From Behind the Veil: The Epistles of John

Deep Exegesis:The Mystery of Reading Scripture

Jane Austen
(A Biography)

Solomon Among the Postmoderns

The Baptized Body

1 & 2 Kings
Brazos Theological Commentary

The Promise Of His Appearing: An Exposition Of Second Peter

A Great Mystery: Fourteen Wedding Sermons

Deep Comedy: Trinity, Tragedy, And Hope In Western Literature

Miniatures & Morals: The Christian Novels of Jane Austen

The Priesthood of the Plebs: A Theology of Baptism

A Son To Me: An Exposition of 1 & 2 Samuel

Against Christianity

From Silence to Song: The Davidic Liturgical Revolution

Ascent to Love: A Guide to Dante's Divine Comedy

Blessed Are the Hungry: Meditations on the Lord's Supper

A House For My Name: A Survey of the Old Testament

Heroes of the City of Man: A Christian Guide to Select Ancient Literature

Brightest Heaven of Invention: A Christian Guide To Six Shakespeare Plays

Wise Words: Family Stories That Bring the Proverbs to Life

The Kingdom and the Power: Rediscovering the Centrality of the Church

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Economics: Choice Architects

Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness, by Richard Thaler and Cass Sustein is about choice architecture: “A choice architect has the responsibility for organizing the context in which people make decisions. . . . If you design the ballot voters use to choose candidates, you are a choice architect.  If you are a doctor and must describe the alternative treatments available to a patient, you are a choice architect.  If you design the form that new employees fill out to enroll in the company health care plan, you are a choice architect.  If you are a parent, describing possible educational options to your son or daughter, you are a choice architect.”  If you work at a cafeteria or retail store, your choice architecture is reflected in the arrangement of the goods you want to sell.

One basic principle of choice architecture is that “there is no such thing as a ‘neutral’ design,” which can be translated as “everything matters.”  Thaler and Sustein cite an example from men’s rooms at the Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam: “There the authorities have etched the image of a black housefly into each urinal.  It seems that men usually do not pay much attention to where they aim, which can create a bit of a mess, but if they see a target, attention and therefore accuracy are much increased.”  ”If a man sees a fly, he aims at it,” says Aad Kieboom (real name!), the economist who designed the Schiphol expansion.  It works: the “etchings reduce spillage by 80 percent.”

Economics: Capitalism as cultural system, 2

Weston Hicks responds to my post on Joyce Appleby’s book on the history of capitalism:

“The state used to be a tool of the powerful to entrench themselves and press their advantage, but Christendom transformed it into an arbiter of fair play, unleashing the dominion-taking potential of everyone instead of only the entrenched.

“In turn, it also transformed dominion-taking itself, from oppressive to service-oriented. Now that everyone’s endeavor is in constant danger of being surpassed by someone else’s, bosses must serve employees rather than coerce them. Power is now, by consequence of good law, used for service-of-others instead of self-service. We increase ourselves by seeking the interests of others (consumer, employee) first.  It’s never existed in any ‘pure’ form, but welcome to the fallen world and the powerful are still on the hunt for ways to press their advantage.

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Economics: Capitalism as cultural system

Joyce Appleby begins her The Relentless Revolution: A History of Capitalism with a discussion of the definition of her subject.  Is capitalism an expression of a basic, immutable human nature (Smith: everyone exerts “uniform, constant, and uninterrupted effort . . . to better his condition”)?  Is it exploitation, the seizure of the means of production from farmers by the new lords of production, and the confinement of the rest to the status of wage laborers (Marx)?

Neither.  Following Weber more than Smith or Marx, Appleby argues that capitalism is not the natural form of human enterprise, nor fundamentally as an economic system, but a “cultural system” that took form in seventeenth-century England.  Through an thorough examination of pamphlet literature of that period, she was able to trace the development of new views of human nature, which amounted to a shift from Calvinist man to economic man.  Capitalism expanded as England did (she nicely notes that for much of the world capitalism, like English, is a second language).

She describes the cultural system of capitalism this way:

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Economics Uncategorized: Conservatism and the Market

Kinneging points out the ambiguous relationship that traditional conservatism has often had with the market: “No conservative will deny that a system of mutual provision of services, based on a range of evil affects residing within man – which are further inflamed by the unrestricted operation of that system – ‘works,’ in the sense that it maximized utility.  Unlike critics from the left, conservatives do not believe that the market fails when measured by its own standard of success: utility maximization.  Conservative criticism is not about whether the market lives up to its promises, but whether the market’s promises are necessarily beneficial.  Desire – or ‘preferences,’ as they are not called – are a fundamental principle of the market that is not open to question in the market philosophy.  To conservatives, on the other hand, desires are the core of the problem.  To be sure, many conservatives are strong advocates of the market economy, beginning with Burke.  But conservatism, unlike many market liberals, are also well aware of the limitations and dangers of the market.”

