[Ritenour, Shawn, Foundations of Economics: A Christian View, Wipf & Stock, an Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers. Kindle Edition. pp. 545]
Previously, I have complained that, when it comes to economics and the Bible, people often make fallacious claims due to ignorance of economics, ignorance of the Bible, or both. This is not a problem when it comes to Foundations of Economics: A Christian View.
Shawn Ritenour’s book provides a college-level introduction to economics, specifically Austrian economics, through the lens of Biblical theism and Christianity. The book serves as a textbook for his course at Grove City College and can be recommended without hesitation for any economics class within a Christian institution.
The reader can expect an unembarrassed and unashamed presentation of sound Austrian economics and the implications of a Biblical-Christian worldview. Ritenour is not shy about his presuppositions and conclusions, rather he announces and justifies them with clarity, good humor, and interesting thought experiments and examples. The winsome presentation is informative and entertaining and similar to Ritenour’s style in lectures.
When reviewing any book, there are two words that come to mind for me—contribution and significance. What is the unique thing or things this book offers and why does it matter?
In order to focus this review, we can focus on two key aspects of Foundations of Economics besides its excellent presentation of sound economics—epistemology and ethics.
Epistemology
A typical objection to such a book and topic is, “There is no such thing as Christian economics.” In other words, A Christian View might be said to inject undue normative arguments into what is supposed to be a value-free science. To an extent, Ritenour would agree (p. 340),
Economics is a social science that helps us to understand the created order. It is the systematic relationship of the laws which God has established as they relate to human action and exchange. It is value free in the sense that it discovers and describes universally true laws that are actually implied by human action. These laws are true no matter whether we like them or not. They are true no matter a person’s ethics. Economics, as such, describes what is, not what ought to be. It describes how people act and not how they should act.
It is true that valid economic law applies independent of religion. Economic law does not apply differently to the Christian, the Jew, the Buddhist, the Muslim, or the atheist. That said, it is short-sighted to claim that worldview does not matter. Whether consciously or unconsciously, all people possess fundamental worldview presuppositions, that is, a web of interconnected beliefs about the nature of reality (metaphysics), knowledge (epistemology), and ethics (a theory of what is normatively good or right).
Toward the end of the book, Ritenour offers a practical reason—which has been acknowledged by many others—as to why religion and worldview matter for economic prosperity and human flourishing (p. 525),
Because of its importance in shaping values, habits, and cultures, it is difficult to overemphasize the importance of religion as it affects economic prosperity. Ultimately, the problem of the cultural mandate [Genesis 1:26-28] and economic development is a spiritual and intellectual problem. Prosperity is a matter of capital investment, but it is not merely that. Economic development also depends on human attitudes. While economic expansion cannot guarantee spiritual, intellectual, moral, or aesthetic well-being, religious views do have a tremendous effect on general economic performance.
Beyond just the economic impact of attitudes and beliefs, the book lays epistemological groundwork within the first chapter. This follows a similar pattern of arguably the greatest economist of the 20th century, Ludwig von Mises. Mises—and Austrian economics as a result—took the time to painstakingly focus on epistemology.
It is easy, in any study, to skip over epistemology, but it is helpful to ask: What makes the study of economics possible?
There is a nexus of presuppositions underlying the action axiom. In order to study economics (or anything for that matter) there are several things that must be presupposed as true already including the law of causality, meaningful connection between means and ends, causes and effects, induction/uniformity principle (UP), the laws of logic, unchanging laws and principles that operate in a changing world of flux, the semi-predictability of the world including uncertainty about outcomes of an action, the basic reliability of sense perception, the basic reliability of memory, the connection of the mind and body, the distinction between material factors—physics, biology, and chemistry working according to natural processes—from purposeful human judgement and action. The question is ultimately what worldview provides these necessary preconditions for studying economics?
It is Ritenour’s contention that Biblical theism and Christianity uniquely supply the worldview foundations that make economics and other sciences possible. He provides a firm but gentle internal critique to alternative theories of knowledge—skepticism, relativism, empiricism, apriorism—which is coherent and easy to grasp.
