Increasing Returns and The Fall

So, I’ve been thinking a lot this holiday season about increasing returns. For those who don’t know, this is the “rich get richer” phenomena which seems pretty pervasive to me. Good college football teams get the best recruits, a few popular artists (music, theatrical, etc.) get a majority of the popularity, ‘hot’ technology companies attract the best talent and thus gain more advantage. Those are just a few examples – you can likely think of more. It may be harder to think of something where this is not true. The opposite would be a dampening process, sort of like your air conditioner – when it gets hotter, cool air comes out to reverse the rise, not reinforce it. Can you think of any societal process which is naturally dampening? I haven’t yet, but I’ve not given up either.

The popular get more popular, the rich get richer, the powerful get more powerful. And there are cycles/crashes, obviously – exponential increases aren’t sustainable, and so the same reinforcing process that gave you popularity can also crush you. Ask Britney Spears.

And then I think of socialism/communism. As I’ve stated previously, my primary gripe with those political theories is that they inevitably lead to centralization of power when the group size gets at all large (bigger than a small commune) because it gets too big to self-govern. Then, you get a situation like communist Russia, which is again a rich-get-richer phenomenon. Those in power use that power to stay in power and profit for themselves at the expense of the masses. And socialism inevitably leads to centralization of power as we discover more social problems that need to be solved by the government to be sure that things are done equitably. But this leads to a very large and powerful government, which the larger it gets, the less accountable it becomes to voters. Rinse, dry, repeat and viola, you have an unaccountable, totalitarian government.

So, how much of this is due to the fall? Doesn’t it seem that humanity at some level was designed to live together in a way that the rich give more away, and the poor find themselves to be the major benefactors of that largess without even needing to ask? This is a big part of Jesus’ counter-cultural message – to give away your riches, to give away power, and to eschew the praise of men (popularity). On the one hand, it is better for you – your soul is less tied to those things when you are able to give them away and you live in freedom and not slavery to them. But it is also better for society. We as Christians are the dampening mechanism, at least in some sense. In another sense, that seems impossible.

A lot of what I’ve said here is probably obvious to some. I guess what feels new to me is that this seeming inexorable push for increasing returns to various things is embedded deep on our society and must be a major target of Christ’s redemptive work.

More on usury

A new article in the Christian Century by friend Jesse DeConto. The Center Way’s own Jesse Blocher is quoted. Check it out, especially for the excellent history of usury laws.

For many Christian leaders, who are the main recruiters for the interest-cap movement, concern for interest rates is rooted in biblical texts and traditional teachings of the church against usury—that is, against charging a fee for the use of money, otherwise known as interest. Medieval Christian thinkers attacked usury, but allowed moneylenders to profit in cases of shared risk, lost business opportunities or late repayment. The Reformers expanded the possibilities for charging interest, but urged that interest rates be kept at 5 percent or lower. The Reformers helped redefine the meaning of usury as “excessive interest.”

Faith & Politics

This is several months old, but it’s good stuff. Three generations of evangelical leaders, Chuck Colson, Greg Boyd, and Shane Claiborne, take part in a dialogue (trialogue?) on the intersection of faith and politics. If there’s a weakness it’s that Boyd and Claiborne probably represent substantially the same position. But a good talk.

Do Americans believe in the common good?

This article by Daniel Callahan in Commonweal explores how our cultural character makes it difficult for us to articulate or appreciate concepts like solidarity or the common good. It is a good read, and a good example of the way Catholic social thinking tends to avoid our political polarities.

The thought that we might have to ration health care in the name of the common good—even to ensure that others get a fair share—is objectionable to most Americans, and our politicians have not dared to talk about it. It is the medical equivalent of not-in-my-backyard. Americans understand that in a flu pandemic a shortage of vaccines might require rationing and priority-setting. In such a case, where our backs are against the wall, the good of the community self-evidently comes first. Not so with the health-care system overall. Rationing is tolerable only in an emergency. We are a rich country, even during a recession; we can afford expensive wars abroad and McMansions. So why should we have to limit health care?

Liberals mostly ignore the question. They like to say that the real problem with health-care costs is waste and inefficiency, curable with better management and better incentives. No one needs to give up anything. Conservatives say that the market by itself can do the job by leading people to make more careful health-care choices. If insurers were forced to compete, everyone would have a wide range of options, and the net result would be lower costs. Again, no one needs to give up anything. Both the Right and the Left have their fairy tales; both refuse to face reality.

