On March 23, 2023 Laszlo Zsolnai delivered a lecture on Spirituality and Economics for the Galileo Commission, The Scientific and Medical Network (London).
The main point of Zsolnai’s lecture was that the extension and reorientation of economics toward a spiritually informed science is required to consider humans as having both material and non-material needs and desires, to recognize that they can be driven by intrinsic motivations, and to accept that economic actions should be evaluated multidimensionally with reference to the material and non-material outcomes of actions.
Zsolnai suggested that ways to spiritually informed economics include (i) redefining economics as a science of the livelihood of people, (ii) considering the whole economic iceberg (monetary economy, social economy and Mother Earth), (iii) acknowledging the intrinsic value of nature, (iv) giving rooms for ethics in the economic coordination, (v) reinforcing the intrinsic motivation of people, and (vi) developing holistic measures of value and wellbeing. Zsolnai concluded that capitalizing on the best of human nature, spiritually informed economics can become a force for good.