Kruse Kronicle

"Test of Faith" Trailer

Test of Faith (HT: David Opderbeck)

Test of Faith is a project of the Faraday Institute for Science and Religion at St Edmund's College, Cambridge. Our purpose with Test of Faith is to promote understanding between science and Christianity. To this end, we have created an award-winning documentary series, a book, an educational course, and are developing a resource-rich website. More details on www.testoffaith.com 

U.S. Investor Optimism Rises to Highest Level of the Year

Gallup: U.S. Investor Optimism Rises to Highest Level of the Year

PRINCETON, NJ -- Consistent with Gallup's Consumer Confidence measure and the continued strong performance of the equity market, the Gallup Index of Investor Optimism -- a broad measure of investor perceptions -- in August hit a new 2009 high of 9. This represents a 12-point increase from July and is the first time the Index has been positive since June 2008. The Index has improved by 73 points from February's -64 reading -- its lowest level since its inception in October 1996.

"Deep Church" - Book Review

Deep Church: A Third Way Beyond Emerging and Traditional

Just over ten years ago, my  friend Steve told me he was part of a core group that wanted to plant a church in my neighborhood, not far from downtown Kansas City, MO. He wanted to know if I knew of a place they could meet. I suggested the unused third floor of our church building. That was the beginning of Jacob’s Well, an emerging congregation, pastored by Tim Keel.

The struggling Presbyterian (PCUSA) congregation of which I was a part of played the supporting role of landlord and cheerleader from 1998 until 2003 to the newer merging congregation. In 2003, the Presbyterian congregation dissolved and sold the facility to Jacob’s Well. Jacob’s Well now has three Sunday worship services and a vibrant ministry presence in the community.

I found a lot in common with Jacob’s Well and the questions they wrestled with. I’ve attended a couple of Emergent Village events. I’ve attended local discussion groups. I continue to read books, articles, and blogs by several of the key personalities connected with the emerging church (of which Emergent Village is but one expression.) There is also a community of Emergent folks inside the PCUSA called Presbymergent that I follow. I’ve been at least at the edge of the emerging church movement since before it … well … emerged. So what is the emerging church all about? 

Deep Church: A Third Way Beyond Emerging and Traditional is a book by Jim Belcher, founding pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church (PCA) in Newport Beach, CA. Belcher offers a brief account of how the emerging church came to be and acquaints readers with the significant contours of the at least the American expression of it. I like his characterization of the emerging church movement as a desire for what C. S. Lewis called mere Christianity or “deep church.”

Belcher lays the defining features of traditional Evangelicalism and characterizes the Emerging church as a protest movement against Evangelicalism’s cooption by Modernism. While many emerging church folks share some common critique of the traditional Evangelicalism, Belcher identifies three types of responses:

The Relevants. Still hold to traditional theology but believe that worship and ministry need a serious make over for the message becomes more relevant to the postmodern world.

The Reconstructionists. Tend to be influenced by Anabaptist “resident aliens” perspectives and a desire to return to a pre-Constantinian early church model … they hold to more orthodox views of Scripture but see a need for more radical change in mission and ecclesiology.

The Revisionists. They are questioning core theological understandings as well as virtually every other aspect of what has historically been known as Christian. This third group includes some key leaders of the Emergent Village and is the group that most people first thing of when the “emerging church” moniker is mentioned. (I think it is also safe to say that the great majority of Mainline Christians who call themselves emerging are of this camp.)

Over the last two thirds of the book, entitled “Protest, Reaction and the Deep Church,” Belcher walks us through seven key issues that the emerging church is protesting. With each he explains how traditional Evangelicalism has responded to the protest and then how he sees Deep Church as a response. The book is written in a very engaging gracious conversational style, with Belcher offering considerable autobiographical accounts that relate to his journey and the formation of the church he planted.

I think Belcher has his finger squarely on the pulse of what is happening with the emerging church. He is offering some insights for how church could be done differently that escapes some of the Evangelical versus emerging church conflict, as well as some useful insights about church that have application beyond that conversation.

The book also really brought into focus for me why I always feel like such an outsider to the emerging church conversation. My frame of reference is Mainline Christianity, which has a whole different set of Modernist baggage than Evangelicals do. Postmodernism presents major challenges here as well. The only “emerging church” conversation I find is with those who identify strongly with Belcher’s Revisionist group. I’m not a Revisionist. Go to any emerging church venue that isn’t dominated by Revisionists and it’s like walking in on someone else’s family squabble (i.e., Evangelicals versus Emerging). Where is the conversation for non-Revisionist mainliners who aren’t Hauerwas Anabaptists or McLaren social progressives, but see the need for serious rethinking of what it means to be the church? This is not a criticism of Belcher’s book but rather an acknowledgement of how his clarity helps bring other issues into focus.

If you want to get a handle on what the Evangelical and emerging church controversy is about, and considerable insight on alternatives to the controversy, you need to read this book. It is one of the best two or three books I’ve read on the emerging church movement. Hat’s off to Belcher for a very important contribution to the conversation.

Honorable Marketing

Urban Perspectives: Honorable Marketing by Bob Lupton

"Here’s my bottom line: the Kingdom doesn’t need our hype. The Kingdom needs people who speak the truth."

Cheerios just got a black eye. For as long as I can remember, those little round “O”s have been a breakfast favorite of both children and adults. Kids have spelled words with them in their cereal bowls, moms have carried baggies of them in their purses for snacks, dads have shoveled down spoonfuls as they hurried out the door on the way to work. In recent years these nutritious, fiber-rich, toasted 100% whole grain oat delights have boasted an amazing ability to lower bad cholesterol. I believed them. Who wouldn’t believe in Cheerios? Then some whistle-blower or competitor cried foul and the Federal Trade Commission took a close look at these health claims. Cheerios may be nutritious but no longer can they claim to lower cholesterol. They got caught doing false advertising.

Is it buyer beware or do we want government watchdogs checking the validity of our marketing practices? Frankly, I’m glad there is some ethical standard in our society that attempts to maintain a modicum of honesty. Can you imagine living in a culture where you could believe nothing that you read or heard? What chaos! I’m disappointed in Cheerios. I wish their advertising were as wholesome as their 100% whole grain oats. But I’ll keep eating the little “O”s for breakfast. And I’ll also keep taking my cholesterol pills.

The Federal Trade Commission, an independent agency of the U.S. government, is charged with keeping American business free and fair. Included in its many responsibilities is “to prevent the dissemination of false and deceptive advertising of goods, drugs, curative devices, and cosmetics.” False claims, whether by Cheerios, car dealers or snake oil peddlers, when detected are subject to public exposure, penalties and immediate corrective action. The FTC has jurisdiction over a broad spectrum of activities but there is one realm it cannot penetrate — the church. The church-state barrier offers protection against government intrusion into the practice of organized religion. Of course, one would expect that, since the Judeo-Christian traditions are foundational to the ethical and moral codes of American society, the church would be the last institution in need of ethical policing.

Certainly the church is not without its flaws. The moral failure of church leaders is legendary. The media feeds off such scandal. Yet, in spite of the damage caused by the occasional fall of religious leaders, the church as an institution strives to preserve and protect high standards of conduct. Though its members, and too often its leaders, fail to measure up to its high ideals, the church remains the primary guardian of moral and ethical values. It may wrestle with controversial issues of the day such as gay marriage and abortion, but it does so in pursuit of a moral high ground.

But there is one area that seems to have eluded the ethical scrutiny of the church. Churches from the left to the right, high and low, share the same blind spot. Perhaps it’s because the practice is so pervasive or because the claims seem so spiritual. But if the FTC were to shine the spotlight on the marketing of missions, the expose would be, well, perhaps not damning but certainly embarrassing. Take a look at most any promotional package for a mission trip and you will get the distinct impression that lost, starving, forsaken people have their last hope riding on the willingness of Christians from the US to come and rescue them. The pictures are heart-rending — a close-up of a child’s sad face, a tin-roof shack beside an open sewage ditch, an old woman struggling under a load of firewood sticks. The emotional call goes out for the “healed, trained, empowered and Spirit filled teens to be missionaries to the world.” Such experiences promise to touch lives, change the world, and have a dramatic, life-changing impact on those who will sacrifice their comfort to go. For a week!

Can we be honest? Mission trips and service projects are important. For lots of reasons. But the truth of the matter is that dropping into a strange culture for a week or even two creates far more work for the local leadership than it’s worth, except for the money and gifts we leave. And those gifts more often than not do more long-term harm than good. As one local leader told me: “They’re turning our people into beggars.” Much of the work we do is make-work — painting a church, digging a foundation, leading a summer Bible school — all work that could and should be done by locals. “Our men need the work,” a seminary president once told me as we discussed the impact of US mission trippers in her impoverished country.

