© 1987 Charles E. Hansen
© 1987 The Urantia Book Fellowship (formerly Urantia Brotherhood)
Economics is basically the study of our individual actions and our interactions with each other that are necessary to draw forth and shape resources from nature; to provide for their distribution among us; and to employ them to some purpose that, in one way or another, satisfies us or increases our happiness. These activities were going on a long time before there was a “science” of economics; and, as the intent of any science is to help us improve, the science of economics actually gets down to the search for understandings and principles that can help us do these activities more efficiently.
Regardless of how spiritual or intellectual we consider our existence, our linkage to the energy and material levels of the universe is so extensive that there is virtually no human action possible without its economic counterpart. Even to think, or to pray, requires energy from food extracted by human labor from the earth. We know that the spirit, the mind, and the energy-material realms are all inter-related, so it would appear almost obvious that the teachings of the Master, although usually considered “above” our daily bread-winning activities, are, in fact, directly applicable to economics. If his principles for our individual actions and for interactions with each other are universally valid; then they must hold for the human activities that involve economics.
Charles E. Hansen
Silver Spring, Maryland
“Political science must effect the reconstruction of economics and industry by the techniques it learns from the social sciences and by the insights and motives supplied by religious living. In all social reconstruction religion provides a stabilizing loyalty to a transcendent object, a steadying goal beyond and above the immediate and temporal objective. In the midst of the confusions of a rapidly changing environment mortal man needs the sustenance of a far-flung cosmic perspective.” (UB 99:7.2)