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No Rising Tide: Theology, Economics, and the Future, by Joerg Rieger
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Even though economic downturns are still followed by upturns, fewer people benefit from them. As a result, economic crisis is an everyday reality that permanently affects all levels of our lives. The logic of downturn, developed in this book, helps make sense of what is going on, as the economy shapes us more deeply than we had ever realized, not only our finances and our work, but also our relationships, our thinking, and even our hopes and desires. Religion is one arena shaped by economics and thus part of the problem but, as Joerg Rieger shows, it might also hold one of the keys for providing alternatives, since it points to energies for transformation and justice. Rieger's hopeful perspective unfolds in stark contrast to an economy and a religion that thrive on mounting inequality and differences of class.
- Sales Rank: #522262 in Books
- Published on: 2009-10-01
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.02" h x .44" w x 5.98" l, .60 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 160 pages
Review
"For such a time as this, when financial markets are crashing, real estate bubbles bursting, and job security disappearing, Rieger gives us a book that reveals the consequences of placing blind faith in capitalism. Not only does he boldly critique the lsquo;free market’, but he suggests alternatives that are more humane and more liberating for the dispossessed. A must read for all who seek the link between religion and economics." --Miguel A. De La Torre, Associate Professor of Social Ethics, Iliff School of Theology, Denver
"The time is long past for European and U.S. theologians to engage the crisis of current market economies. Theologian Rieger in No Rising Tide challenges the market's own fetishes and belief structure, criticizes Christian theology for its complicity in underwriting our economic crisis, but then also mints theology anew for a Christian practice of economic justice. Rieger's book is where Christian theological reflection on the economy must now begin." --Mark Lewis Taylor, Maxwell M. Upson Professor of Theology and Culture, Princeton Theological Seminary
"Joerg Rieger uses the occasion of the present financial crisis to remind us once again that the religion that controls most human history at present is devoted to the market rather than to the father of Jesus Christ. He shows how far we who call ourselves Christians have been sucked into the orbit of worship of this God. May his call to repentance be widely heard." --John B. Cobb Jr., Professor Emeritus of Theology, Claremont School of Theology
About the Author
Joerg Rieger is Professor of Systematic Theology at Perkins School of Theology, SMU, Dallas. He is author and editor of many works, including several from Fortress Press: Christ and Empire: From Paul to Postcolonial Times (Fortress, 2007) and God and the Excluded: Visions and Blindspots in Contemporary Theology (Fortress, 2000).
Most helpful customer reviews
7 of 8 people found the following review helpful.
The Most Accessible and Insightful Analysis of Christianity and the Economic Crisis
By minister
Theologian Joerg Rieger's No Rising Tide has set the new standard for work on theology and economics, helping Christian communities make sense of what is going on in the economic crisis. In a style accessible to most of the general public, Rieger exposes the dynamic and mutually influential relationship between economics and religion, including how economic systems have shaped Christianity and how some Christian communities are forging economic alternatives today.
Rieger's analysis of economic theory and policy is rigorous yet understandable as he guides readers through a critical analysis of several prominent economic theorists whose work underlies current policy debates. As the economy benefits fewer and fewer persons, Rieger demonstrates how both liberal and conservative mainstream economists have tended to hold (in blind faith and against all current evidence) to their ideals that so-called free markets will ultimately create a rising tide that lifts all boats. Rieger's analysis of economics is most helpful because it is not an ideological rejection of free-markets but rather a return to forms of economic analysis that assess and respond to real life economic struggles.
No Rising Tide is especially useful for helping Christian communities see how they have been shaped by the bubble economy and often been part of the problem rather than the solution. Rieger confesses that Christian theologies encouraging blind faith in a God who provides a transcendent fix to the problems of the world have actually played an important role in legitimating economic idealism. Furthermore, many Christian communities have been shaped more than they even realize by economic idealism, organizing churches around the leadership and interests of the financially successful and creating theological bubbles of unquestioning faith in the God of financial prosperity who more closely resembles an investment banker or CEO than the Jesus described in the gospels.
But, as a theologian concerned about what religion is doing to transform economic injustice, Rieger remains hopeful that Christianity is still playing an important role in energizing and organizing people to make serious change for economic justice. Rather than being based in utopic economic ideals like absolutely free-markets or perfectly engineered economies, Rieger's hope is grounded in real life alternatives in Christianity and economics that are getting in touch with those under increasing pressure in the economy.