But this treatise is not about the downstream impact of mission trips. Some ambitious young reporter seeking to make a name for himself will sooner or later handle that expose. This is about the dishonesty in our marketing of these trips. Our “people-are-dying-and-you-can-save-them” rhetoric may be effective spin to lure young people (and older as well) into signing up but we know that only on rare occasions is this actually true. Yes, there are Katrinas. But the overwhelming majority of our mission trips are to places where the needs for development are far greater than for emergency assistance. And development is about enabling indigenous people to help themselves, not doing the work for them. Development is much longer term, calls for professional expertise and planning, requires lending and investing — not the sort of things that lend themselves to a typical short-term mission trip.

I am not saying that mission trips don’t have value. They do. Great value. They open up new worlds, new perspectives, new insights. They expose us to fascinating cultures, connect us with new friends, allow us to experience God at work in surprising ways, inspire us, break our hearts, build camaraderie among traveling companions. Any one of these benefits might well justify the time and expense. But isn’t it time we admit to ourselves that mission trips are essentially for our benefit, not for the benefit of the ones our marketing material portray? Would it not be more forthright if we called our junkets “insight trips” or “exchange programs”? Or how about Kingdom adventures? Do we really need to justify our journeying to exotic lands under the pretense of missionary work? Religious tourism would have much more integrity if we simply admitted that we’re off to explore God’s amazing work in the world.

I know we have to have good reason to justify spending the kind of money we do on mission trips. US churches spent well over $2 billion (that’s with a “b”) on them last year. This is not at all inconsistent with our normative pattern of church spending, however. We typically spend upwards of 95% of church budgets on ourselves anyway. So to admit that mission trip expenditures are primarily for the spiritual benefit of our members would not be out of line, that is if we feel justified spending that percentage on ourselves. But that’s a discussion for another time. Our subject here is marketing with integrity.

So how do we capture the imagination, the compassion, of a younger generation if not by appealing to the tenderness of their hearts? Come to think of it, it was the story of fatherless children that drew me into urban work nearly 40 years ago. I wanted to make a difference. That was a powerful motivator. So maybe “touching lives” and “changing the world” is appropriate rhetoric after all. It certainly appealed to my compassionate side and it played at least some part in shaping my call into ministry. The idea of sacrifice was also appealing to me, to offer myself up to a cause of great importance. I wanted my life to count. That was important. But playing to those tender Spirit-sensitivities should be done with great care. Setting up unrealistic expectations can lead to discouragement. Portraying false representations can lead to cynicism. Is it not enough to simply say “come and see” and then allow the Spirit to do the touching and surprising?

Here’s my bottom line: the Kingdom doesn’t need our hype. The Kingdom needs people who speak the truth.

Bob Lupton

To learn more about FCS Urban Ministries or to donate online, please visit www.fcsministries.org/involved.htm

Is Consumerism the Real Quesiton?

Consumerism. Everywhere I turn I confront articles, blog posts, and books reflecting on the evils of consumerism. There is concern that consumerism has overtaken the church. A cottage industry now exists to address these issues, offering resources and seminars for your … well … consumption. So what, exactly, is consumerism?

Wikipedia says, “Consumerism is the equation of personal happiness with consumption and the purchase of material possessions.” That is about as good as any definition. In the church context, it centers on people shopping for churches that meet their “needs” and churches marketing products and programs tailored to meet “customer” needs.  I think most of us could give example we would call consumerism. But there is something not quite right here.

Consumption is a verb. Verbs need a subject and an object. The subject is a consumer … me for instance. But what is the object? “Things?” I can’t recall ever having had the urge to buy a “thing.” The target of my urge is something specific … a top of the line home theater system or front row seats at the ball game. Happiness does not come from the consumption of generic things but rather from the perceived need specific things satisfy in our inner-world. Those things produce something for us.

When we look at the biblical narrative we learn that we are world builders. We were made in God’s image. As his image-bearers, we create physical and cultural worlds. We were given dominion … made vice-regents over creation. But we were created to live our world-building calling in relationship to God.

With the fall comes disruption of relationship and of the world-building project for which we were made. Adam and Eve are cast from the garden and things quickly go downhill. Cain kills his brother. He is banished from the presence of God. Then Genesis 4:16-17 records these words:

Then Cain went away from the presence of the Lord, and settled in the land of Nod, east of Eden. Cain knew his wife, and she conceived and bore Enoch; and he built a city, and named it Enoch after his son Enoch.

The two primary social institutions in ancient cultures were kinship and politics. Cain starts a lineage and establishes a city. He names his son and the city Enoch, meaning “initiated.” Cain initiates the building of a new world apart from God. This is an attempt to give meaning and purpose to his life. But note where Cain builds the city: Nod. “Nod” means “wandering.” Cain has “settled” in the land of “wandering!” An exercise in futility if ever there was one, but Cain’s project is now the prototypical human project … building a world in the land of wandering.

Ancient societies built their worlds around kinship and politics. Kinship and politics aren’t evil. They were redirected toward his project of building a world apart from God. Ancient cultures tended to be totalitarian world-building projects, infused with divine qualities. We have entered a different time. World-building projects are more individualized. Rather than building one world through domination, we cooperatively engage each other in exchange to create our customized worlds with their own customized deities.

There really is nothing inherently wrong with consumption. Every living thing on the planet consumes. There is nothing wrong with seeing to our needs. God created a world of abundance but made us participants in our provision as we “till the garden.” There is nothing wrong with taking delight in material pleasures. We are material beings who create things and it is appropriate that the material items we form bring us happiness. There is nothing wrong with exchange. Exchange gives each of us access to things that can enhance our lives that we otherwise would not have.

Corruption enters the picture through the values by which we approach consumption, meeting needs, experiencing happiness, and exchange. Those values are emanating from the world-building projects that have formed in our minds.  This means that any given act of consumption can be legitimate for one person and idolatry for another. Reshape the world-building projects and you reshape the values through which all else is done.

Enter the Kingdom of God with its new (or is it the original?) vision of a world-building community ... a place where consumption, meeting needs, experiencing happiness, and exchange are redirected to their intended place in the order of things. How do we participate in, and invite others into, the original world-building project? It seems to me that this is the question.

Company size: Big is back

The Economist: Company size: Big is back

Corporate giants were on the defensive for decades. Now they have the advantage again.

... Today the balance of advantage may be shifting again [Toward big firms]. To a degree, the financial crisis is responsible. It has devastated the venture-capital market, the lifeblood of many young firms. Governments have been rescuing companies they consider too big to fail, such as Citigroup and General Motors. Recession is squeezing out smaller and less well-connected firms. But there are other reasons too, which are giving big companies a self-confidence they have not displayed for decades.

Of course, big companies never went away. There were still plenty of first-rate ones: Unilever and Toyota continued to innovate through thick and thin. And not all start-ups were models of success: Netscape and Enron promised to revolutionise their industries only to crash and burn. Nevertheless, the balance had shifted in favour of small organisations.

The entrepreneurial boom was supercharged by two developments. Deregulation opened protected markets. Some national champions, such as AT&T, were broken up. Others saw their markets eaten up by swift-footed newcomers. The arrival of the personal computer in the 1970s and the internet in the 1990s created an army of successful start-ups. Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak founded Apple Computer in 1976 in the Jobs family’s garage. Microsoft and Dell Computer were both founded by teenagers (in 1975 and 1984 respectively). Larry Page and Sergey Brin started Google in Stanford dorm rooms.

But deregulation had already begun to go out of fashion before the financial crisis. ...

The article goes on to address other reasons for the shift but I think the article highlights something I think is grossly misunderstood. It is common wisdom that in general big corporations want  deregulation. It frees their grubby little hands to pursue more profit.

In reality, regulation is often an asset to big corporations. (It is not true in every industry or for every firm but it is frequently the case.) Regulation creates a barrier to entering the industry from newcomers ... that is, it limits competition. The big existing firms take a financial hit in their compliance efforts but their is a disproportionately higher impact on smaller firms and newcomers. Furthermore, since the regulations are crafted by a handful of people in D. C., money spent on lobbyists and cozy relationships with lawmakers is much less risky than having to compete against innovative newcomers. Yet the ones in the public square who rail against the presence of big corporations are frequently the same ones calling for the most regulation. Regulation of business is essential but attempts to mange industries through legislation generally favors big corporations.

U.S. Online Video Market Soars in July as Summer Vacation Drives Pickup in Entertainment and Leisure Activities Online

Com Score:  U.S. Online Video Market Soars in July as Summer Vacation Drives Pickup in Entertainment and Leisure Activities Online

TV Viewers Turn to Internet for Fresh Content with Shows on Summer Hiatus; Hulu Reaches All-Time High with 457 Million Video Views

RESTON, VA, August 27, 2009 – comScore, Inc. (NASDAQ: SCOR), a leader in measuring the digital world, today released July 2009 data from the comScore Video Metrix service, showing that 158 million U.S. Internet users watched online video during the month, the largest audience ever recorded. Online video reached another all-time high in July with a total of 21.4 billion videos viewed during the month. ...

