New Directions for Economics

by Gregory C. Dahl

About: Recent developments in both the Bahá’í community and the field of economics have opened up new vistas in the application of Bahá’í principles to economic questions, both in theory and in practice. The Bahá’í community has grown enough that the Universal House of Justice, in its 1 March 2017 message, has called on Bahá’ís to concern themselves increasingly with the inequalities in the world and to bring their personal lives and the actions of their Bahá’í communities more in line with the high moral standards and principles of compassion and service in the teachings of their Faith. At the same time, the economics profession is more open to new directions of thought and research following the financial crisis of 2007–08 and the subsequent global recession, which exposed the shortcomings of the macroeconomic models that the profession had spent the previous several decades constructing. Some of the fields that appear most fertile for the application of Bahá’í principles to current economic problems are reviewed in this article.