Introduction to Ethics and Economics

Abstract

The first essay in this volume is a very generous and gracious article on the part my Christian faith plays in my work as an economist. It is not my place to comment on this essay except to provide a little historical background. From the first year in which I studied economics, in 1950 at the University of Western Australia, I had no doubt that a person’s faith, or ideology, or world view should provide an underpinning for one’s work as an economist. This was both appropriate and inevitable. Equally appropriate and inevitable was that it affected the conclusions to which one came as an economist. In those days of a brave new world of Keynesian economics it was easy to see a relationship between a faith that firmly believed in God’s concern for all human beings and an economics which would save Australian society from the horrors of the depression of the 1930s, of which I had some personal memories. Incidentally, the parochialism revealed in the last sentence was clearly there in practice, but would have been denied on principle if anyone had challenged me about it.