Robert Fogel, winner of the 1993 Nobel Prize in Economics, has set the agenda in economic history for nearly four decades. His research, especially on railroads and slavery, has rewritten the economic history of the United States. Now in his seventies, Fogel has produced a book that focuses as much on the future as on the past. Instead of meticulously building economic models, scouring archives and carefully computing numbers that summarise the performance of the historical economy, Fogel tackles a topic that is seemingly beyond the reach of economic theory and quantification -- the interaction of technology, economics, politics, culture and religion.

Fogel begins by introducing religious "Great Awakenings" as an organising framework. The original Great Awakening began around 1730 with revival meetings, conversions and a renewed "ethic of benevolence." Its political ascendance "provided much of the popular ideological foundation" for the American Revolution. By the early 1800s, as spirits flagged and the influence of churches hit its lowest point in American history, the Second Great Awakening arose and inspired a "zealous quest not only for personal but also for social perfection," spawning numerous reform movements, especially abolition and temperance. Its political ascendance coincided with the American Civil War. Fogel's Third Great Awakening dates from the late nineteenth-century split between fundamentalists and modernists.

The "winning camp" of this "awakening" argued that poverty was not a personal failure but a failure of society. Its ascendancy stretched from the New Deal to the Great Society, ushering in the welfare state, labour laws, the civil rights movement and the women's rights movement. America's Fourth Great Awakening began as the earlier movement petered out. In the past three decades mainline Protestant denominations have lost twenty-five per cent of their membership, while "enthusiastic" churches (such as Pentecostals, Adventists, and Mormons) have doubled in size. This "religious right" has recently gained political ascendancy, pushing a prolife, profamily, anti-entitlement agenda.

Next, Fogel offers a whirlwind tour of American history, showing that technological change has generated accelerating economic growth and has made today's poorest Americans very rich by the standards of the past. This chapter is recommended to anyone wanting a brief, insightful overview of American economic history.

Amid these economic triumphs the "modern egalitarian ethic" came to dominate American culture. This ethic superseded the Second Great Awakening's belief in equality of opportunity and its programme of access to inexpensive western land, universal primary education, women's suffrage and abolition. The modern egalitarian ethic claims that society as a whole will be better off if income is transferred from the rich to the poor and that the state is the proper instrument of redistribution. Economic developments spurred this changing ethic and were a major cause of the Third Great Awakening, according to Fogel. Surging immigration created crowded, disease-filled cities that, for the first time in American history, harboured a class of chronically impoverished people. This visible poverty, coupled with the rise of powerful big businesses, led many Americans to rethink their theory of poverty's causes.

The old theory that stressed individual failure lost adherents to the new theory, especially as recessions became a common feature of economic life. Even though average inflation-adjusted incomes of workers increased by fifty percent between 1860 and 1890, many were jolted by technological change's "frenetic pace." Insecurity plus a lack of sanitary housing plus growing inequality were joined by theological changes bought on by new findings in geology, Charles Darwin's theory of evolution and critical study of the Bible, yielding a shift toward "modernist" ideas. With ideas stressing the inherent goodness of man, social reformers sought to create God's kingdom on earth and "the essence of religion became the elimination of poverty and inequality." Ironically, those who eventually headed the government agencies entrusted with these tasks were likely to be professionals, who looked not to the Bible for guidance, but to textbooks and professional journals.

The twentieth century brought a veritable Egalitarian Revolution. Examining eight economic and biological measures, Fogel concludes that the "modest egalitarian gains that took place during the nineteenth century" have contrasted with the "remarkable gains realised during the twentieth." Ironically, most of these gains in equality were not caused by the interventionist government programs established as part of the Third Great Awakening's agenda. Most income equalisation, for example, occurred because the economy shifted away from land and physical capital (which are not very equally distributed) toward labour income. Fogel identifies government's role in financing education and its public health programs as its most successful egalitarian achievements.

Yet, "despite the enormous gains in life expectancy, health, education and real income and the nineteenfold increase in the real income of the poor, the Social Gospelers' effort to reform human nature, to crush evil, and to create God's kingdom on earth through income redistribution has failed." Modern America is beset with drug addiction, broken families, crime, abortion, pornography and other evils. Fogel identifies these as problems of "spiritual" or "immaterial" inequality, and warns that "like it or not, the reform agenda spelled out by the religious Right, with its focus on the restoration of the traditional family and emphasis on equality of opportunity, more fully addresses the new issues of egalitarianism than does the agenda of the Third Great Awakening."