Help or Hurt? African Debt Edition

I’m going to start a new recurring series that I’m calling “Help or Hurt” on various popular causes or initiatives frequently advocated by the Church, celebrities, the cognoscenti, etc. Today, we discuss HIPC or “Highly Indebted Poor Countries.”

Bono famously has called for massive debt relief for HIPC’s, and there is some logic to it. If these poor countries are under crushing debt, the it seems that removing some or all of that debt would be a vital step in their recovery. There are two issues here, though, that need to be thought out before diving in.

1. How did they get into debt in the first place? One of problems we’ve already seen with past debt forgiveness (both of countries and people) is that the most common outcome is the simple recurrence of debt. The underlying problem remained so as soon as the massive debt (which was prohibiting any new debt) was removed, debt simply increased again. If the problem is cleptocratic governments, then all we’ve done is line the pockets of the crony thugs who keep these people in power, and done little more than hand billions of dollars to bad governments to waste.

2. The thing these countries need the most is functioning debt markets. Felix Salmon has posted an open letter from Michael Shaheen, recently taken down by Johann Hari in the Independent as a heartless capitalist in search of even more money. Felix had written before about it as well.

So, what is happening here? Shaheen and others like him buy the debt of third world countries, usually very cheaply, and then take them to court to get the full amount back. Since they bought the debt so cheaply, they usually make money, even if they don’t get 100% of the face value. This does, on the face of it, seem to be rich capitalists exploiting poor countries.

But this is how debt markets are supposed to work. If it is deemed politically impossible to actually get your money back when you lend to a country (or a person) then nobody will lend to you. All these “vulture” funds are doing is spending the time and effort to force a country who borrowed to make good on a financial contract. Until these countries know that they will, in fact, have to pay back debt at some point, they will continue to run up large debts and then wait for them to get forgiven. Several Latin American countries have made this a core part of their fiscal policy and until they change it, their people are the ones who pay because it is dysfunctional. They simply spend and spend and spend until they are broke, claim they can’t pay and default. It is the classic tough love argument.

Now, I’m not taking one generalization (we should always forgive the debt of HIPC) and turning it into another (we should never do that). I’m just saying it’s more complicated. Perhaps a small amount of debt relief tied to required governmental reforms may be in order. But broad scale unconditional debt relief for governments does not seem to have brought the results we hoped.

If we really want to help our African neighbors, what we need is unconditional free trade, importing from them anything they want to sell us. But that’s a story for another day.

Profits & Prophecy 4: A Personal Story

I have more to say about the nature of prophecy in the Hebrew Scriptures and what it means today, but I want to take a moment and describe why the prophets are so meaningful to me personally, and why I am passionate about their message being heard in our time.

I am one of those who, as they say, “grew up in the church”. The conservative evangelical church, specifically. Southern Baptist, even more specifically. In fact, my father was a minister. I went to Sunday school and church (twice on Sundays) and Wednesday night supper every week. I accepted Jesus as my savior, and was baptized accordingly. I was a Royal Ambassador. I went to youth group. I have been to dozens of retreats, camps, lock-ins, and Bible studies. I have heard thousands of sermons.

And I never once heard a thing about caring for the poor.

Ok, that last bit is hyperbole. I’m sure I heard something about the poor; as an aside, or as charity, or as a way to draw in people to evangelize. Or as, at best, a consequence of the gospel: Christians become good people and good people should give money to those less fortunate. I’m sure somebody said something about it at some time. Maybe.

Knowing what I now know about the history of Christianity in America, and the modernist/fundamentalist split, and so on, it is not surprising to me that the segment of the church I was a part of was suspicious of anything suggestive of the “social gospel”. We had long ago divvied up into teams (much like politics today) and whatever the other side was for, we were against. What is still surprising to me, what continues to anger me, is that this disregard for social justice comes from people who claim to have a high regard for the Bible. Here is a nice collection of verses in the Bible about poverty. It’s not even close to all of them.

