Do people underinvest in spiritual activities?

To reduce spiritual activities to world of money and economics may seem somwhat gross to the spirituallyinclined.However the larger purpose of the work of which this article forms a small component is to draw attention and engage people to the possibility that rightly framed public policy can spur or be conducive to spiritual development of people generally certainly over the longer term. That is perhaps jumping too far ahead in our quest though a draft paper written two years back does attempt to relate economic development and spiritual growth with its tentative conclusions on role of education)

Spiritual pursuit may seem poles apart from worldly pursuits but both have at their core the common aim of increasing and maintaining happiness and /or removal of pain in its various forms ( See for example "The Science of Religion" by Paramhamsa Yogananda published by Self realisation Fellowship). There are other reasons why spiritual pursuits could be considered/studied with the standard and evolving economic and non-economic instruments ( such as controlled experiments or using data generated through controlled experiments).

1. First the ultimate goal of taking to spiritual endeavour as much in common with the aims/purpose of the worldly pursuits and that would allow us to compare one with the other in a limited way
2. The point (1) thus throws up the question of how people would allocate time and resources between the two category of pursuits since resources are always scarce and there are opportunity costs involved at least in the short and medium term
3. Thirdly there is consensus of what constitutes " Spiritual growth" ( See Varieties of Religious Experience by William James"and works of several spiritual giants over last hundreds of years)and while it cannot be meaured as per our present knowledge like income and expenditure, there may be ways to capture this measurement problem)
4. Fourthly Spiritual development has characterstics of an investment where the "output begins to flow" usually after a time which may vary from person to person

To be continued