The Roll of Luck

6min Snip

00:00

Play full episode

Summary

Transcript

Episode notes

In the 18 thirties and forties, America was a very different country from scotland or england. There really was a view that among the white males, anybody could make it. If you didn't like your if you didn't like what you were doing, you could always move 200 miles west to start off as an independent farmer. So i think er, that's, that is not the world adam smith knew. That there's a reason americans think in this way - ouk now, that's different from european society. We're entitled to ask whether we have inherited any good assumptions about how our lives should turn out," he says.

In episode 162 of The Michael Shermer Show, Michael speaks with one of the nation’s preeminent experts on economic policy, Benjamin Friedman, about his new book Religion and the Rise of Capitalism — a major reassessment of the foundations of modern economic thinking that explores the profound influence of an until-now unrecognized force — religion.

Critics of contemporary economics complain that belief in free markets — among economists as well as many ordinary citizens — is a form of religion. And, it turns out, that in a deeper, more historically grounded sense there is something to that idea. Contrary to the conventional historical view of economics as an entirely secular product of the Enlightenment, Benjamin Friedman demonstrates that religion exerted a powerful influence from the outset.