Ancient futures: papal and Buddhist economics

This study compares traditional, neoclassical economics with two religiously-based economic paradigms. The first relies on an application of the teachings of Buddhism. The second, of more recent vintage, is based on Christian principles, and is grounded in the social justice teachings of the Catholic Church of the past 100 years. The exercise of comparing neoclassical economics with these two religiously-based paradigms is not meant to replace the former with one of the latter, but to provide a pair of prisms through which neoclassical economics can be viewed and fine tuned.