What this has to do with the prophets is that, when I was in college, I took a class in the Judaic Studies department called “The Hebrew Prophets”. This is where I learned about God’s “preferential option for the poor“, from an ex-fundamentalist Christian who converted to Judaism and taught at a secular, state-run university. This is where I discovered a whole area of the Bible about which I knew nothing, except maybe a little from Isaiah (“by his stripes we are healed”). I learned about the passion of Jeremiah and the faithfulness of Hosea and the courage of Amos. I learned about the particularity and holiness of God’s chosen people from Obadiah and the universality of God’s love for all creation from Jonah, which is right next door in the table of contents, and that this placement was probably on purpose. Mostly I learned about a God who was on fire with love and justice, with a special concern for the most vulnerable and marginalized, or in the language of Scripture, “the alien, the fatherless, and the widow”.

I do not assume a 1:1 correspondence between the prophets’ situation and our own, or that their words can be applied uncritically and unthoughtfully to our particular problems (if for no other reason than that we are not Israel). I am not suggesting the prophets would all be Democrats, or socialists, or anything like that. I am not suggesting that those who disagree with me on whatever issue do not care about God, or the Bible, or justice.

But there is a blindness in certain segments of Christianity to what is at the heart of the Bible’s ethics: love for God, and love for others. Justice, Martin Luther King Jr. said, is what love looks like in public. The prophets call for an allegiance to God and his love, and offer a rebuke not just to individuals, but to systems, nations, peoples, and cultures wherein the most poor are oppressed. Their words are authoritative, and their message is, while not simplistically timeless, timely. They revolutionized my own faith, and if their words are heard within and through our own communities, I really believe they can revolutionize our world.

Profits & Prophecy 3: The Divine Pathos

Abraham Joshua Heschel was one of the greatest Jewish theologians of the 20th century, and his book on the prophets (titled guess what, The Prophets) cannot be recommended enough. We tend to think of prophecy as some kind of crystal ball prediction of the future, but Heschel argues it is actually about accurately describing the present (all emphases original):

Prophecy is not simply the application of timeless standards to particular human situations, but rather an interpretation of a particular moment in history, a divine understanding of a human situation. Prophecy, then, may be described as exegesis of existence from a divine perspective…The prophet seldom tells a story, but casts events.

The prophet was an individual who said No to his society, condemning its habits and assumptions, its complacency, waywardness, and syncretism. He was often compelled to proclaim the very opposite of what his heart expected. His fundamental objective was to reconcile man and God. Why do the two need reconciliation? Perhaps it is due to man’s false sense of sovereignty, to his abuse of freedom, to his aggressive, sprawling pride, resenting God’s involvement in history…

Rabbi Heschel points out that the prophets were people of extremity:

To us a single act of injustice–cheating in business, exploitation of the poor–is slight; to the prophets, a disaster. To us injustice is injurious to the welfare of the people; to the prophets it is a deathblow to existence: to us, an episode; to them, a catastrophe, a threat to the world…The prophet’s words are outbursts of violent emotions. His rebuke is harsh and relentless. But if such deep sensitivity to evil is to be called hysterical, what name should be given to the abysmal indifference to evil which the prophet bewails?

The prophets are strange to us, especially when compared with the Greek philosophers:

A student of philosophy who turns from the discourses of the great metaphysicians to the orations of the prophets may feel as if he were going from the realm of the sublime to an area of trivialities. Instead of dealing with the timeless issues of being and becoming, of matter and form, of definitions and demonstrations, he is thrown into orations about widows and orphans, about the corruption of judges and affairs of the marketplace…The world is a proud place, full of beauty, but the prophets are scandalized, and rave as if the whole world were a slum.

His principal insight is that the prophet is one who, fundamentally, empathizes with God. We do not have the “unmoved mover” god of the Greeks. YHWH is a God who gets involved:

The prophet does not judge the people by timeless norms, but from the point of view of God. Prophecy proclaims what happened to God as well as what will happen to the people. In judging human affairs, it unfolds a divine situation. Sin is not only the violation of a law, it is as if sin were as much a loss to God as to man. God’s role is not spectatorship but involvement…Therefore, the prophetic speeches are not factual pronouncements. What we hear is not objective criticism or the cold proclamation of doom. The style of legal, objective utterance is alien to the prophet. He dwells upon God’s inner motives, not only upon His historical decisions. He discloses a divine pathos, not just a divine judgment. The pages of the prophetic writings are filled with echoes of divine love and disappointment, mercy and indignation. The God of Israel is never impersonal.