Africa's population: The lesson from Sodom and Gomorrah

The Economist: Africa's population: The lesson from Sodom and Gomorrah

CAREFULLY stepping round another heap of fetid refuse in Sodom and Gomorrah, it is easy to despair of Africa’s future. Accra’s notorious slum is aptly named. Here, about 30,000 families (no one knows for sure how many) crowd into a warren of hastily thrown-together shacks on the fringes of Ghana’s capital: there is no power, sewerage or running water, diarrhoea and other diseases are rife and deadly fires rapidly take hold. It seems to contain all that is wrong with modern Africa—too many people, deep poverty and the failure of inept or corrupt governments to do anything to help. Yet Sodom and Gomorrah also has a more hopeful story to tell.

Africa is undergoing a “demographic transition”. As our briefing shows (see article), African women are now following their sisters in Asia and the rich world by bearing steadily fewer children. Admittedly, Africa is lagging behind Asia by about 20 years, and the continent’s fertility rates are still high, but the trend is clear. In Mozambique in 1950 a woman had, on average, 6.5 children over her lifetime; now she has five. In Ethiopia the figure has dropped from seven to five; in Côte d’Ivoire it has almost halved from its peak; in Botswana it has more than halved. The only exceptions are war-torn places such as Congo. ...

...In Latin America and Asia this transition yielded a huge economic gain, called the “demographic dividend”. As birth rates decline, the proportion of children shrinks and the working-age population bulges, as is happening now in Africa. That can kick-start industrialisation. Factories employ low-skilled farmers fresh from the country, which increases productivity and prosperity, which creates demand, and so it goes on. Some studies reckon that demography explains as much as a third of Asia’s economic growth. ...

Related: Demographic Transition Model

Theologians & Economists: The Rise of Unprecedented Prosperity (2)

[Series Index]

(Continued)

Economic Growth

When most people of think of economic disparity, they usually think in terms of income. Income is correlated with other factors that empower us to survive and thrive. What can we say about per capita income on an historical basis?

Comparing income across eras is difficult. Inflation and other variables make direct comparison impossible. Comparing contemporary currency based economies to barter economies will not work either. To aid in this comparative analysis, economic historians have developed a concept called “purchasing power parity” (PPP). The value of a dollar at a fixed point in time is chosen and the value of income at all other points in time is pegged to the purchasing power of the fixed dollar. For our purposes, we will be using a PPP measure of “1990 International Dollars” (I$). Annual per capita Gross Domestic Product (the total market value of all final goods and services produced within a given country in a given period of time, usually a year) will be used as a proxy for income.

Not all economists agree on how to achieve parity between the present and past eras. Angus Maddison, one of the foremost authorities on this topic, suggests that I$400 per capita is a subsistence level income and was typical of subsistence living prior to the industrial revolution. However, economist Brad Delong, who has done his own analysis, claims:

“A large proportion of our high standard of living today derives not just from our ability to more cheaply and productively manufacture the commodities of 1800, but from our ability to manufacture whole new types of commodities, some of which do a better job of meeting needs that we knew we had back in 1800, and some of which meet needs that were unimagined back in 1800.” (Brad DeLong)

Therefore, DeLong puts historic subsistence living at I$90. Both scholars end up with similar income estimates in recent eras.

Another difference is that while Maddison has tended to focus his analysis on the past two millennia, DeLong has analyzed more ancient eras. Either way, when you plot their data over the past few millennia on a chart, you get this:

DeLong reports that it took from 10,000 BCE until 1750 for per capita GDP to double from I$90 to I$178. (I$109 in year 1 CE.) Maddison reports a per capita GDP of I$467 in 1 CE and I$616 in 1700. The following chart shows their estimates between 1600 and 2003:

You can see that the growth accelerates beginning in the early nineteenth century. Many have suggested that the industrial revolution began not long after 1750 and it is true that many inventions came into being not long after that. However, there was a lag of a few decades between the advent of various technologies and their placement into productive use. Maddison argues for a beginning point of 1820 (as do other economic historians.) Whichever the case, keep in mind that the world population grew sevenfold between 1750 to 2010 as this explosion in per capita income unfolded. In the aggregate, we can see that the growth in worldwide per capita income is astounding. But how broadly spread is it?

Angus Maddison offers us some powerful insights into the recent global economic expansion through regional analysis. The popular history of the world is that through colonization, the West European nations enriched themselves by robbing other regions of the world of their resources, thus driving them into destitution. Let’s take a look at the impact of colonization and the industrial revolution on those regions outside Western Europe, West European Offshoots (like USA, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand) and Japan:

Every region of the world has experienced magnitudes of growth since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. It is particularly true after World War II. The former USSR data is a bit distorted on the graph because there was a significant drop in per capita income during the 1990s after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. However, growth has returned over the past decade. Russia’s per capita GDP has grown nearly 25% in the three years after 2003.

The truly bleak portion of the picture is Africa. Africa was actually ahead of Asia in growth throughout the twentieth century until the 1980s. Inability to establish sound governments and the AIDS epidemic have stagnated Africa’s growth and even reversed it in several sub-Saharan nations. Sub-Saharan Africa is one of the few stagnate or declining regions of the globe but this reversal did not begin until the 1980s.

The fact is that there has been a significant improvement in the absolute per capita income of nations outside the West. And not only are people not getting poorer outside the West, non-Western emerging economies have been growing at a faster rate than Western economies. The recent recession has sent most of this temporarily into reverse but emerging nations like China, India, and Brazil have been weathering the recession better than the U. S.

(Source: The Economist)

However, as this chart below shows, there is a lot of catching up to do:

The realities of world economic growth are more complex than I can nuance in this  post. There are disparities when we disaggregate the data. Still, the percentage of people living on the equivalent of less than I$1 a day has shrunk from 39% in 1970 to less than 20% in 2000. The UN anticipates it will be less than 10% in 2015. (We will see what impact the recession has.) All this during a period when the world population doubled!

The overall picture is one of unprecedented improvement in the lives of billions of people around the world. Whatever we may think of the rate of change, the overall picture is not one of the poor getting poorer under the oppression of Western consumerism.

Other Measures

• It is frequently noted how violent the Twentieth Century was, yet death through violence as a proportion of the world population was not high for the century. The past thirty years have been some of the most peaceful in recorded history.
• As ranked by Freedom House, the number of people living in free countries rose from 16% to 43% between 1975 and 2005. (See 1975 and 2005)
• Daily caloric intake has shown improvement for the past thirty years. (Chart)
• Child labor rates have been in decline for thirty years. (Chart)
• Literacy has been improving dramatically around the world, even in the poorest nations. (Chart)

Other Considerations

The changes we have seen in the past two centuries are unprecedented but they can't be totally attributed to economic change. Economic changes have been accompanied by changes in governance, scientific discovery, improvement in human health ... all of which contribute to, and draw from, each other. But economic productivity has been a major driver of the changes.

The process by which these economic changes came about were often chaotic and destructive. Colonialism and slavery are dark chapters in Western history that preceded and then accompanied many of the changes. But the questions is whether these practices were some how inherent in the emergence of market economies and capitalism. The fact is, colonialism and slavery are ancient practices. They have been practiced by societies that knew nothing of capitalism. The great technological and economic power that capitalism created made Western nations especially proficient at these activities, but were they essential?

Economic historian Paul Bairoch highlights two powerful and pervasive myths about colonialism in his book Economics and World History: Myths and Paradoxes. One is held by the right and the other by the left. The one held by the right is that the nations of Western Europe achieved their growth through free trade. He shows convincingly that only after about 1960 did truly free trade begin to be practiced widely among nations.

The other myth, more pertinent to our discussion, is that colonialism was the backbone of European economic growth. On the contrary, Bairoch shows that imports of raw materials into Western economies accounted for a small fraction of total raw materials and colonial markets for finished goods never amounted to but a few percentage points of the overall economy. In fact, colonial possessions, originally established when mercantilist thinking was in vogue (16th to 18th Century), may actually have stunted the economic growth of colonial powers during the Industrial Revolution because of the high “carrying cost” of maintaining colonies.

The real damage done to colonies was less a matter of the resources extracted and far more about the suppression of industrial development within the colonies. The good news is you don’t need colonialism to develop a strong economy. The challenge is to nurture industry among the former colonial states and that is happening at various rates around the world right now.

More directly related to capitalism is what happened to workers as  urbanization and industrialization unfolded. That process is happening elsewhere around the world and careful attention needs to be given to these developments by theologians and economists.

I wrote yesterday that one of the standards of shalom was, "Nature itself will be altered into a more peaceful order." While we have seen concern about pollution and environment move higher on the list of developed nations, and there has been significant improvement, other nations are emerging into industrial societies where pollution and environmental destruction are increasing. Possible unforeseen side effects of CO2 have emerged as well. This clearly is tied to the economic decisions we make and needs our reflection as well.

Conclusion

The overall trajectory of life on earth is one rising and expanding prosperity across the planet. It is not a transformation without challenges. In addition to the above concerns, globalization and the impact it has on cultures is something to be considered. Furthermore, we can't simply justify the means by the ends alone. However, what we can see is that the changes of the last two centuries are absolutely unprecedented in the amount of widespread prosperity the world experiences.

