Episode 289: Benjamin M. Friedman
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The Religious Roots of Economics
How much did the religious beliefs of the Enlightenment Age influence the evolution of modern economic theory? Can widespread economic growth lead to an improvement in moral character across a vast population?
Benjamin M. Friedman is a professor and former Chair of Economics at Harvard University. In his books Religion and the Rise of Capitalism and The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth, he explores the relationship between economic theory, religious thought, and views of moral progress.
Benjamin chats with Greg about how the Scottish Enlightenment, in particular, became a hub for social scientific thought, what the belief in Calvinism had to do with the rise of capitalism and the correlation between economic growth and positive moral changes in society.
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Episode Quotes:
Predictable pathologies
01:01:20: The fact that there's a lot of ungenerosity in our society, the fact that we have renewed racial tensions, the fact that there's a lot of antipathy toward immigrants, the fact that large numbers of people in our country are not particularly committed to the fundamentals of American democracy that we've had for a very long time—all these are not just pathologies. They are predictable pathologies. They are the symptoms that emerge whenever we go through a lengthy period, like 18 years, in which the broad bulk of society doesn't have any improvement in its living standard.
The cause and effect of our acts and works
34:26: The fact that people can and sometimes do make other people better off through actions, which are not self-interested behavior doesn't preclude the fact that people also can make others better off under the right conditions by acting in a way that's self-interested.
Is economic growth consistent with the improvement of human moral character?
58:33: I believe that economic growth, by which I mean rises sustained, increases improvements in living standards, broadly distributed among the population. That is the condition under which society is able to move forward in a variety of non-material dimensions that, ever since the Enlightenment, we've taken to be morally positive.
Economics is a product of the Enlightenment
06:09: Economics is a part of the Enlightenment, and we do normally think of the Enlightenment as a movement away from conceptions of a God-centered universe toward what we, in our modern vocabulary, would call secular humanism. And so I don't think people who have the conventional view are being stupid, obtuse, or ignorant, but I do think it is wrong. And that's what the book was about: showing that the conventional view, which excludes any role for religious thinking in the origins of modern Western economics, is seriously incomplete.
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