This discussion includes estimates of dramatic changes in how Americans use their time. Fogel estimates that at the end of the nineteenth century, the typical American spent about 182,000 hours earning income over the course of a lifetime. This fell to about 122,000 hours by the end of the twentieth century. Leisure time (what Fogel calls "volwork") has exploded from about 44,000 hours to 176,000 hours. The key to solving modern problems will be in developing institutions that put this growing free time to good use.

Fogel closes by proposing policies that will allow a "redistribution of spiritual resource." He advocates life-long learning programmes directed at the elderly and wrestles with problems surrounding the funding of old-age pensions and health insurance. While he criticises the "clumsy" funding mechanism for the current Social Security system, his primary point is that the future will bring such abundance that we'll be able to afford comfortable pensions, generous health insurance, and expanded spending on education and still have lots of resources left over for everything else.

He also advocates increasing public resources and subsidies spent on early childhood, pushing "the expansion and spiritual enrichment of nursery and day-care programs," harnessing the "resources of houses of worship for the redistribution of immaterial resources," using "great care" to "safeguard freedom of religion and to ensure the separation of church and state." Fogel repeatedly stresses expanded education as the principal solution to modern problems.

This book raises many interesting points and provides cutting-edge analysis of the development of the economy, rising standards of living, and the progress of material equality. Fogel is at his best when he measures and interprets economically meaningful variables. However, when he steps off the dependable causeway of economic statistics, he steps into a morass. Thus, I fear that the book comes up short of its broader ambitions.

A public choice economist might argue that Fogel is simply a rent seeker. The reforms he pushes may or may not solve modern problems but did you notice that the definitive panacea is more government spending on education-the very industry in which Fogel works? A public choice economist would also point out that for all the political economy in this book, it never seriously embraces the insights of public choice economics. Where are rationally ignorant voters, political special interests and empire-building bureaucrats in the history of the rise of the welfare state? Most readers will agree that Fogel relies much too heavily on the Great Awakening motif, excluding other explanations of twentieth-century "reforms" and statism. Where are the crises of Robert Higgs' Crisis and Leviathan? Where are the demographic forces that Peter Lindert finds so important in his cross-national studies? More importantly, don't international comparisons doom Fogel's entire analysis of the Third Great Awakening? Industrialised countries throughout the world adopted reforms similar to those of the New Deal and Great Society, often somewhat earlier than they were adopted in the US. However, these countries did not have Great Awakenings-did they? In any case, the US is almost analysed in a vacuum and too much is attributed to the role of religion and the Third Great Awakening in explaining political developments of twentieth-century America.

Another wary reading is that Fogel is a wolf in sheep's clothing. A self-professed "secular child of the Third Great Awakening," Fogel offers quintessential liberal reforms-subsidisation of daycare, for example-and tries to sell them as compatible with the agenda of the religious right. He seems want to harness the Fourth Great Awakening while blocking it from filling in the unfathomably deep gulf between church and state that was dug by liberals during the last "awakening."

Ultimately, I fear that Fogel has vastly underestimated the compatibility between his proposals and analysis and the ideals and worldview of the Fourth Great Awakening. The religious right is deeply sceptical of government and creeping secularism. It will scoff at the notion that there ever was a "Third Great Awakening." Modernism was, instead, the Great Apostasy or perhaps the Great Slumber. Such a reader will notice that despite its focus on religion and its generally positive assessment of the Fourth Great Awakening, there is a profound Godlessness in this book. Although the focus falls on people who deeply feel God's presence, God is never an actor in this history. Indeed, he cannot be, because Fogel is an economist and a historian and neither of these disciplines accords room for God to act.

In the academic view of the world, religion evolves because technological and economic forces act on men, but God never acts. The enthusiastic converts of the Fourth Great Awakening, instead recognise that God does act and invite Him to act through in their lives. To them, spirituality is a matter of the immortal spirit. Equating spiritual resources with a sense of purpose, a capacity to engage with diverse groups, a work ethic, a thirst for knowledge, self-esteem and other secular psychological traits, as Fogel does, misses their point. The only way to overcome "spiritual" inequality is to accept the free gift of the Holy Spirit from God. Only a de-secularisation of society can achieve this agenda of the Fourth Great Awakening-life-long education, subsidised daycare, and pension reform cannot.