If you have about twenty minutes, you may enjoy this presentation by Hans Rosling at TED that graphically illustrates the change that has occurred.

We turn next to asking how we might think both theologically and economically about these issues.

[Previous] [Next]

Half of Americans use social networks

USA Today: Half of Americans use social networks

If you needed any more proof about the ubiquity of social media, take a gander at a fresh new report from Forrester Research.

It concludes that four in five Americans use social media at least once a month, and half participate in social-networking services like Facebook, Twitter and MySpace.

But before you dismiss the social-media phenomenon as strictly the province of twentysomethings and teens, consider the greatest increase in social media adoption over the past year has been among adults ages 35 to 54, where participation has grown 60%, Forrester says.

Forrester based its results on responses from nearly 4,500 consumers.

Wal-Mart Stores offers bill pay service

Yahoo Finance: Wal-Mart Stores offers bill pay service

BENTONVILLE, Ark. (AP) -- Wal-Mart Stores Inc. said Tuesday it is offering a bill-pay service for customers who do not use traditional checking accounts.

Customers can go to Walmart MoneyCenters and customer service desks at its stores nationwide to pay utility, landline phone, cable/satellite, credit card bills, auto and wireless phone bills.

Walmart says a large segment of Americans who make less than $45,000 per year pay bills in person or use third-party walk-in bill payers to pay their basic household bills.

The company said the service provides a low-cost option to minimize fees customers may otherwise face.

Shares of Wal-Mart rose 12 cents to close at $51.67 Tuesday.

Theologians & Economists: The Rise of Unprecedented Prosperity (1)

[Series Index]

Is the state of world getting better or getting worse? Our mission is to seek the greatest shalom possible in the world, always cognizant that shalom in its fullness will only be recognized at the consummation of the new creation at Christ’s return. But how would we measure shalom?

Isaiah 65:17-25 gives an Old Testament perspective on what the redeemed Israel will look like.Listen to the themes of what constitutes a redeemed world:

17 For I am about to create new heavens
and a new earth;
the former things shall not be remembered
or come to mind.
18 But be glad and rejoice forever
in what I am creating;
for I am about to create Jerusalem as a joy,
and its people as a delight.
19 I will rejoice in Jerusalem,
and delight in my people;
no more shall the sound of weeping be heard in it,
or the cry of distress.
20 No more shall there be in it
an infant that lives but a few days,
or an old person who does not live out a lifetime;
for one who dies at a hundred years will be considered a youth,
and one who falls short of a hundred will be considered accursed.
21 They shall build houses and inhabit them;
they shall plant vineyards and eat their fruit.
22 They shall not build and another inhabit;
they shall not plant and another eat;
for like the days of a tree shall the days of my people be,
and my chosen shall long enjoy the work of their hands.
23 They shall not labor in vain,
or bear children for calamity;
for they shall be offspring blessed by the LORD --
and their descendants as well.
24 Before they call I will answer,
while they are yet speaking I will hear.
25 The wolf and the lamb shall feed together,
the lion shall eat straw like the ox;
but the serpent -- its food shall be dust!
They shall not hurt or destroy
on all my holy mountain, (NRSV)

Several themes jump out from this characterization of a world restored to shalom. There are some very practical and specific features:

• God will delight in his people and be attentive to them. (18-19, 24)
• Safety will prevail. (19)
• Infant mortality will cease. (20)
• Life expectancy will increase beyond 100 years. (20)
• There will be a just and prosperous order in society (absence of war and oppression.) (21-24)
• Nature itself will be altered into a more peaceful order. (25)

The New Testament version of the new creation expands this vision even further. God makes his dwelling with humankind and there is eternal life. But it seems to me that we can look at the features of shalom in this Isaiah passage as standards.

This passage makes direct reference to life expectancy and infant mortality. Demographers and sociologist frequently turn to these measures for a sense of overall societal welfare. Why? These two indicators serve as indirect indicators of other societal realities. Many other social variables (i.e., adequate food, health care, environment, social stability, healthy social institutions, low crime) must be positive in order for these two variables to be positive as well.

Life Expectancy

The life expectancy rate is the number of years someone is expected to live at birth. Long life is a universal indicator of prosperity across cultures and time. So what can we say about this measure of prosperity throughout human history? Here are estimates of two scholars:

For most of its existence, Homo sapiens lived in far-flung hunter-and-gathering communities, each of which was quite small and barely able to reproduce itself. Life expectancy at birth was hardly twenty-five years on average, and those persons who survived childhood often died violently, in combat with other hunters, at relatively young ages. (Robert William Fogel, The Fourth Great Awakening and the Future of Egalitarianism, 48)

For much of human history, average life expectancy used to be 20-30 years. By 1900, it had climbed to about 31 years … By 2003 it was 66.8 years. (Indur Goklany, The Improving State of the World, 31)

To put the last statement by Goklany in perspective, let's graph the estimated life expectancy on a chart:

If we show only the last two centuries we get a clearer picture:

Using life expectancy as a measure of prosperity, the world is far more prosperous than it has ever been. The gap is narrowing between the top and bottom rungs of the global community. More amazing, most of this change occurred over a time when the total world population grew nearly sevenfold, from less than 1 billion to almost 7 billion today!

This is not to say that every nation, or every region within a nation, or every subgroup within in a nation, has prospered equally well. Note the tragic impact of the AIDS epidemic and of social chaos on sub-Saharan Africa by looking at this map of life expectancy from wikipedia:

The trajectory of change is an unprecedented rise in prosperity. It is uneven growth but every corner of the planet has improved and the gap between top and bottom nations is closing.

 

Infant Mortality

A second measure of prosperity demographers frequently use is the infant mortality rate. The infant mortality rate is the number of children that die between birth and their first birthday, per 1,000 live births. Because the first year of life is when human beings are most vulnerable, their ability to survive the first year of life says a lot about the state of their society; thus the significance of the infant mortality rate.

So what can we say about this measure of prosperity throughout human history? Here are  two scholarly estimates:

In the year 1000, the average infant could expect to live about 24 years. A third died in the first year of life. Hunger and epidemic disease ravaged the survivors. By 1820, life expectation had risen to 36 years in the west, with only marginal improvement elsewhere. (Angus Maddison, Contours of the World Economy, 1-2030 AD, 69)

Before industrialization, at least one out of every five children died before reaching his or her first birth day; that is infant mortality measured as the number of children dying before the age of one, typically exceeded 200 per 1,000 live births. … In the United States, as late as 1900, infant mortality was 160; …” (Indur Goklany, The Improving State of the World, 27)

 

Let's look at the change in the infant morality rate for the last fifty years:

Note that the average infant mortality rate for developing nations in 2003 is at the same level the rate was for the developed world fifty years ago. The trend continues downward. This is not to say that every nation, or every region within a nation, or every subgroup within in a nation, has prospered equally well. As with life expectancy, note the tragic impact of the AIDS epidemic and social has had on sub-Saharan Africa by looking at this of infant mortality from wikipedia:

During the 1990s there was a small increase in the rate for the former Soviet nations but that trend has turned positive again. There are disparities between Anglos and non-Anglos in the United States. Disparities exist, but only about a dozen (mostly small) African nations have infant mortality rates above 100. The great majority of the total world population lives in nations with far lower rates including India (34.6) and China (22.1).

Using infant mortality as measures of prosperity, the world is far more prosperous than it has ever been and the gap is narrowing between the top and bottom rungs of the global social ladder. There is uneven growth but every corner of the planet has improved and the gap between top and bottom nations is closing.

Economic Growth

(Continued ...)

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The truth on infant mortality

Chicago Tribune: The truth on infant mortality

The American medical system has the latest technology, the greatest variety of new drugs and unparalleled resources. But anyone who thinks we're getting something great for our dollars inevitably encounters a two-word rebuke: infant mortality.

The United States is the richest nation on Earth, but it comes in 29th in the world in survival rates among babies. This mediocre ranking is supposed to make an irrefutable case for health-care reform. If we cared enough to insure everyone, we are told, we would soon rise to the health standards of other modern nations. It's just a matter of getting over our weird resistance to a bigger government role in medical care.

But not every health issue is a health-care issue. The reason boxers are unusually prone to concussions is not that they lack medical insurance. Doctors may treat head injuries, but it's a lot easier to prevent them. Absent prevention, we shouldn't blame the medical industry for punch-drunk fighters.

Like life expectancy (the subject of a previous column), infant mortality is a function of many factors. The more you look at the problem, the less it seems to be correctable by a big new federal role in medical insurance -- and, in fact, the less it seems to be mainly a medical issue at all.

No one denies the problem. Our infant mortality rate is double that of Japan or Sweden. But we live different lives, on average, than people in those places. We suffer more obesity (about 10 times as much as the Japanese), and we have more births to teenagers (seven times more than the Swedes). Nearly 40 percent of American babies are born to unwed mothers. ...