His comments on apriorism are particularly relevant (p. 7),
The theory of epistemology that we have left then is that of some kind of apriorism. . . . Apriorism argues that in order for us to gain knowledge, there is something that is logically prior to empirical facts. Apriorists recognize that our mind imposes unity on experiences by applying innate mental categories in classifying and judging our experience.
According to Ritenour, even secular Kantian or seemingly neutral apriorism is philosophically problematic (p. 7),
[Kant] argued that we can only make sense of our experience because we possess a priori categories of thought, such as logic, unity, space, and causality. Further, he thought that these a priori categories that we use to make sense of our experience are subjective aptitudes.
Unfortunately, these internal a priori categories—while they help us to categorize and interpret experience—do not necessarily guarantee that we will perceive truth or reality. “An order is impressed upon our experience, but the world as it really is remains unknowable” (p. 8). As an alternative, Ritenour offers what he argues is “A Better Way” (p. 8),
You may recognize that Kant’s problem leads us back to relativism and skepticism. Your categories could be true for you and mine could be true for me and never the two necessarily have to meet. So our trek through various epistemologies seemingly has led us nowhere. Take heart. We need not despair. What if we do have mental categories but our categories are implanted in us by a Creator, and what if he has fashioned both our mind and the world so that they harmonize? This is the idea we get from God’s revelation given in the Bible.
This approach is a biblical apriorism. It begins with God’s revelation in both his creation and his written word. . . .
Basically, the argument is that the nature character of the sovereign, transcendent Creator-God of Biblical theism and Christianity—revealed generally in the created order and man’s nature and revealed specially in Scripture—provides an ultimate foundation for intelligibility, epistemology, metaphysics, and ethics. Further, it is argued that this basis uniquely provides the foundation for the sciences, including economics.
Regarding the order that allows for the study of science, Ritenour writes (p. 10),
. . .the Bible affirms there is a purpose and orderliness to creation. Without such orderliness, it would be impossible to have any sort of science. There could be no scientific laws. All would be chaos. Because God created a universe with order and purpose, however, we can undertake science. We can observe natural and social regularities. We can use concepts of cause and effect to derive scientific laws.
Similarly, though not a Christian, Mises likewise wrote,
In a world without causality and regularity of phenomena there would be no field for human reasoning and human action. Such a world would be a chaos in which man would be at a loss to find any orientation and guidance. Man is not even capable of imagining the conditions of such a chaotic universe.
In a previous article, largely inspired by Dr. Ritenour’s love of flourless chocolate cake (“Recipes with Rothbard: What Chocolate Cake Can Teach About Economics”), I asked, “Under such chaotic conditions, how could anything like a recipe—recorded instructions providing a uniform plan of action to achieve certain results with regularity—exist?”
We would do well—with Mises and Ritenour—to do the hard work to become more epistemologically self-consciousness, that is, to examine critically what we truly know and how we know it, the web of presuppositions beneath our beliefs, and seek both consistency and justification for our presuppositions and beliefs.
As a discipline, Ritenour sees economics largely as thinking God’s thoughts after Him and discovering the order of God’s creation in the world. He writes (p. 13),
We believe the truths of economics because God has created us in his image with the ability to know and perceive truth and one of these truths communicated to us in his creation and his Word is that, like God, we act with a purpose.
While many may view religion in general, and Christianity in particular, to be irrelevant to economics or any science, hopefully Ritenour’s work challenges us to at least consider how worldview presuppositions and epistemology shape our views. In a section about suggestions for further reading, Ritenour recommends The Savior of Science by Stanley L. Jaki as, “An impressive explanation of the importance of Christian faith and doctrine for the development and progress of science in Western Europe during the High Middle Ages” (p. 13). Contrary to the secular “Enlightenment” view that Biblical theism and Christianity were contrary to science, it is arguable that this worldview provides presuppositions that lead to the development of science.
Value-Free Economic Theory to Biblical Ethics
Gary North’s Christian Economics in One Lesson was a reworking of Hazlitt’s Economics in One Lesson in an attempt to put economics into a Biblical-Christian worldview framework. While greatly appreciating Hazlitt’s work, North pointed out what he believed to be gaps that Ritenour’s Foundations of Economics arguably fills.
