Economics and environmentalism: belief systems at odds.

AuthorNelson, Robert H.
PositionEssay

Economics and environmentalism are belief systems that shape their adherents' way of thinking about the world. We might just as accurately characterize them as secular religions, which most theologians count as real religions (see, for example, Tillich 1963), but many people prefer to regard them as competing belief systems. Many (not all) economists and environmentalists thus function in the world as advocates for their belief systems and associated values, albeit often more implicitly than explicitly (Nelson 1991, 2001, 2010).

This view admittedly is not the usual understanding of the social sciences and ecological science, which have long professed to seek "value neutrality." Depending on the audience, however, people often agree to a surprising extent that economics and environmentalism are actually religions. When the subject comes up informally in conversations with economists (and with policy analysts, if perhaps less predictably), I find little disagreement with the idea that environmentalism is a religion--to most economists, the claim seems fairly obvious. Environmentalists often react similarly, but the other way around: economics, for most environmentalists, is a religion. Neither group, however, is comfortable with the characterization of their own thinking as religious (and the economists are more uncomfortable with it than the environmentalists).

Economics and environmentalism are not always religious. Economics can be turned into a pure exercise of mathematical or other formalism; other things being equal, it is not a religious statement to say that having more goods and services is better than having fewer. Likewise, other things being equal, having less risk of cancer is better than having greater risk. The religious dimension becomes much clearer, however, where economics and environmentalism intersect with public policymaking. Here most people's policy positions reflect in significant part the core convictions of economic religion and environmental religion. Economists and environmentalists obviously can also have supplemental noneconomic and nonenvironmental beliefs about strictly private aspects of life or matters such as life after death.

Economic Religion

Economists believe in economic progress as an end in itself. Or, more accurately, they view economic progress not as the ultimate end, but as the correct path to the ultimate end: elimination of material deprivation as an important aspect of human existence, freeing human beings to realize their higher and better selves. As in many other areas, John Maynard Keynes was more articulate about this idea than other economists. In 1930, in an essay titled "Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren," Keynes wrote that rapid economic growth will soon "lead us out of the tunnel of economic necessity into daylight" as a result of "the greatest change that has ever occurred in the material environment for human beings in the aggregate." Thus relieved of the pressures of economic scarcity, we will finally be "able to rid ourselves of many of the pseudo-moral principles which have hag-ridden us" throughout all previous human history (1963, 371-72).

Enthusiasm for economic progress reached its apex at the end of the nineteenth century, and in the years leading up to World War I many in the West believed that economic progress was paving the path to a new heaven on earth. Richard Ely, who helped to found the American Economic Association in 1885, believed that economics would provide the scientific knowledge to sustain "a never-ceasing attack on every wrong institution, until the earth becomes a new earth, and all its cities, cities of God" (1889, 73). Historians have described the Progressive movement of those years as seeking to advance a "gospel of efficiency," amounting to a "secular Great Awakening" (Haber 1964, ix). Leading political scientist Dwight Waldo once wrote that "it is yet amazing what a position of dominance 'efficiency' assumed [in the Progressive Era], how it waxed until it had assimilated or over-shadowed other values, how men and events came to be degraded or exalted according to its dictate" ([1948] 1984, 19-20).

The carnage of World War I shattered this faith for many leading Western intellectuals, and the many terrible events of the 1930s and World War II proved even more disillusioning. Nevertheless, economists have been perhaps the leading holdouts for the belief in progress (Friedman 2005), even if they no longer speak with the religious zeal of the Progressives and adopt a posture of rigorous analytical neutrality. William Baumol, when asked why he entered the economics profession, replied: "I believe deeply with Shaw, that there are few crimes more heinous than poverty. Shaw as usual, exaggerated when he told us that money is the root of all evil, but he did not exaggerate by much" (1992, 51). In advising professional economists on the role they should play in government, Charles Schultze said that they should be "partisan efficiency advocates," advancing the highest cause of the economist--the efficient use of the resources of society (1982, 62).

In the nineteenth century, the belief that economic progress was transforming the human condition for the better rested on seemingly solid ground, and it was apparently reasonable--at least until World War I--to think that this progress might continue indefinitely, leading eventually (perhaps in a mere one hundred years or so, Keynes optimistically surmised) to a virtual heaven on earth. Economic historian Gregory Clark reports that no large improvement in the living standards of the great majority of the people living in England occurred before 1800. Indeed, for the world as a whole, "the average person in ... 1800 was no better off than the average person of 100,000 BC" (2007, 195). Not until the nineteenth and twentieth century did humankind encounter "the first break of human society from the constraints of nature, the first break of the human economy from the natural economy" (Clark 2007, 33), when large numbers of people first overcame the state of material deprivation that had always characterized life for the great majority. An average person today lives better materially than a member of a royal family did a few hundred years ago. This tremendous, unprecedented change does seem miraculous.

Although many current economists agree fundamentally with these observations, they would argue that economics long ago shed its progressive religious zeal and now rests on analysis in which they merely assume that more is better than less. Utility depends on goods and services consumed, and more of each good and service necessarily means a higher level of utility for each individual so favored. Distributional issues will obviously arise, but if they are dealt with reasonably, society's total welfare will increase as the total amount of goods and services it consumes increases. More rapid growth means more rapid increase in social welfare.

Implicit in this way of thinking, however, are strong unstated value assumptions. First, it assumes that human happiness and well-being depend on consumption. Many leading religious thinkers in the history of Western civilization have believed, to the contrary, that labor is the key to human happiness. Having more possessions for consumption may pose great dangers in at least two ways: first, focusing on the pursuit of riches may tempt us to betray our higher principles; and, second, the possession of the wealth itself may corrupt our morals. This fear is no minor matter, but a central message in the history of Christianity. The Bible warns, "[W]oe to you who are rich, for you have already received your comfort" (Luke 6:24); "How hard it is for the rich to enter the kingdom of God" (Mark 10:23); and "Love your enemies, ... lend to them without getting anything back" (Luke 6:35). The poor are the blessed of the earth.

The economist Donald Hay is somewhat unusual in being both well regarded in the economics profession and a devout Christian. He observes that the idea of the pursuit of self-interest fits well in the Christian concept of fallen human beings. Although he thinks that much of what economists currently do would survive in a newly "Christian economics," he asserts that the central...

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