...African-American babies are far more likely to die than white ones, which is often taken as evidence that poverty and lack of health insurance are to blame. That's entirely plausible until you notice another racial/ethnic gap: Hispanics of Mexican or Central or South American ancestry not only do consistently better than blacks on infant mortality, they do better than whites. Social disadvantage doesn't explain very much. ...

...So why does our infant mortality rate exceed that of, say, Canada, where health care is free at the point of service?

One reason is that we have a lot more tiny newborns. But underweight babies don't fare worse here than in Canada -- quite the contrary. ...

From an earlier article by Chapman on Life Expectancy:

One big reason our life expectancy lags is that Americans have an unusual tendency to perish in homicides or accidents. We are 12 times more likely than the Japanese to be murdered and nearly twice as likely to be killed in auto wrecks.

In their 2006 book, "The Business of Health," economists Robert L. Ohsfeldt and John E. Schneider set out to determine where the U.S. would rank in life span among developed nations if homicides and accidents are factored out. Their answer? First place.

I also recently saw (can't find the article) that life expectancy for Americans at about age 50 and higher is about a year or more longer than in other developing nations.

The Beloit College Mindset List for the Class of 2013

The Beloit College Mindset List for the Class of 2013

Most students entering college for the first time this fall were born in 1991.

1. For these students, Martha Graham, Pan American Airways, Michael Landon, Dr. Seuss, Miles Davis, The Dallas Times Herald, Gene Roddenberry, and Freddie Mercury have always been dead.
2. Dan Rostenkowski, Jack Kevorkian, and Mike Tyson have always been felons.
3. The Green Giant has always been Shrek, not the big guy picking vegetables.
4. They have never used a card catalog to find a book.
5. Margaret Thatcher has always been a former prime minister.
6. Salsa has always outsold ketchup.
7. Earvin "Magic" Johnson has always been HIV-positive.
8. Tattoos have always been very chic and highly visible.
9. They have been preparing for the arrival of HDTV all their lives.
10. Rap music has always been main stream.
11. Chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream has always been a flavor choice.
12. Someone has always been building something taller than the Willis (née Sears) Tower in Chicago.
13. The KGB has never officially existed.
14. Text has always been hyper.
15. They never saw the "Scud Stud" (but there have always been electromagnetic stud finders.)
16. Babies have always had a Social Security Number.
17. They have never had to "shake down" an oral thermometer.
18. Bungee jumping has always been socially acceptable.
19. They have never understood the meaning of R.S.V.P.
20. American students have always lived anxiously with high-stakes educational testing.
21. Except for the present incumbent, the President has never inhaled.
22. State abbreviations in addresses have never had periods.
23. The European Union has always existed.
24. McDonald's has always been serving Happy Meals in China.
25. Condoms have always been advertised on television.
26. Cable television systems have always offered telephone service and vice versa.
27. Christopher Columbus has always been getting a bad rap.
28. The American health care system has always been in critical condition.
29. Bobby Cox has always managed the Atlanta Braves.
30. Desperate smokers have always been able to turn to Nicoderm skin patches.
31. There has always been a Cartoon Network.
32. The nation's key economic indicator has always been the Gross Domestic Product (GDP).
33. Their folks could always reach for a Zoloft.
34. They have always been able to read books on an electronic screen.
35. Women have always outnumbered men in college.
36. We have always watched wars, coups, and police arrests unfold on television in real time.
37. Amateur radio operators have never needed to know Morse code.
38. Belarus, Moldova, Ukraine, Uzbekistan, Armenia, Latvia, Georgia, Lithuania, and Estonia have always been independent nations.
39. It's always been official: President Zachary Taylor did not die of arsenic poisoning.
40. Madonna's perspective on Sex has always been well documented.
41. Phil Jackson has always been coaching championship basketball.
42. Ozzy Osbourne has always been coming back.
43. Kevin Costner has always been Dancing with Wolves, especially on cable.
44. There have always been flat screen televisions.
45. They have always eaten Berry Berry Kix.
46. Disney's Fantasia has always been available on video, and It's a Wonderful Life has always been on Moscow television.
47. Smokers have never been promoted as an economic force that deserves respect.
48. Elite American colleges have never been able to fix the price of tuition.
49. Nobody has been able to make a deposit in the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI).
50. Everyone has always known what the evening news was before the Evening News came on.
51. Britney Spears has always been heard on classic rock stations.
52. They have never been Saved by the Bell
53. Someone has always been asking: "Was Iraq worth a war?"
54. Most communities have always had a mega-church.
55. Natalie Cole has always been singing with her father.
56. The status of gays in the military has always been a topic of political debate.
57. Elizabeth Taylor has always reeked of White Diamonds.
58. There has always been a Planet Hollywood.
59. For one reason or another, California's future has always been in doubt.
60. Agent Starling has always feared the Silence of the Lambs.
61. "Womyn" and "waitperson" have always been in the dictionary.
62. Members of Congress have always had to keep their checkbooks balanced since the closing of the House Bank.
63. There has always been a computer in the Oval Office.
64. CDs have never been sold in cardboard packaging.
65. Avon has always been "calling" in a catalog.
66. NATO has always been looking for a role.
67. Two Koreas have always been members of the UN.
68. Official racial classifications in South Africa have always been outlawed.
69. The NBC Today Show has always been seen on weekends.
70. Vice presidents of the United States have always had real power.
71. Conflict in Northern Ireland has always been slowly winding down.
72. Migration of once independent media like radio, TV, videos and compact discs to the computer has never amazed them.
73. Nobody has ever responded to "Help, I've fallen and I can't get up."
74. Congress could never give itself a mid-term raise.
75. There has always been blue Jell-O.

Theologians and Economists: Knowing the "Common Good"

[Series Index]

Each Sunday, Christians around the world gather and pray, “Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” It is both a request for an outcome and a statement of commitment to that outcome … to give witness to the coming shalom of the new creation.

In the previous post, we affirmed that selfishness is not of the Kingdom of God. Our self-interest is inextricably connected with God, others, and creation. So surely, then, our mission must be to pursue the common good of all.

My favorite book on theology and work is Miroslav Volf’s Work in the Spirit. Volf writes:

… The good of others must be a goal toward which I am consciously striving. The persuasion that the common good will be realized behind my back, so to speak, as I am busying myself exclusively with myself will not do. … (191)

Individual self-interest can be pursued validly, but it must be accompanied by the pursuit of the good of others. These two pursuits are not in principle mutually exclusive but complementary (though in concrete cases they often conflict.)  …

The horizon of individual concern for the common good is the whole of humanity. … But she [the individual] can keep in mind the good of the world community and attune the pursuit of her own self-interest and the interest of her local community to the good of the world community.

As they work, individuals many not limit their perspective only to local communities, but have to seek the good of all human beings. ... (192)

Brian McLaren writes in Everything Must Change:

First, Jesus addresses the law of progress through rapid economic growth. In its place, he offers the law of good deeds for the common good. … (206, emphasis original)

Pope Benedict XVI in Caritas in Veritate:

Another important consideration is the common good. To love someone is to desire that person's good and to take effective steps to secure it. Besides the good of the individual, there is a good that is linked to living in society: the common good. It is the good of “all of us”, made up of individuals, families and intermediate groups who together constitute society[4]. … To desire the common good and strive towards it is a requirement of justice and charity. ... In an increasingly globalized society, the common good and the effort to obtain it cannot fail to assume the dimensions of the whole human family, that is to say, the community of peoples and nations[5], in such a way as to shape the earthly city in unity and peace, rendering it to some degree an anticipation and a prefiguration of the undivided city of God. (Paragraph 7, emphasis original)

Wonderful sentiments, but based on previous posts, do you see the insurmountable challenge? With any given decision, how do you or I or any other entity know what the common good is and which choices advance it? Who, exactly, oversees this striving for the common good and on what knowledge base are they achieving it?

Proximity to others is essential for accessing how decisions will impact their lives. Society is not a family writ large. I can’t assess the impact of my decisions on me and seven billion of my closest friends. There is no oikonomos (household manager) managing the household, nor can there be. To effectively manage societies to the optimal common good would require near omniscience. Remember that every major totalitarian leader and regime of the Twentieth Century claimed they possessed this knowledge and would achieve the common good.

Surely limiting income inequality is in the common good. Yet no one argues that everyone should get the same income. On what basis do we have fair inequality and how do we know what is optimal for the common? What if it turns out that allowing a lot of inequality makes everyone better off but a there would be a greater distance between the top and bottom of the scale? Is this better for the common good?

Take something as seemingly straightforward as murder. Surely we agree that murder is not in the common good. Yet there are honor and shame societies where the preservation of honor demands the execution of a family member who has brought dishonor on the family. This practice is said to maintain greater social stability. Who says this isn’t better for the common good?

Economists are sometimes accused of creatively assuming things about a problem in order for their theories to work. A joke says an economist was asked what a man should do who falls into a deep hole. The economist’s response begins, “Well first we assume a ladder …” The common good is the theological equivalent of the economist’s ladder. The common good exhortation assumes there is a universal standard for what the common good is, that it is readily accessible to each of us, and that there is an apparatus for its implementation, none of which is true!

