Seminars/Conferences : Faith and Economics : Conference Report
A Project of the Witherspoon Institute
March 19, 2007 • Florence, Italy
When Professor Harold James introduced the public session of the Study Group on Faith and Economics that took place at the European University Institute on March 19, 2007, he commented on how the modern world seems to be marked by both the globalization of markets and the resurgence of religious activity around the globe. Are these two trends connected? How does religion influence economic development? As the President of the European University Institute, Yves Meny, asked, “What does it mean to talk about faith and economics when for many, economics is the religion of the times?” These were some of the questions addressed by a group of the world’s leading scholars and practitioners of economic development in an intense day-and-a-half meeting.
The four central figures present at this conference agreed that economic growth in and of itself must be connected to promoting human dignity. Each made unique suggestions regarding how to accomplish this. For example, as the eminent economic historian Emma Rothschild pointed out, the market does not create equity, yet classical authors like Hume and Montesquieu were concerned about the perverse effects that gross inequality could have on a democracy. Although much contemporary writing on economics has separated the ethical and the technical, the study group participants stressed how religious ideas and religious people contribute to generating an ethic that guides the distribution of wealth and the proper use of the fruits of wealth. Amartya Sen, a Nobel Laureate in economics, remarked how most religions contain a missionary element that leads humans to encounter other humans and, importantly, to consider them in an ethical light. Although neither Professor Sen nor Professor Rothschild practices a particular religion, they recognized how religious faith as a transcendental approach to life—or what Professor Rothschild called “an imaginative transposition”—leads one to put himself in the position of other human beings and to consider how we should treat them.
The other two conference participants—Michel Camdessus, the former Executive Director of the International Monetary Fund, and Anwar Ibrahim, the former Deputy Prime Minister of Malaysia—are both religious believers. They became friends while working with the IMF and began to discuss their faiths, finding many commonalities despite their different traditions (respectively Catholicism and Islam). When steering the IMF, Mr. Camdessus recounted, he strove to bring discussions of values and ethics to his work. He also met regularly with religious and lay leaders of different religious faiths. In both the private and public sessions of the study group meeting, Mr. Camdessus recounted conversations he had with Pope John Paul II that led him to ponder a question the Pope put to him. After the fall of communism and as market economies spread across the globe, the Pope asked him, “Upon what values are you going to build this new global society?” During the rest of his time at the IMF, Mr. Camdessus reflected deeply on this question; he also took advantage of his many opportunities to solicit answers from political and religious leaders. The responses he formulated represent the beginning of a platform with which people of various religious faiths—or, importantly, no particular faith—could agree. During the study group meeting, Mr. Camdessus argued that we need a global economic system that promotes human dignity. He outlined three values that he thinks world leaders and world citizens can agree to: 1) a sense of global responsibility to all countries; 2) solidarity to alleviate poverty; 3) a new sense of global citizenship to back a new global governance.
Mr. Ibrahim recounted how he has encountered many stereotypes against religious believers, in particular against Muslims, in his work in international economics. For too many people, secularism has come to mean not just the separation of church and state but an outright antagonism towards religion. He argued that faith can help to bring back an ethical approach to economics. Rather than thinking of man as homo economicus, we should think of man as a universalist humanist. As Mr. Ibrahim pointed out, arguing that the theory and practice of economic development should include faith and religion does not mean that non-believers now become the excluded.
All of the participants agreed that people can reach an agreement on values and ethics even if they start from different religious faiths or no faith at all. Professor Sen made a passionate call for greater dialogue about economics and ethics. In closing this brief summary, let me use the words of Michel Camdessus, one of whose remarks sums up the importance of this topic and these types of encounters: “The 21st century will be a century of ethics or it will not be.”
Margarita Mooney
Assistant Professor of Sociology
UNC-Chapel Hill (starting July 2007)
Fellow of the Witherspoon Institute.
The study meeting on “Faith and Economics” is the first event of the The Program in Ethics, Culture, and Economic Development of the Witherspoon Institute. A full report of the "Faith and Economics Study Group" will be available in the near future.
This event was made possible by a grant from the Social Trends Institute.
Updated April 2, 2007