A while back, I put up a post riffing on Colossians 2 and asking, “What are the spirits our society accepts as the elemental powers that rule human destiny?” I didn’t have a lot of answers to that question, but the estimable Doug Hagler had a good one: “ECONOMICS.” In support of that, he offered a very interesting point, which hadn’t occurred to me before (emphasis mine):
Everyone treats economics as a science, which in our culture, means a truth-discerning and truth-telling method, when it is in fact a value system of subjective measurement.
I posted again, noting his penetrating observation and interacting with it a little more; and then a little while later, I ran across Kent Van Til’s article in Perspectives titled “Not Too Much Sovereignty for Economics, Please: Abraham Kuyper and Mainstream Economics.” Due to technical difficulties, I didn’t manage to get it posted at the time, and other things intervened. I did want to come back to it, though, because it’s a remarkable piece—particularly when considered in conjunction with Doug’s argument, because Dr. Van Til works with the idea that economists are primarily, not scientists, but storytellers offering an explanatory story of the world. As he notes, the promises they make for their story tend to go beyond what they can actually keep:
In spite of their role as writers of fiction . . . economists pretend to be physicists who deal only with empirical data. They also mainly talk about what has already happened because they aren’t necessarily great predictors—if they were, they’d all be rich.
Dr. Van Til’s analysis is of particular interest when he applies it to rational choice theory, pointing out that people cannot be reduced to “rationality” (and especially to one particular definition of what it means to be rational) and “efficiency.” As he argues, such a reductionistic understanding of human beings can only lead to injustice if left unchallenged; thus it is critically important to see ourselves as more than homo economicus, but with Abraham Kuyper to insist that
economics is not the only sphere of life, nor the only explanatory model of human action. The attempt by one sphere to suppress or dominate all the others must be resisted.
As such, Dr. Van Til writes,
We must urge that humans are more than individuals who rationally satisfy their preferences. We must insist that there really are sins and evils, not merely sub-optimal conditions or disequilibria. We must contend that all goods are not reducible to the one goal of utility. We must contest the notion that the ultimate meaning of the good is only a composite economic good for many individuals. And we must say that all grand narratives are ultimately foolish unless their denouement is found in Christ. That is simply to repeat after our Master that it makes no sense for us to gain the whole world but lose our souls.