I think there are four groups of folks who believe something approaching the common good can be discerned and implemented.

Totalitarians – Whether based on an ideology or personal charisma, the leader claims to know and pursue the common good.

Free Market Fundamentalists – Markets function with near perfection. The common good is best achieved by letting markets run their course.

Economist Managers –Believe they can so thoroughly model the real world that they can manage the economy toward the common good.

Mainline Theologians – Carry a presupposition that someone is or should be in charge of economic outcomes … an oikonomos. Tend to lean heavily on the communitarian wing of modern day American liberalism for substance on what constitutes achievement of the common good.

“Common good,” as it often plays out in many discussions, is a rhetorical device to justify interventionist views over against what is characterized as greed, selfishness, and chaos. Those who would oppose an intervention oppose the common good in favor of their selfish behavior or ideological enslavement to markets.

Common good as theological concept conjures up images of the peaceable kingdom and the coming new creation with God, humanity, and all creation living in perfect harmony … in contrast to a world dominated by sin and death. But when the Bible speaks to issues we might consider being of economic importance, it is speaking in the context of a culture with little economic specialization and little integration with others beyond the local community. Production options were fixed, meaning economic ethics was focused on distribution and just interaction within people who lived in close proximity. Ethics discerned by casting a modern specialized and integrated economy as a small community writ large is useless … even dangerous.

We know that simply pursing selfish desires, even in our modern context, is not Kingdom building and we know that none of us can discern the optimal common good with certainty. That is the paradox in which we live.

**********

(For an excellent book that demonstrates the challenges of discerning the common good see Good Intentions: Nine Hot-Button Issues View Through the Eyes of Faith by Charles North and Bob Smietana. For an excellent journal article that addresses the problem of personal versus impersonal systems in making ethical decisions, see Markets and Morality: Things Ethicists Should Consider When Evaluating Market Exchange, by Peter J. hill and John Lunn.)

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Health Care Forum (Via Streaming Video)

United Methodist Church of the Resurrection (Leawood, KS)

Health Care Forum

Tuesday, August 25, 7 pm, Sanctuary

Live webstreaming at live.cor.org

Join us for the opportunity to listen in as a panel of professionals discuss the challenges faced by people who cannot afford health care and the issue of health care reform. Panel participants are:

• Sam Turner, CEO, Shawnee Mission Medical Center
• Myra Christopher, President and CEO, The Center for Practical BioEthics
• Keith Wisdom, CFO, United Health Care Midwest
• Rick Kahle, President, Employee Benefits, Lockton Insurance
• Hilda Fuentes, CEO, Samuel Rodgers Health Center
• Dr. Ritch Richardson, Emergency Room Physician, Johnson County EMS Director
• Brenda Sharpe, CEO, REACH Health Foundation

Dr. Bill Reed, chair of the department of cardiovascular disease at KU Medical Center and a member of the Kansas Health Authority board, will be helping to craft the questions for the discussion.

How to Manage Your Online Life When You're Dead

Time: How to Manage Your Online Life When You're Dead

When her 21-year-old daughter died in a sledding accident in early 2007, Pam Weiss had never logged onto Facebook. Back then, it was used almost exclusively by the young, like her daughter Amy, a student at UCLA. But Weiss knew her daughter had an account, so in her grief she turned to the social-networking site to look for photos. She found what she was looking for, and more — she was soon communicating with her daughter's many friends, sharing memories and even piecing together a blueprint of things Amy had hoped to do in the future through posts she'd written. "It makes me feel good that Amy had a positive effect on so many people, and I wouldn't have had a clue if it hadn't been for Facebook," says Weiss.

Like a growing number of people mourning loved ones, Weiss had tapped into one of the most powerful troves of memories going: their online presence. Though Facebook shut Amy's account after three months (Weiss had copied much of it), the site later decided to keep deceased users' profiles up. "We first realized we needed a protocol for deceased users after the Virginia Tech shooting, when students were looking for ways to remember and honor their classmates," says Facebook spokesperson Elizabeth Linder. The site responded by creating a "memorial state" for profiles of deceased users, in which certain information, such as status updates and group affiliation, is removed. ...

Purchasing power: An alternative Big Mac index

The Economist: Purchasing power: An alternative Big Mac index

How many minutes to earn the price of a Big Mac?

THE size of your pay packet may be important, but so is its purchasing power. Helpfully, a UBS report published this week offers a handy guide to how long it takes a worker on the average net wage to earn the price of a Big Mac in 73 cities. Fast-food junkies are best off in Chicago, Toronto and Tokyo, where it takes a mere 12 minutes at work to afford a Big Mac. By contrast, employees must toil for over two hours to earn enough for a burger fix in Mexico City, Jakarta and Nairobi.

Theologians and Economists: Self-Interest Versus Selfishness

[Series Index]

“Love your neighbor as yourself.” This injunction is mentioned once in the Old Testament (Lev. 19:18) and seven times in the New Testament (Matt. 19:19, 22:39; Mark 12:31; Luke 10:27; Rom. 13:9; Gal. 5:14; James 2:8) It is the core Christian ethic for relating to others. The antithesis of loving others is selfishness. A central element of market economies is self-interest. Therefore, market economics is antithetical to Christian living.

This is the logic presented by many social justice advocates looking for a new Kingdom economics but is the characterization correct? No. It presumes that “self-interest,” in keeping with colloquial usage, is a synonym for “selfishness.” Few other misconceptions about economics generate more confusion than this one.

In economics, a self-interested action is purposive behavior. Each act taken is an expression of preference for that act versus other acts we might have taken. We are neither automatons nor a bundle of random firing neurons. Some calculus tells us which action to take. If I jump in front of a gun fired at a friend, then both the shooter and I have engaged in self-interested behavior. Self-Interest is not selfishness.

So why is there a widely shared perception that market economics is based on selfishness and greed? There are three contributors to the misunderstanding: semantics, economists and pop culture, errant piety.

Semantics

The words “self-interest” and “selfish” are used as synonyms in our day but connotations of words change in over time. In the U. S. Constitution, “liberty” essentially meant not being imprisoned but it has taken on other layers of meaning sense. The idea of “self-interest” entered economic thought through Adam Smith. He used it synonymously with “self-love.” What did he mean?

Webster’s says self-interest is, “Regard for one’s own interest or advantage, especially with disregard for others.” That second clause is the rub. “With disregard for others” was not the connotation Smith gave to the term. Unlike animals that mature into complete independence, human beings are dependent upon exchange. Benevolence was Smith’s highest virtue but as there is a constant need to coordinate meeting each other’s needs benevolence alone is insufficient. Smith’s position was that you served your self-interest when you served the self-interest of others. The idea of wanton pursuit of unrestrained desires would have been objectionable to Smith.

Economists & Pop Culture

There have been strands of economic thought that gave voice to the idea of rational egoism. With neoclassical economics at the end of the Nineteenth Century came the idea of homo economicus, the utility calculating human at the center of economic analysis. He weighs every decision to optimize personal advantage through rational economic analysis. Probably the biggest boosters of this thinking were economists and activists influenced by novelist and philosopher Ayn Rand, with her exhortation of freedom from all restraints in pursuit of self-actualization. Many of these economic thinkers appropriated and distorted Smith’s writings to give credence to their own views, including the distortions of “self-interest” and “invisible hand.” You can find economists who champion selfishness, but they do so on grounds other than economics … just as there are scientists who confuse methodological naturalism for their own metaphysical naturalism and declare that science proves there is no God.

Pop culture and critics of market economies like to lift up Gordon Geko’s (from Wall Street) “Greed is good” as emblematic of market economies … that it is a defining feature promoted by economists. Clearly greed is present in market economies but it has also been present in every other economy throughout history. No system will ever eliminate greed.

My experience has been that most economists view “self-interest” as purposive behavior as described above. But when economists try to enter into discussion with theologians, I sense there is a very high level of suspicion among theologians that someone is trying to paint lipstick on a capitalist pig … trying to justify “selfishness.” It should not be surprising that there is considerable misunderstanding about “self-interest” but a serious examination of economics requires going beyond popularized narratives that misrepresent economic views. Theologians know theology can be unjustly trivialized through guilt by association with the worst representatives of the field (e.g. All scientists are God haters like Richard Dawkins). It is just as unjust with economics.