Economics: Dead Capital

In the “how other people live” category: Hernando de Soto (The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else) argues that the key obstacle to Third World prosperity is the invisibility of their assets, and the assets are invisible because property rights are in chaos.  Poor people in poor countries have a lot of assets and they’re worth a lot, and poor people in poor countries work hard and creatively.  But their assets don’t function as capital because they are not legally secure.

He sites some stunning statistics: “In Haiti . . . 68 per cent of city-dwellers and 97 per cent of people in the countryside live in housing to which nobody has clear legal title.  In Egypt dead-capital housing is home for 92 per cent of city-dwellers and 83 per cent of people in the countryside.”

Cumulatively, Haiti’s poor have a lot of wealth:

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Economics: Dead Aid

Over the past sixty years, writes Dambisa Moyo (Dead Aid: Why Aid Is Not Working and How There Is a Better Way for Africa), Africa has received over $1 trillion in aid.  Study after study concludes that it has had minimal, or even negative effects on Africa’s economies: One study finds that there is no impact on growth, another that aid is actually inversely related to savings, another that aid is used on consumption rather than investment.  ”Over the past thirty years, the most aid-dependent countries have exhibited growth rates averaging minus 0.2 percent per annum.”

The culprit, she says, is corruption: “aid is one of [corruption's] greatest aides.”  She describes the cycle of aid:

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Economics: Money-Blind

Gifts blind the clear-sighted and subvert justice (Exodus 23:8).  In context, that’s statement about bribery, and the word used for “gift” here is almost invariably used for bribes of one sort or another (Deuteronomy 10:17; 16:19; 27:25; 1 Samuel 8:3; 1 Kings 15:29; 16:8; etc.).

Occasionally, the reference seems a bit broader (cf. Psalm 15:5), and in any case, the principle holds even for those who are not judges and princes: Money and promises of money blind us to injustice, and concern for our self-interest can lead us to subvert justice in our economic, social, and other dealings.

We who are rich and have a lot of interests to protect are particularly susceptible to blinding “gifts.”

Economics History: Medieval economics

Henri Pirenne, in his Economic and Social History of medieval Europe, describes the regulation of economic life in medieval towns during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Pirenne is admittedly old news, and perhaps more recent studies have corrected some of his claims.

The town government had two main aims: “publicity of transactions and the suppression of middlemen.” Later, Pirenne adds that economic regulations in the towns were “governed by the spirit of control and by the principle of direct exchange to the profit of the consumer.”

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Economics: Bad Samaritans

Ha-Joon Chang argues in Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism that highly developed economies impose unfair and hypocritical demands on developing economies.  In particular, the nations that control the international trade and monetary agencies require that developing economies open their markets to imports, drop or lower tariffs, and basically structure their economies after the image of developed free-trade economies.

This is unfair, Chang argues, because developing economies simply cannot compete.  Koreans don’t have the technical skills to compete in an open computer market, say, with American or Japanese companies, and if the government doesn’t protect Korean companies in some fashion they will never have a chance to develop those skills.  Trade barriers are necessary “training wheels” for developing economies, keeping them profitable until they are ready to compete in a global marketplace.

More tellingly, Chang argues that these demands are hypocritical, since every developed economies did precisely what developing economies are doing when they were in the early stages of development.  American and European companies developed behind the protective barriers of trade restrictions and tariffs until they were able to flourish in an open global market.  Chang asks that the same courtesy be extended to immature economies today.

Economics History: Byzantine economics

Economics: Tight Fists, Open Hands

David L. Baker’s recent Tight Fists or Open Hands?: Wealth and Poverty in Old Testament Lawis a thorough and judicious introduction to the Pentateuch’s teaching on economics.  The book has a limited scope.  Baker largely ignores the contemporary economic situation, and gives comparatively little attention to recent works in theology and economics, and does not go into detail on prophetic texts.  He focuses instead on economic texts in the law, and compares Israel’s economic regulations to those of surrounding Ancient Near Eastern peoples.  His large topics are land and property, marginal groups, and justice and generosity.

He sticks close to his texts.  He recognizes, for instance, that the law does not outlaw slavery outright, but instead “establishes various principles to ameliorate the condition of the poor and needy, emphasising the individual worth of every human being and treating slaves as persons rather thyan property.”

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Economics: Merchants

Angeliki E. Laiou has another revealing article in the Wealth and Poverty volume cited earlier.  She notes the regular warnings and even condemnations of commerce in the patristic literature, and goes on to examine medieval and Byzantine hagiography for the same themes.  She is surprised to find a fairly positive view of merchants.  

Saints use the marketplace for their charitable work – selling produce to raise money for the poor, securing loans which the poor then use to pay rent or buy necessities.  The lives of the saints also celebrate cities for their commercial dynamism: Nicaea in 886 is “full of all good things, which attracts those who deal in money/merchandies, for it well placed for commerce.”  Trebizond has “very numerous and wealthy merchants.”  Pious professional merchants appear with some frequency.

