Joshua beckons the children of Israel to remain steadfast in their faithfulness to God. After seeing that she was unloved by Jacob, God gave her the first of his children. But many that are first shall be last; and the last first. Written by the apostle, John is the last of the four Gospels. When the Swedish central bank had to decide who would win the 2013 Nobel prize in economics, it was torn between Shiller’s claim that markets frequently got the price wrong and Fama’s insistence that markets always got the price right. Thus it opted to split the difference and gave both men the medal – a bit of Solomonic wisdom that would have elicited howls of laughter had it been a science prize. The latter half of the population that are religious, are split in the following way: 20% believe in Protestantism, 16% believe in Buddhism, 13% believe in Catholicism, and 1% believe in other religions or cults. For a long time, they seemed to deliver on that promise, succeeding in a way few other religions had ever done, our incomes rising thousands of times over and delivering a cornucopia bursting with new inventions, cures and delights.

As soon as the lecture was done, Sage stormed into the university president’s office and insisted: “This man must go; he is sapping the foundations of our society.” When Adams’s tenure was subsequently blocked, he agreed to moderate his views. Often depicted as an ibis, a man with an ibis head, or a baboon, Thoth is the god of writing and wisdom and is said to have invented language and hieroglyphics. Since the crash of 2008, most of us have watched our living standards decline. The 2008 crash was no different. Why Did Henry VIII Change the Religion of England? Although England has an established church, few of us today pay it much mind. Once a principle is established as orthodox, its observance is enforced in much the same way that a religious doctrine maintains its integrity: by repressing or simply eschewing heresies. When, for example, Robert Lucas insisted that Eugene Fama’s efficient-markets hypothesis – which maintains that since a free market collates all available information to traders, the prices it yields can never be wrong – held true despite “a flood of criticism”, he did so with as much conviction and supporting evidence as his fellow economist Robert Shiller had mustered in rejecting the hypothesis.

In Moses and Monotheism Freud reconstructed biblical history in accord with his general theory, but biblical scholars and historians would not accept his account since it was in opposition to the point of view of the accepted criteria of historical evidence. But, economists will maintain, this is precisely what they themselves do – what sets them apart from the monks is that they must still test their hypotheses against the evidence. If the government, guided by its priesthood, changes the incentive-structure of society to align with the assumption that people behave selfishly, for instance, then lo and behold, people will start to do just that. This was our heaven, and richly did we reward the economic priesthood, with status, wealth and power to shape our societies according to their vision. Powerful political interests – which historically have included not only rich industrialists, but electorates as well – helped to shape the canon of economics, which was then enforced by its scholarly community. We’ll also examine how painters, writers and filmmakers have portrayed the Reaper in their works. How can you make sense of a tradition and a text that have been interpreted in different ways across vast geographical spaces for nearly a millennium and a half?

The irony is that, in its determination to make itself a science that can reach hard and fast conclusions, economics has had to dispense with scientific method at times. However, this is not the method used by scientists, who tend to require assumptions to be tested empirically before a theory can be built out of them. The field’s basic premises came from “deduction from simple assumptions reflecting very elementary facts of general experience” and as such were “as universal as the laws of mathematics or mechanics, and as little capable of ‘suspension’”. We rejoice at what we received-but we must be careful to remember from whom it came. The hubris in economics came not from a moral failing among economists, but from a false conviction: the belief that theirs was a science. Accordingly, the final draft of the AEA platform expunged the reference to laissez-faire economics as being “unsafe in politics and unsound in morals”. Five years earlier, on 4 January 2003, the Nobel laureate Robert Lucas had delivered a triumphal presidential address to the American Economics Association. On the eve of the 1929 Wall Street crash, the American economist Irving Fisher advised people to go out and buy shares; in the 1960s, Keynesian economists said there would never be another recession because they had perfected the tools of demand management.