Errant Piety

Finally, some people view “loving others” and “loving self” as antithetical values. It is win lose … it is a zero-sum game. Others win is when I lose. This is not the view of scripture. John Stackhouse writes:

The amazing paradox of Christian teaching here, however, is that losing one’s life is the way to save it (Mt. 16:24-27). Spending one’s goods on others is the way to pile up treasures of much greater value that will last forever (Mt. 19:21). Altruism is in one’s own interest – including God’s own interest. I need to say this carefully, so I will hew closely to the words of Scripture: Jesus suffered and sacrificed himself on the cross “for the joy set before him (Heb. 12:2), not in a zero-sum game in which he simply had to lose so we would gain. Yes, of course that is partly true also: “by his poverty you have become rich” (II Cor. 8:9). But it was a temporary sacrifice, a temporary poverty. It was an expenditure that was truly costly – may I not be misunderstood as denigrating the grace of God in Christ – but it was spent so as to bring joy to God, as well as to bring salvation to us. It is never one or the other. (Making the Best of  It, 204)

The intended relationship between God, others, and us is multiplicative, not zero-sum. It is a win-win-win multiplicative dynamic in which God wins, others win, and we win. Properly disciplined self-interest enables us to become well-functioning contributive members of the community. We internalize the reality that our interests are inextricably entwined with God’s interests and the interests of others, enabling us to weigh alternatives and choose those that lead to the salvation of our lives (Matt 26:24-27) and to the piling up eternal treasure (Matt: 19:21), while simultaneously leading to the salvation of other’s lives and the amassing of their treasure, all of which furthers God’s interests and glorifies him. The self-interest calculus for purposive behavior for fallen people is self above all else but among the redeemed it is self in proper relationship to God and other … but both use have a self-interest calculus.

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COR Goes Downtown

Tonight was the inaugural service for the Church of the Resurrection (Methodist mega church in Leawood, Ks) at their downtown Kansas City, Mo, location, Rez Downtown. They were expecting 50 people and I would guess they had at least 250.

The service was held in the Scarritt Building, catty-corner from the Grand Avenue Temple (Methodist) where the church will take up permanent residence in November with weekly services. (They are meeting once a month a until November.) Grand Avenue Temple has been downtown at this location since 1866 but it has been in desperate need of revitalization for many years. The church building and the twelve story building were built as unit in 1912.

Melissa and I had a great experience. If you live downtown (or even if you don't) you should give it a try. Hats of to COR.

Life Expectancy Reaches a New High

U. S. News & World Report: Life Expectancy Reaches a New High

The typical life expectancy in the U.S. reached 77.9 years in 2007. Over the past decade the American lifespan has increased 1.4 years, up from 76.5 in 1997, according to a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention analysis of death certificates in the United States.

Women continue to live longer than men. Males now typically live 75.3 years, compared to 80.4 years for females. But the gap between male and female life expectancy is decreasing. While women lived 5.1 years longer than men in both 2006 and 2007, that’s down from a peak gap of 7.8 years in 1979.

Life expectancy also varied by race. White men outlived black men by 2.1 years in 2007.  ...

Rebalancing the World Economy: China

The Economist: Rebalancing the World Economy: China

A REBALANCED global economy requires America to consume less and save more. That means the world’s three big surplus economies—China, Germany and Japan—will have to save less and spend more. None is under more scrutiny than China, whose vast current-account surplus has been fingered by some as the ultimate cause of the financial crisis. The case against China is exaggerated but a surplus of more than $400 billion in 2008, or 10% of GDP, was clearly too big. Can China right its trade imbalances, and if so, how will it achieve rapid growth in future?

The good news is that the surplus is already shrinking. ...

U. S. Manufacturing Employment

Carpe Diem

Rise of the Super-Rich Hits a Sobering Wall

New York Times: Rise of the Super-Rich Hits a Sobering Wall

The rich have been getting richer for so long that the trend has come to seem almost permanent.

They began to pull away from everyone else in the 1970s. By 2006, income was more concentrated at the top than it had been since the late 1920s. The recent news about resurgent Wall Street pay has seemed to suggest that not even the Great Recession could reverse the rise in income inequality.

But economists say — and data is beginning to show — that a significant change may in fact be under way. The rich, as a group, are no longer getting richer. Over the last two years, they have become poorer. And many may not return to their old levels of wealth and income anytime soon. ...

... Last year, the number of Americans with a net worth of at least $30 million dropped 24 percent, according to CapGemini and Merrill Lynch Wealth Management. Monthly income from stock dividends, which is concentrated among the affluent, has fallen more than 20 percent since last summer, the biggest such decline since the government began keeping records in 1959. ...

...“We had a period of roughly 50 years, from 1929 to 1979, when the income distribution tended to flatten,” said Neal Soss, the chief economist at Credit Suisse. “Since the early ’80s, incomes have tended to get less equal. And I think we’ve entered a phase now where society will move to a more equal distribution.” ...

...But if the rich have done well in bubbles, they have taken enormous hits to their wealth during busts. A recent study by two Northwestern University economists found that the incomes of the affluent tend to fall more, in percentage terms, in recessions than the incomes of the middle class. The incomes of the very affluent — the top one ten-thousandth — fall the most. ...

...In the three decades after World War II, when the incomes of the rich grew more slowly than those of the middle class, the top marginal rate ranged from 70 to 91 percent. Mr. Piketty, one of the economists who analyzed the I.R.S. data, argues that these high rates did not affect merely post-tax income. They also helped hold down the pretax incomes of the wealthy, he says, by giving them less incentive to make many millions of dollars. ...

“Information bad for you,” says older generation

Wikinomics: “Information bad for you,” says older generation

I just turned 50 years old. So that officially qualifies me to be recognized as an “older American,” at least according to the good folks in the AARP membership department.

As I’ve come to learn with age, you are certainly as young as you feel, act, and – I would add – as you think. Invariably, with age comes experience and with experience comes the tendency to recognize patterns – or what one interprets as patterns.

This can be a good thing when it comes to mitigating risks and maximizing returns. However, it can be a bad thing when it stifles innovation. At the half century mark, I’ve seen the upside and downside of this dynamic tension between innovation risk and return.

A couple of recent articles reminded me of how this drama plays out every day in the tech industry, often outside of the typical consumer’s eyesight. ...

Theologians & Economists: Division of Labor and Trade Transform the World (2)

[Series Index]

Trade (Continued)

(Yesterday we quickly highlighted the impact of the Division of Labor and how trade creates wealth. We continue with a second feature of trade of that is too frequently invisible.)

Information and Incentives

The second thing trade does is create an information and incentive system, coordinating economic activity for millions of people.

Take the lowly no. 2 pencil.* Nobody (no one body) knows how to make a pencil. Raw materials must be extracted to create graphite, graphite transformed into graphite rods, trees grown and harvested, lumber processed into wooden cylinders that will hold the graphite, tin extracted from the ground, raw tin processed and rolled it into tiny cylinders for eraser holders, raw materials extracted for the eraser, eraser heads processed and shaped, dye created that will go into the paint that will go on the pencil … getting the picture? Different people in various locations are accomplishing all these tasks. But we aren’t done.

Consider that sophisticated machinery is involved at every step in this process. Each of those machines contains countless parts made of a myriad of materials. Each of those raw materials had to be extracted, processed into components, and then assembled. These machines are also part of making a pencil.

We can go deeper beyond this to the machines that created the machines to create the components for the pencil … but we haven’t even touched on the transportation infrastructure that allows us to move these components from place to place. There is much more. I’m radically simplifying the process of pencil production!

Buyers are weighing the demand for their product as they determine what they are willing to pay suppliers and suppliers are weighing what buyers are offering as the decide how much to supply at each tiny step in this dance of decisions. Price communicates the demand for a product and the willingness of suppliers to supply it. If the price for a product is going up, then the suppliers have an incentive to produce more and the buyers economize. If the price is going down, the suppliers have an incentive to cut production and buyers to buy more. (It isn’t quite this simple in all markets but the general idea holds.)

In all this, no one knows how many pencils are needed. There is no pencil czar monitoring the need for pencils and assuring that they are supplied. The vast majority of participants in this pencil making process have no clue that they are contributing to the ultimate creation of the pencil on my desk. Yet through independent responses to dynamic information and incentives, a sufficient number of pencils appear at a reasonable price every day.

Now take a close look at some items around you … maybe a stapler, a book, or a role of adhesive tape. Pay attention to all the materials and process that have gone into creating those items. How about your cell phone or your iPod? It is humanly impossible to visualize how these things came to be and we use them daily without a thought. Markets are the information and incentive network that brings all this about.

Market Challengers

This information and incentive system explains why communism and socialism have been so ineffective. No person or entity can possibly know how to match supply and demand at any given moment, much less on when the balance changes by the nanosecond. Without a real time feedback loop there is no way to coordinate what needs to be done. Excesses of one product appear along with shortages of another, sometimes with tragic consequences.

This should also highlight why calls by theologians like John Milbank for a gift economy … where markets are eliminated and we give to each other as needed … is so misguided. While this might be practical among a face-to-face community it would end coordinated economic behavior beyond the community. There would be no information to coordinate our projects.

Similarly, there is a movement by some to return to local economies. Revisit the process of making a no. 2 pencil and imagine a person or team collecting all the resources themselves without trade (assuming they are locally available) and processing them into a no. 2 pencil. Think of the hours of labor required to bring it all together into a product that could have been bought for pennies in seconds along with other items at the store. Now take that image through the production of food, clothing, medicine, hygiene products, housing materials, etc. If local economies were genuinely embraced, living standards would revert to bare subsistence.