[Previous] [Next]

Profits & Prophecy 1: Introduction

Previously, we’ve obliquely alluded to “the prophetic voice”, which some can be forgiven for thinking means “a churchy word for self-righteously complaining about stuff we don’t like”. This series will be an exploration of what biblical prophecy was in its context, and what it can and should be for the church today. As Jesse has rightfully warned, claiming to speak for God is a dangerous thing. Why not then rather keep silent? Because sometimes, in the words of Jeremiah, his word is like a fire shut up in our bones, and we cannot but speak. So then, we’d better get it right.

But first, history. I may surprise some folks by turning now to a neocon, Norman Podhoretz. The very beginning of the introduction to his book, The Prophets, sets the stage for us nicely:

Roughly 2,750 ears ago–around the time Homer was probably singing and/or writing the Iliad and the Odyssey in far-off Greece–a man named Amos, who described himself in the Bible as “…an herdsman, and a gatherer of sycomore fruit…” left the village near Jerusalem where he lived and traveled up to Samaria in the northern part of the Land of Israel. Immediately he erupted lke a volcano, denouncing its people in the name of God for their sins and calling upon them to repent.

Thus did the first of the so-called classical prophets suddenly and mysteriously stride onto the historical scene, to be followed by, among many others, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Hosea, and Micah. They were some of the greatest men ever to walk the earth, and most of them, like Homer himself, were also, and not so incidentally, among the greatest poets who ever lived. Then, three centuries after Amos started this astonishing parade (and just when Socrates and Plato were active in Athens), it ground to a halt as suddenly and mysteriously as it had begun.

[Next]

More on consumer debt, the financial crisis, and the Church

I have previously commented on the Ten Percent is Enough campaign. My basic take is that it is well intentioned, but not the best choice for the Church’s scarce resources of time and money. I may blog more on this later – on things like the role of prophetic voice, church-as-institution and the role of the church in politics and community banks. So much to say. But that is not for today.

My point was that I think the Church should focus much more on Consumer Debt and more importantly, Idolatry. First, a bit of data:

Source. This is the household debt to GDP ratio. I may discuss GDP more later, but you can think of it as the amount of “income” our country has in a year*. There are two lines because there was a slight change in how the data is measured, but the trend is clear. Another thing to note is that this does not include the US Government debt. Many like to complain about that, which by itself is about 60-70% of GDP. In 1929, the Consumer Debt to GDP was about 100%. That is equivalent to saying that the mass of consumer debt (note: does not include Mortgage Debt) in the United States is equal to an entire year’s “salary”. When did we reach that lofty height again? Now. Also notice a particularly stark run-up since the late 1990′s.

Many in the Church are concerned about interest rates, I’m concerned about the principal. Why are people in so much debt? No doubt, there are some who, due to unfortunate circumstances, find that debt financing is the only way they can feed their family or pay medical bills. I’ve not seen any data on how big this problem is – the only info I have on Medical Bankruptcy is suspect.

No, I suspect it is the idol of consumerism. I have also heard many people in the Church decry Capitalism as the cause of Consumerism. That is a cop out. Consumerism is an idol that is simply a way for people attempt to show they are smarter, sexier, happier, or wealthier than you may think until they show clearly demonstrated it to you. It is a mechanism for attempting to control our identity. To be what we think others want us to be. It is, at it’s core, a spiritual problem. And for the Church to blame it all on capitalism is irresponsible. There is no doubt the business in the 21st century plays on those weaknesses to sell us things we don’t want or need, but it is also responsible for big benefits to society.  But even if we were to magically outlaw any and all forms of consumerism, advertising and capitalism, we humans would find another idol. We always do. The problem is Idolatry, not Capitalism. We are no wiser or better than the carpenter in Isaiah 44:13-20.

We have seen the problem, and it is ourselves.

===============================

*Technically, GDP measures the output of the country. So, to make this analogy work, think of your labor, your hours worked as your “output” for the year, and your income as what you’ve been paid for that labor. I’ve just skipped some steps because the analogy isn’t quite perfect – countries are different from households. But I think the analogy is apt for the point I’m making.