The poor are poor not because the rich are rich but in spite of that fact. Father Schall sees an important role for religion as a wealth-creating institution, but he strenuously opposes the church's persistent opposition to democratic capitalism - the last great hope for the poor. This iconoclastic book trenchantly analyses numerous religious sacred cows and finds them all wanting. Father Schall, a Jesuit priest who is a member of the Political Science Faculty of Washington's Georgetown University, views social justice as an attempt to wrest control of the economy from the citizen and thereby strengthen the state. He lauds the profit motive as a great boon to the poor, and criticizes government welfare programs for being dependence creators.

For three years the Fraser Institute has conducted a project examining the relationship between economic development and civil, political, and economic freedoms. The purpose of the project is ultimately to construct a global index of economic freedom and thereby to facilitate such an examination. Such an index could also be used in analysis to predict the economic consequence of changes in the level of economic freedom in different countries.

The services economy is pregnant with paradox. It employs our most-skilled and our least-skilled workers. The small productivity increase of service sector workers is regarded as one of the key problems facing us in a future in which four-fifths of the work-force will be employed in the service sector. At the same time, productivity-enhancing outputs from the service sector are the key to future world growth and development. While we can't get rich taking in each other's laundry, the failure to do so as the world economy becomes more 'roundabout' would doom us to stagnation.