While the modern industrial scientific society has been gradually alienated from religion, it is unknowingly following an even more powerful religion, around which the rich and the middle class have oriented their lives. It is the religion of economics. The present day economics offers a comprehensive doctrine, promising its blind adherents the salvation in this world. It has its gnostics, mystics and magicians who conjure money out of thin air, using spells in “stock-markets”.
like the old religions, the religion of economics has its prophets, reformists, moralists and above all, the high priests in World Bank,
WTO, Harvard University , lSE and so on who uphold ‘orthodoxy’. It has cult figures like Bill Gate or Zukerberg. It has reformists like the UKIP which triggered Brexit Movement in UK. It has various sects between rightist -globalization and socialist-globalisation nations. It has advocates like the TATAs, the Adanis, who have been benefited by the miracle blessings of the new religion.
Over the time, successive economists slid into the God men’s role, giving us guidance on how to reach the promised land of “material abundance” and “endless contentment”. For a long time, they seemed to deliver on that promise, succeeding in a way a few other religions had ever done, helping in the rise of our incomes thousands of times. We reward the economic priesthood, with status, wealth and power to shape our societies according to their vision. At the end of the 20th century, amid an economic boom that saw the western economies become richer than humanity had ever known, economics seemed to have conquered the globe. With nearly every country on the planet adhering to the same free-market holy scripture, and with the university students flocking to take degrees in the subject, economics seemed to have attained the goal that had eluded every other religious doctrine in history--bringing the entire global society into its fold.
Yet, if history teaches anything, it’s that whenever the “prophets “feel certain about finding the holy grail of endless peace and prosperity, the end of the tunnel arrives. But, they promise good future again with a prescription. During the 1929 Wall Street crash, the American economist, Irving Fisher, advised people to go out and buy shares so that the phenomenon shall never happen again. In the 1960s, Keynesian economists said there would never be another recession because they had “perfected” the tools of demand management.
On January 4, 2003, Nobel laureate Robert lucas had delivered an address to the American Economic Association where he reminded his colleagues that macroeconomics had been born in the depression precisely to try to prevent the occurrence of another such disaster. But another economic crash revisited US in 2008.
Hubris or excessive self confidence can be dangerous in economics, because in such situation, its scholars don’t observe the laws of nature but begin to think that they can create them. If a Government, guided by one of these priests, changes the nation’s core- economic policies, its economics is bound to fail eventually. For instance, if the economist postulates that people behave selfishly in the society and advises the Government to change the incentive-structure of the society to align with such assumption, then society will soon follow it. People shall be rewarded for doing selfish act and penalised for undertaking social work. Economics education shall teach students to praise greediness as GDP booster and encourage them to create theories of greedy- consumers. As the human beings are not selfish according to law of nature, this false assumption of the economist shall push the economy eventually to disaster. Therefore, be it Ahuliwalla or Rajan or Pangaria, no one can be trustworthy in public finance policy, more so, the economist who belong to western school of thoughts.
The hubris in economics grew, not from a fall in moral of the economists, but from a false conviction that economics was a science.
Once a principle is established as orthodox, its observance is enforced in much the same way that a religious doctrine maintains its integrity by repressing or simply eschewing heresies. Some anthropologists have already observed the way taboos function to help humans impose an order on a seemingly disordered, chaotic world. The premises of conventional economics haven’t functioned differently.
This preoccupation with order has derailed scientific outlook of economists. In fact, the society is full of cycles of order and disorder.
The irony is that, in its determination to make itself a science that can reach hard and fast conclusions, economics has had to dispense with scientific method at times. For starters, it rests on a set of premises about the world not as it is, but as economists would like to see it. Just as any religious service includes a profession of faith, membership in the priesthood of economics entails certain core convictions about human nature such as humans are self-interested, rational, essentially individualistic, and prefer more money to less.
Deducing laws from premises deemed eternal and beyond question is unscientific. For thousands of years, monks in medieval monasteries built a vast corpus of scholarship doing just that, using a method perfected by Thomas Aquinas, known as scholasticism. However, this is not the method used by scientists, who tend to require assumptions to be tested empirically before a theory can be built out of them.
Economists arguably do their best work when they take the stories we have given to them and advise us on how to go ahead. Such agnosticism demands a humility that is lacking in economic orthodoxy in recent years. Economists don’t have to abandon their traditions if they are to overcome the failings of the past- narratives. They have to look within their own history to find a method that avoids the evangelical certainty of orthodoxy.
Paradoxically, therefore, as economists try to make economics more scientific, it will become less of a science. Acknowledging these limitations will free it to serve us more and find solution to poverty and recessions. The commonality between religion and economics perhaps helped the Patanjali firm of Baba Ram Dev.