North wrote,
[Hazlitt] audience was made up of literate people who had read his columns for years in The New York Times. He was also writing for businessmen. But he was not writing for people in the pews of America’s churches. Yet, from the point of view of the size of the audience, he missed a great opportunity. . . .
North continues,
Hazlitt never identified the government interventions that he describes for what they really are, namely, theft. Hazlitt carefully avoided the fundamental ethical issue. He did not raise the ethical question. . .
People only rarely re-think their lives, and then re-dedicate their lives, on the basis of a short chain of reasoning. . . .
If, on the other hand, you can persuade the person that he has become an accessory, or even an active participant, in breaking somebody else’s window, you may be able to gain his attention. You may be able to motivate him by a careful consideration of this principle: thou shalt not steal.
In an attempt to be consistent with value-free economic science, defenders of the free market often leave the supposed moral high ground to the progressives, welfarists, and socialists. We often think that if we demonstrate the economic impossibilities of socialism, the counterproductive nature of interventionism, and the moral implications of the devastating consequences and destruction of each, that people’s intellectual minds will be changed—that they will repent—and come to believe sound economic theory and policy. However, we often overlook that most peoples’ commitments—right or wrong—to views are moral-ethical commitments.
(This is not to suggest that people necessarily or usually hold their positions because of sound or just ethical views, in fact, according to the Biblical worldview, human nature is ethically fallen, and we often observe that ethical positions are usually not the result of philosophical reflection but ad-hoc and/or post-hoc moral rationalizations).
In the name of Jesus and Biblical teachings, men commonly attempt to replace the commandments of God with the traditions of men (cf. Mark 7). This moral special pleading usually combines isolated and non-contextual Biblical vague-isms (e.g., love your neighbor, care for the poor) and progressive/interventionist presuppositions and concerns to then leap to unjustified, modern, statist conclusions. Ritenour deals handily with what I call the statist non sequiturs (in fact, it was a lecture given by Ritenour that helped me identify this concept) in one example (p. 441),
Although taxing people to pay for subsidies to others designated as poor is a violation of private property rights, welfare programs tend to be quite popular with Christians because they recognize the numerous times in the Bible that God calls for his people to care for the poor. Many seem to draw a straight logical line from the commands to care for the poor to government mandated welfare subsidies. God wants us to be caring toward the poor therefore we need the welfare state.
Many Christians have been intimidated into assuming that, while they may have sound economics, the progressives have niceness, Jesus, and the Bible on their side. “You may have the deist Adam Smith on your side, but we have Jesus on our side.” Of course, this does not stop them from adopting the worldly, non-Christian presuppositions and policy prescriptions of the atheistic, pervert child molester John Maynard Keynes in the name of Jesus, but I digress.
Many Christians may know that full socialism is un-Biblical but do not possess either the economic or ethical intellectual equipment to combat these views, thus many individual Christians and churches drift slowly toward progressivism, welfarism, and middle-of-the-road interventionism. Ritenour’s work provides the apologetic vocabulary to combat these errors.
In a simple statement, he articulates a simple mental model for policy evaluation (p. 341),
A complete analysis of economic policy, therefore, must take into account not only economics but also ethics. Such analysis requires answering two questions. First, is the policy economically sound? By economically sound we mean is the policy the proper means to achieve its goals? Does the policy accomplish what it is supposed to do? To evaluate economic policy, we will use the economic principles explained thus far to answer these questions.
Second, is the policy ethically sound? By ethically sound we mean does the policy seek to accomplish a morally lawful end? Does it seek to accomplish this end in a morally lawful way? Only a policy that can answer all of these questions in the affirmative can be embraced as a truly good economic policy.
Using the Bible and economics, Ritenour soundly upholds private property, free exchange, sound money, and many more principles. Conversely, he debunks the moral standing of socialism, rent control, wage and price controls, environmentalism, and many other evils promoted as good. After providing a devastating economic and Biblical-ethical case against socialism, in just one sentence, he summarizes, “Regardless of the motives of those pushing for collectivistic economic reform, socialism is both an economic and ethical evil” (p. 500).
This book can help equip the Christian with economic and ethical confidence, firmly rooted in a Biblical worldview. We need more workers in the harvest of the intellectual and ethical division of labor.
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