I recommend this book for both clergy and laity interested in how Christianity is making a difference in the economic crisis. The book also works well for group book studies and adult Sunday school classes (at least it did at my church) and a free study guide is provided on Joerg Rieger's website at[...]. Rieger's website [...] provides a helpful resource for those looking to explore these issues further and thinking about how to get in touch with economic struggles in their communities.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful.
No more "Zombie Economics": Rieger explains the way out
By Susan Thistlethwaite
It is not merely Congress that is broken, it is the depth of our relationships in the "oikos" (house in Greek) of our common life that is deeply and profoundly broken. "Oikos" the root of the term "economy." Surely now is the time for a book that makes theological sense of the economy, and pushes theologians to recognize how deeply complicit they are in the assumptions behind a "free-market" economy. "No Rising Tide" is the same critique Warren Buffett makes of Reaganomics, "What has happened in recent years," said Buffett, is that "we were told a rising tide would lift all boats, but the rising tide has lifted all yachts." [...] Even more blunt than both Rieger and Buffett, Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman calls this "Zombie Economics." The "rising tide lifts all boats" economic theory, according to Krugman, is a zombie because it doesn't work and thus has been dead for decades, but like brain-dead zombies, it's still walking around. But the best news of "No Rising Tide" is that Rieger doesn't leave you with the problems, he has concrete examples of those who refuse to walk the zombie walk and who are creating new models. Excellent book. I have used it in teaching and found it very valuable.
14 of 18 people found the following review helpful.
Rieger without Romance
By Matthew Hisrich
As I read No Rising Tide, I was struck repeatedly both by the lack of clear steps toward the new reality Rieger envisions and by an apparent naivet� regarding public policy. He notes that "politicians are democratically elected by the people, while business leaders are not," as if this puts an end to the discussion about corruption in government, and asks with genuine astonishment, "why would `government' want to take just anything from its citizens, and who is `government' in a democracy if not the citizens?"
The essential narrative that Rieger appears to operate out of is one in which the state is there to protect us from corporations. But while I would agree that the empire and economics as they exist today are pervasive and domineering forces in our lives, I wish that Rieger would expand the scope of his definition of empire to include democratic states that collude with business interests.
His appreciation of democracy coupled with his disdain for corporations seems to prevent him from correctly identifying the crony capitalist nature of our economic system. This in turn prevents him from offering a response to empire-as-state that recognizes the incentives within the empire to expand the scope of its power whether employing the language or free markets or that of progressivism. Sadly, therefore, the very remedies he suggests only serve to feed empire further.
In 1978, economist James Buchanan coined the phrase "politics without romance" to describe what he was trying to develop at the time - public choice theory. As Buchanan further elaborates, "Armed with nothing more than the rudimentary insights from public choice, persons could understand why, once established, bureaucracies tend to grow apparently without limit and without connection to initially promised functions. They could understand why pork-barrel politics dominated the attention of legislators; why there seems to be a direct relationship between the overall size of government and the investment in efforts to secure special concessions from government (rent seeking); why the tax system is described by the increasing number of special credits, exemptions, and loopholes; why balanced budgets are so hard to secure; and why strategically placed industries secure tariff protection."
In order to build upon the work he has already undertaken, deepen his critique, and point readers toward solutions that begin to sever the ties between empire and economic interests, I would encourage Rieger to further explore public choice theory. As Buchanan argues, "Regardless of any ideological bias, exposure to public choice analysis necessarily brings a more critical attitude toward politicised nostrums to alleged socioeconomic problems." If Rieger or others seek to strengthen their understanding of the connections between empire and economics, I would suggest Anthony de Jasay's The State and Robert Higgs's Crisis and Leviathan: Critical Episodes in the Growth of American Government.
From the economic side, Rieger conflates free markets with a mercantilist system whereby "groups with political power use that power to secure government intervention to protect their interests while claiming to seek benefits for the nation as a whole." His presentation of the Austrian School, for instance, is important to the overall structure of his argument (as with Jung Mo Sung's in Desire, Market and Religion), it nonetheless requires a fundamental distortion of the ideas of the Austrian School that unfortunately weakens his argument and reveals a lack of familiarity with important concepts in economic thought that are essential to Rieger's project of critiquing free-market economics.
