.
Part 3 brings the themes of economics into dialogue with Lonergan and GEM-FS, and the book concludes in Part 4 by focusing more specifically on the future of the planet and the need for a new approach to economics to secure that future. These are not easy sections to summarize: they include technical engagement with aspects of economic theory, including a few complex mathematical equations which are impenetrable to the non-specialist, and also references alluding to Lonergan’s theological focus, which, nonetheless, fall short of deep theological reflection. An economic argument addressed to specialist economists would not include references to God, but a theological engagement with economics would stop short of this level of economic technicality. On the one hand, this makes the book something of a one-off in terms of genre. On the other, it leaves this reviewer, at least, unsure of the intended audience. For a work aiming to shift the global economic (and moral) paradigm, this suggests that the authors lack a theory of change to accompany their intellectual insights.
One problem which the authors do not address head-on is that defenders of the global economy have their epistemological defences firmly lined up ready to see off critics. Consider the key point, made by Hayek and repeated frequently since, to the effect that the impersonal and amoral market is the proper mechanism for distributing scarce resources because the alternative is that the moral preferences of some elite are treated as normative for all, thereby entrenching unaccountable power and moral hegemony in a plural world. That is an argument that critics of market economics (especially Christian critics) rarely engage with, thereby opening themselves to the charge of seeking to impose their moral principles on everybody else. Hayek’s argument is, of course, profoundly self-serving in itself. Markets do not manifest themselves in a pure form and, in their impure forms are extremely efficient mechanisms for entrenching, if not the morals, certainly the material interests of global elites. But there remains just enough traction in the argument to require an answer. If one is promulgating a better economic approach, in what way does it avoid the charge of sectarian interest? One weakness of the authors’ arguments is that they want economic structures to be more democratic and assume that democracy inevitably favours greater equality. To be fair, their use of the term ‘democracy’ could mean, simply, a system more aligned to the interests of the majority, although a sharper definition would have removed doubt here. But in a year when authoritarian and anti-democratic interests controlled by the economic elites are on the rise in numerous ‘democratic’ countries, not least the USA, democracy in and of itself seems a somewhat frail mechanism for challenging the vested interests, which control economic outcomes. Whose interests are being served when a majority in a democracy can vote for a politics which entrenches inequality and allows global financial elites to milk the economy to everyone else’s detriment? This is not a simple question, but it is one that should not be ignored when economics and political economy meet one another.
In the end, this book is perhaps more theological than it appears at first sight in that, following Lonergan, the authors’ approach to practical change comes down ultimately, not just to a better economic theories or approaches to the discipline, but to the concept of conversion. Indeed, as early as p.6, they call for six GEM-FS ‘conversions’ in terms of conceiving economic categories and complementing Lonergan’s understanding of personal conversion. If one takes the concept of conversion to be fundamentally a theological category (although it is not expounded in theological detail), it may seem to sit oddly alongside the technical economic analyzes elsewhere in the text. This need not be so, especially as, at one point, the authors compare their notion of conversion to the Copernican Revolution. Against that comparator, it becomes undeniable that great transformations in public thought and conceptions of what is possible have happened in the past and can doubtless happen again. But why should the conversions called for here be considered possible, let alone likely? What were the conditions that made the Copernican Revolution happen – come to that, what were the conditions that allowed a new global economic orthodoxy to develop from the late 1970s, with all the consequences the authors so greatly deplore? How, exactly, do revolutions in social thought relate to personal moral and spiritual conversions – and in what way is the word being used identically for both? There is a lot here that remains unexplored and the recurrence of the concept of conversion as key to any economic solution becomes repetitive and lacking in content without that deeper sense of how conversion constitutes part of a viable theory of change.
So, there is plenty to criticize about this book, but that does not make it a worthless or negligible venture by any means. Back in 2008, at the time of the Financial Crash, the economics journalist, Larry Elliott, observed at a seminar that the economic thinking that led to the dominance of market economics took 35 years gestation from Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom to Margaret Thatcher’s adoption of his ideas as a national economic strategy in 1979. During that time, think tanks, universities and business schools had modelled and tested the theories rigorously, including a tentative dry-run in the economy of Pinochet’s Chile. The journey from ideas to implementation took decades of dedicated hard work. In contrast, in 2008, no new economic thinking was being taught or researched across any of the world’s academic institutions – market orthodoxy reigned unchallenged. That situation has improved only marginally since 2008. Unless books like this continue to be written, beginning to build up the body of hard analytical work that has to take place before any alternative economics is fit to practice, the mess will deepen and the planet and its people will suffer worse degradations. Raymaker and Whalon have not led us to an implementable new economics, but they have pushed some important boundaries and, by starting with Lonergan, have carved a niche for the role of religion and theology as part of a potential solution rather than as a problem for technicians to ignore.