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Economics: Poverty and Splendor

An article by A. Edward Siecienski (in Wealth and Poverty in Early Church and Society (Holy Cross Studies in Patristic Theology and History)) raises the question of the balance between liturgical splendor and poverty relief in the early church.  He points out that even John Chrysostom, who thundered so vigorously against the exploitation of the rich, preached in a cathedral in Constantinople and paraded the city behind silver crosses he had received as a gift from the empress.

Virutally no one, even the most severe ascetic, said that the use of gold and silver and marble was inherently wrong.  Jerome did not “blame” people who built churches with marble, large columns with gold capitals, silver doors and jewel-crusted altars: “Everyone must follow his own judgment.”  But he went on to tell his friend Demetrius that his particular calling was to “clothe Christ in the poor, to visit Him in the wick, to feed Him in the hungry, and to shelter Him in the homeless.”

Chrysostom expressed this “priority of charity over liturgical splendor” in similar Christological terms in a sermon on Matthew:

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Economics: Economies, Advanced and Primitive

Christopher Caldwell ends an intriguing article on William Bagehot (Weekly Standard, 12/22) with this: “To be blunt, credit is successfully reestablished when financial elites say, ‘When.’  Credit is close to a synonym for the mood of the ruling class.  To say an economy is based on credit is to say it is based on animal mysteries.  Glamour, prestige, elan, sprezzatura, cutting a figure . . . that is what the economy is made of.  It is a rather terrifying thought.  Viewed as Bagehot viewed it, from the perspective of a central bank in crisis, an advanced economy looks an awful lot like a primitive economy.”

Economics: Markets and People, II

Reader Jay Horne writes in response to my earlier post quoting Charles Morris, “After working on mechanical trading systems for the past several years (and having some success), I would suggest that it is the lumpiness, the human factors, that exactly create the opportunity for success with a mathematical system. I believe Mr. Morris has it exactly backwards. And mathematics is too broad, we’re talking about repeatable, identifiable trades that have a statistical edge of some sort that can be exploited. It is human greed, fear, and folly that create such opportunities, not some completely random, costless, gaseous system. Humans, on the edge of their emotional range, become remarkably predictable.”

Economics: Markets and people

Charles Morris (in The Trillion Dollar Meltdown) says that one of the dangerous trends emerging in the 80s and 90s, and lurking behind the current financial crisis, is the “increased dominance of investment decisions by mathematical constructs.”  He admits that “Large securities portfolios usually do behave more or less as the mathematics suggests,” but warns that the math breaks down in crisis: “For shares truly to mirror gas molecules, trading would have to be costless, instantaneous, and continuous.  In fact, it is lumpy, expensive, and intermittent.  Trading is also driven by human choices that often make no sense in terms that models understand.  Humans hate losing money more than they like making it.  Humans are subject to fads.  Even the most sophisticated traders exhibit herding behavior. . . . in real financial markets, air molecules have a disturbing knack for clumping on one side of the room.”

Economics: Augustine the Marginalist

In City of God, 11.16, Augustine observes the reality of marginal utility: “So far as the freedom of judgment is concerned . . . the reason of the thoughtful man is far different from the necessity of one who is in need, or the desire of the pleasure-seeker.  For reason considers what value a thing has in itself, as part of the order of nature, whereas necessity considers how to obtain what will meet its need.”

Economics: Consumerism again

Heath and Potter find Thorstein Veblen’s critique of consumerism much more persuasive, “far more penetrating than any of the theories developed in the 20th century.”

Veblen argued that while poor societies devote every increase in production to meeting basic needs, richer societies can devote increases in production to “honorific” goods: “Clothing becomes more ornately decorated, houses become larger, food preparation becomse more elaborate and jewelry begins to make its appearance.” The key is that all these luxury goods serve as badges of social status.

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Economics: Consumerism

In their book, Nation of Rebels, Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter explain why the Marxian critique of the consumer society as a product of “generalized overproduction” doesn’t work: “There is no such thing as generalized overproduction. Never was, never has been.”

More fully, “The problem with Marx’s theory is that it ignores the fact that a market economy is fundamentally a system of exchange. Although we sell goods in return for money, the money itself is not consumed; we simply use it in order to purchase other goods from other people. As a result, the supply of goods constitutes the demand for other goods. Total supply and total demand always add up to the same amount, simply because they are the same thing from two different perspectives. So while there can be ‘too much’ of one particular good relative to other goods, there cannot be an excess of goods in general.”

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Economics: Marxism

In his chapter on the Bolshevik Revolution, Rosenstock-Huessy spends a number of pages digressing about Marx and Marxism. The following notes summarize his treatment of Marxism.

Marx, Rosenstock-Huessy begins, is the culmination of the protest against the “order of things” from within Western civilization itself. Marx is biographically well-positioned for this protest, since “he grew up in its actual centre, between the rivers Seine and Weser.”

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