Here is why:
- Rieger sets up an "us v. them" dynamic in attacking what he defines as mainstream economics and praising what he defines as heterodox economics - from institutionalism to Marxism. According to his interpretation, every school that he sees as questioning markets is heterodox and therefore offers something positive while any school that he sees as generally supporting markets - from Austrian to Chicago - is mainstream and therefore problematic. This creates two problems for Rieger. First, it puts him in an awkward position with regard to Keynesian economics (which I would argue holds far more sway in contemporary economic thought and public policy than he seems to feel it does). This is because Keynesians essentially seek to use the tools of state intervention to save capitalism from itself because left to its own devices it will destroy itself, and Keynesian economics and neoclassical economics have in many regards merged. Is such a position one that supports or questions markets? The ambiguity is clear in Rieger's comments. Second, it forces him to conflate schools of thought that are not nearly as compatible as he would seem to suggest - namely the neoclassical and Austrian Schools, the latter of which is generally considered a heterodox school outside of Rieger's analysis.
- At this point, it would be fair to ask why Rieger (and Sung) include a discussion of the relatively small Austrian School at all. This is an important point. Much of what Rieger criticizes with regard to empire and market has a lot more to do with a crony capitalism that combines state and business interests, not with truly free markets (the same could also be said of more popular theologians such as John Dominic Crossan). But whether Rieger fails to understand this distinction or chooses to ignore it for the sake of his argument, what he appears to want to critique in the book is free markets and not mercantilism. Unfortunately, schools of economic thought that advocate for genuinely free-market positions are few and far between. To accomplish this goal he must employ the Austrians for the sake of rhetorical power alone, using their words as a stand-in for what he wishes genuinely mainstream neoclassical economists would actually have said.
- It is possible that Rieger's understanding of the Austrian School lacks sufficient depth to fully comprehend the distinction, for it is clear that he draws from only one economist from the school (Friedrich Hayek) to represent the whole, and he even goes so far as to use Capitalism for Beginners as a source for one of his Hayek quotes. Setting aside developments in the school since the era of Hayek, that one can bring in a discussion of the Austrian School without even mentioning its central figure, Ludwig von Mises, is telling.
Just to provide one example of how Mises might have informed Rieger's analysis, here is a quote from No Rising Tide:
"A deregulated economy has been allowed to produce an imperial bubble where the stock market, the housing market, and the lending sector built forms of power that were more and more disconnected from real values and real life;"
and one from Mises's Human Action, The Scholar's Edition,
"Nothing harmed the cause of liberalism more than the almost regular return of feverish booms and of the dramatic breakdown of bull markets followed by lingering slumps. Public opinion has become convinced that such happenings are inevitable in the unhampered market economy. People did not conceive that what they lamented was the necessary outcome of policies directed toward a lowering of the rate of interest by means of credit expansion. They stubbornly kept to these policies and tried in vain to fight their undesired consequences by more and more government interference."
Nonetheless, even working with Hayek alone it should become clear that the system Rieger seeks to attack as a tragically deregulated market bears little resemblance to what Hayek understands as a market free from state intervention. As Hayek commented in 1935, "[I]t is a fallacy to suppose capitalism as it exists today is the alternative. We are certainly as far from capitalism in its pure form as we are from any system of central planning. The world of today is just interventionist chaos."
To close, I do think that liberation theology adds to the richness of the theological landscape and should not be ignored as such. Nonetheless, as a proponent of this view Rieger would be more convincing if he displayed a greater depth of economic knowledge. In particular, if he chooses to single out particular schools for criticism, it would behoove him to devote significant attention to the origins and contributions of those schools if he seeks to level effective critiques. Austrian economists have contributed much to the study of how war, oppression, and poverty are connected to na�ve or intentional use of state power for supposedly positive ends. That Rieger finds it necessary to ignore these contributions in order to advance his thesis ought to be of concern to anyone seeking to think through how economies can or should function in light of ethical standards and Christian faith. If readers are interested in a critique of Austrian economics from a faith perspective, I would recommend Charles McDaniel's God & Money: The Moral Challenge of Capitalism. While I don't agree with his conclusions, it is clear the McDaniel spent considerable time trying to understand and confront the core ideas of the school.
One of the definitions of theology is "faith seeking understanding." Rieger has issued a call for truly understanding the nature of the world around us so that we can be effective agents of change. Here's where I would agree with him wholeheartedly. If at least part of our faith involves helping to bring about a more just and humane world, then there is no time to waste.
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