Billed as a “Jesus Freakonomics,” the book weds basic Christian principles with economic tools to figure out which actions and policies will yield moral outcomes. Once again, the results may surprise you.<\/p>\n
Bob Smietana, a fellow religion writer at The Tennessean, and Charles North, an associate professor of economics at Baylor University, teamed up to tackle nine hot-button issues affecting today\u2019s economy: gas prices, immigration, family values, environment, minimum wage, education, capitalism, CEO compensation and poverty.<\/p>\n
“Good intentions do not assure good results, and they can at times lead to policies with perverse unintended consequences,” co-authors Bob Smietana and Charles North write. “As in the rest of life, the road to economic hell is often paved with good intentions.”<\/p>\n
Though many Christians turn to the Bible for to help them make decisions, it\u2019s difficult to apply its principles to the economic choices we make each day, Smietana said. By using Christian economic theory, with the goal of getting God\u2019s gifts into the hands of as many of God\u2019s people as possible, Smietana and North tried to project long-range implications of certain economic choices and evaluate them according to biblical criteria.<\/p>\n
They found that what sounds moral isn\u2019t always so. For example, the battle to raise minimum wage sounds moral, but from an economist\u2019s perspective, granting an “earned income tax credit probably works better than minimum wage to get money in the hands of poor families,” Smietana said.<\/p>\n