Science has often been put forward as a secular religion, a replacement for the God that Time magazine pronounced dead on April 8, 1966. Belief is not the only necessary condition of religion; an ineffable supernatural element capable of being influenced by human agency is necessary as well. Science has nothing to do with the supernatural and consequently can never be a religion. But we have a secular institution which does partake of belief in the supernatural, is not fully understood, can be influenced by human behaviour, but cannot be changed or replaced by us. That institution is Economic Theory.
Markets capable of perfection are the supernatural aspect of economics; this perfection is akin to that of a deist God; it can ensure perfect relations among humans if we don’t interfere. But we do interfere. We blame many social disasters on our interference with the market (tribulations), we devise actions to push a market in one direction or another (prayers), and we promise a market Eden where all will be satisfied and our relationship with each other will be euphoric (afterlife). The economic base must be taken on faith; theologians from St. Augustine to Barth in dealing with the supernatural have attempted to square the faith/reason circle and always end up with faith trumping reason. We do the same for markets and what I call economic theology has today ousted all other possible forms of organizing a society; so much so that our economic theologians have us believing that cultures are entirely a product of economic relationships.
Just as a god’s motive can be named but is ineffable, so is the motivation of a market—efficiency. Efficiency can be assessed in dozens of different ways but for economic theologians there is only one—productivity. To assess the efficiency of any market one must measure productivity; if you suggest that certain types of productivity are not easily measured, say health outcomes for a certain population under a certain medical policy, then economic theologians ignore them by positing the ‘rational actor’, an imaginary being teetering on the unsupported idea that en masse human actions will cancel out every motivation but self-interest—more commonly called greed. No measurement, no actuality. And measurement is nearly always signified by a dollar amount; for a program based on a claim of social efficiency economic theologians will calculate a self-interest productivity figure in dollars and claim that it trumps your wishy-washy ‘externals’ claim.
There are various practical means of enforcing economic theology but the most effective one has been ‘austerity’. It replaces the inclusive term ‘citizen’ with exclusive ‘consumer’ or ‘taxpayer’. Citizen includes everyone in a defined geographical area; consumer and taxpayer exclude those without sufficient disposable income—nine million Canadians pay no income tax overwhelmingly because they don’t make enough income. Those with little or no money just don’t count and the onus is on every individual to make money. The wealthy cannot be expected to take care of failures. This is characterized as ‘individual responsibility’or failure to succeed; social responsibility is not entirely dismissed; the army, police and courts keep motivations other than self-interest under control and criticisms of their inefficiency are rarely acted upon.
The political economist Clara E. Mattei argues: ‘Mostly austerity serves to quash public outcry and worker strikes—not, as it is often advertised, to spontaneously improve a country’s economic indicators by practising greater economic discipline.’ Austerity is imposed as a social one designed to prevent the implementation of unmeasurable social programs on the part of the government receiving aid. This is achieved through such conditions as budget cuts, regressive taxation, deflation, privatization and wage repression on IMF loans; it means that the money eventually granted is largely diverted into the hands of a few. Elizabeth Popp Berman takes our economic theology to task for ‘The high value that the economic style placed on efficiency, incentives, choice, and competition frequently conflicted with competing political claims grounded in values of rights, universalism, equity, and limiting corporate power.’ Perry Anderson writes: ‘Mathematisation had long anaesthetised much of the discipline of economics against original thought of any kind.’ Most of us can’t escape the Procrustean bed of economic theology; it is so widespread today that we never really think of other ways of ordering culture; all our meditations and opinions on culture take this background as needing no justification or criticism. This is clearly revealed in current political ferment where the policies propounded by all party leaders promise to bring on the same economic heaven and where an economist as leader of the Liberals turned a assured rout into a marginal victory on the basis of unquestioned economic theology.
You don’t believe we can order the economy any other way? Mercantilism was the Western economic order from Elizabethan times to the end of the 18th Century. ‘Mercantilism is a nationalist economic policy that is designed to maximize the exports and minimize the imports of an economy. In other words, it seeks to maximize the accumulation of resources within the country and use those resources for one-sided trade.’ (Wikipedia) It was achieved by monopolies granted by the state (East India Company, Hudson’s Bay Company, etc.), suppression of all competitors, high tariffs to prevent importation of goods and thus outflow of wealth and subsidies for exports among a host of other nativist policies. Mercantilist hell consists of free markets and competition. Beginning to sound familiar? Trump, Orban, Putin, etc. are our current ‘neo-mercantilists’ demonstrating the ambiguity in all human projects and affairs.
Further Reading:
Thinking Like an Economist: How Efficiency Replaced Equality in U.S. Public Policy / Elizabeth Popp Berman
The Capital Order: How Economists Invented Austerity and Paved the Way to Fascism / Clara E. Mattei
Crack-up Capitalism: Market Radicals and the Dream of a World Without Democracy / Quinn Slobodian
Economics in America: An Immigrant Economist Explores the Land of Inequality / Angus Deaton
Regime Change in the West? / Perry Anderson. London Review of Books, April 3, 2025.