Finally, as I noted yesterday, many theologians are blind to the issues of production. They believe the goods we need are just there. The issue is how to distribute them. A corollary to this belief is that wealth is fixed quantity. Absent any sense of production, wealth is a preexisting fixed amount. That means economics is a zero-sum game. If I have more than the average person it comes at the expense of those who have less. I recently came across a blog by a caring young woman who praised the observation, “You cannot abolish poverty unless you also abolish affluence.” That is zero-sum thinking in a nutshell.

Now from inside the view that sees a fixed amount of wealth and goods, what could we say about markets? We would say that trade is competition where people try to get more than their fair share. Someone wins at the expense of someone losing. Instead of accepting the abundance God has given us, we covet other’s goods out of a false sense of scarcity. As Adam Smith taught, it’s all based on selfishness, right.

The essential coordinating function of information and incentives is invisible because the question of the origins of goods and wealth isn’t asked. The awareness of people expanding wealth by transforming matter, energy, and data from less useful states into more useful states and by participating in mutually beneficial market exchanges that coordinate an incomprehensibly complex economic system is lost. I’m persuaded that this is a near Copernican-like paradigm shift for many. Economic justice and efficiency does not orbit the distribution of a fixed pile of wealth and goods, but rather distribution orbits the vitality of a just and well-coordinated productivity … without this productivity there is nothing to distribute.

We turn to the issue of “self-interest” next but let me close by noting what I hope is obvious … what I’ve said in these two posts is a 50,000 foot view of the historical landscape, pointing out only two significant features that serendipitously emerged over centuries before coming to fruition in the past hundred years. Furthermore, let’s get on the record that markets function far from perfectly and that they are dependent on other institutions and values. We will talk about addressing market problems later but what should not be lost is that when it comes to the need for information and incentives, we have no legitimate alternatives!

(* Some will realize I'm channeling I Pencil.)

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Global Warming’s Cheap, Effective Solution

Project Syndicate: Global Warming’s Cheap, Effective Solution (Bjorn Lomborg)

COPENHAGEN – Global warming will mean that more people die from the heat. There will be a rise in sea levels, more malaria, starvation, and poverty. Concern has been great, but humanity has done very little that will actually prevent these outcomes. Carbon emissions have kept increasing, despite repeated promises of cuts.

We all have a stake in ensuring that climate change is stopped. We turned to climate scientists to inform us about the problem of global warming. Now we need to turn to climate economists to enlighten us about the benefits, costs, and possible outcomes from different responses to this challenge. ...

... The optimal combination of solutions will create the biggest impact for the least money. A groundbreaking paper by economists Eric Bickel and Lee Lane is one of the first – and certainly the most comprehensive – study of the costs and benefits of climate engineering. Deliberately manipulating the earth’s climate seems like something from science fiction. But as President Barack Obama’s science adviser, John Holdren, has said it has “got to be looked at,” and many prominent scientists agree.

Bickel and Lane offer compelling evidence that a tiny investment in climate engineering might be able to reduce as much of global warming’s effects as trillions of dollars spent on carbon emission reductions. ...

Theologians and Economists: Division of Labor and Trade Transform the World (1)

[Series Index]

Something significant has happened over the last two hundred years, giving rise to an incomprehensibly complex web of international economic activity. What changed? Economic Historians point to two important developments: division of labor and trade.

Division of Labor

Throughout history, households generally produced what they consumed. There were artisans. They produced goods, taking them from raw materials to finished product. The work was piecemeal and usually from home. In the era leading up to the industrial revolution, this began to change in Europe. Some piecemeal workers, especially in Britain, were being gathered into production sites. With greater oversight, quality and productivity improved. But the real innovation came as stages of production were broken down in to discreet tasks.

Instead of taking a product from raw materials to finished product, individuals specialized in only one part of the process. Specialization meant two things. The worker became highly proficient at doing one task very well, thus becoming more productive at that task, and less skilled workers could be trained to do specific tasks eliminating the need for multi-skilled craftsmen … great productivity with less input cost.

The advent of internal combustion engines and the mechanization of the factories accelerated this specialization process. Productivity expanded by magnitudes previously unimaginable. Over time, the cost of goods fell faster than wages, actually improving standards of living. Goods became cheaper to buy in relative terms. The road to this happy outcome was horrific for many of the workers who lived through the changes of the Nineteenth Century but that story is for another day.

Division of labor, supplemented by mechanization, radically increased productivity. But productivity is pointless if there is no one to buy your products. Remember that throughout the past most people lived in isolated communities. With mass production you would quickly saturate the community with your product. There would be no more customers. Enter trade.

Trade

Trade has two critically important qualities that need to be highlighted. They are not immediately obvious to many: value creation and coordination through information and incentives.

Value Creation

First, trade creates wealth. There is a simple game used in schools that illustrates this reality.* A teacher randomly distributes items of roughly equal value to each student in a class. Each student writes down how much they value their item on a scale of one to ten. All the values are combined for a class value. The teacher then divides the class into groups of five. The groups of five are invited to trade. In one group, a boy gets Barbie clothes and a girl gets baseball cards. They decide to swap. They each have something of greater value to them. After trading, the teacher has the students record how much they value their current possession. The group total is calculated again. The new score is higher. Then the teacher permits the students to trade with anyone in the class. The students rate their possessions once and the class value is totaled again. The collective value has gone still higher. Wealth has been created through simple exchange ... without anything being produced.

This reality underscores a discovery that took centuries to uncover. No item has intrinsic economic value. Nor is the value of a product equal to the labor employed to create it … as both the early Nineteenth century classical economists and Marxist economists believed. An items economic value is determined by what someone is willing to give for it. How much is a bottle of water worth as it is being sold to you by someone at your front door? How much is that same bottle of water worth after you have been lost in the desert for 24 hours without water and come across a hermit who will sell it to you? We buy things based on how much usefulness (utility) we perceive the item will have for us. Multiple people bidding into a market is what sets the price for products.

When we move from the trading game example into national or world economies it doesn’t work quite as eloquently … the details of why this is so goes beyond our scope here. Nevertheless, the general principle is true: trade creates a great deal of value through mutually beneficial exchange. The bigger the trade network, the greater the opportunity for everyone to benefit.

Division of labor and trade built on each other. Division of labor, and then mechanization, led to greater productivity. People were drawn into close proximity (urbanization) to participate in the new production facilities, thereby creating larger communities. There was increased demand for transportation infrastructure that would move raw materials in and finished goods out, as well demand for better local transportation. Large concentrated communities facilitated trade as did infrastructure that connected communities together. With greater trade came greater demand for products motivating producers to become even more productive through specialization and mechanization. And so the cycle was created.

Continued ….

(* Illustration is from Jay Richards.)

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Faith rites boost brains, even for atheists: book

Reuters: Faith rites boost brains, even for atheists: book

PHILADELPHIA (Reuters) - Buddhist monks and Catholic nuns boost their brain power through meditation and prayer, but even atheists can enjoy the mental benefits that believers derive from faith, according to a popular neuroscience author.

The key, Andrew Newberg argues in his new book "How God Changes Your Brain," lies in the concentrating and calming effects that meditation or intense prayer have inside our heads.

Brain scanners show that intense meditation alters our gray matter, strengthening regions that focus the mind and foster compassion while calming those linked to fear and anger.

Whether the meditator believes in the supernatural or is an atheist repeating a mantra, he says, the outcome can be the same - a growth in the compassion that virtually every religion teaches and a decline in negative feelings and emotions. ...

 

A Brief History Of The BlackBerry

Forbes: A Brief History Of The BlackBerry

The author of ''BlackBerry Planet'' discusses RIM's early days, court battles and the influence of ''Star Trek.'

BlackBerrys are cult devices, inspiring a kind of slavish devotion perhaps matched only by Apple products. But while Apple's corporate history is familiar to many, no one has written a comprehensive corporate history of Research In Motion, the company behind the iconic BlackBerry.

Canadian historian and author Alastair Sweeny is set to release the first such book in September. Called BlackBerry Planet: The Story of Research in Motion and the Little Device that Took the World by Storm, it tracks the evolution of the BlackBerry from RIM co-founder Mike Lazaridis' 1960s childhood to present day. Forbes reached Sweeny at his Ottawa home to discuss Lazaridis' similarity to Steve Jobs, what RIM thinks of his book and why future BlackBerrys may morph into telepathic gadgets he calls "telebrain." ...

Blackberry 'fastest-growing firm'

BBC: Blackberry 'fastest-growing firm

The maker of the Blackberry mobile phone, Research in Motion (RIM), is the world's fastest-growing company, according to business magazine Fortune.

Canada-based RIM has come top of the magazine's latest annual guide to the 100 fastest-growing businesses.

In second place was US chipmaker Sigma Designs, with Chinese internet business Sohu.com coming in third.

Fortune rates a firm's growth on a combination of its profits, turnover and investment return over three years....

Nigeria nearing 'a failed state'

BBC: Nigeria nearing 'a failed state'

The head of Nigeria's leading lawyers' association has said the country is "gliding toward being a failed state".

Oluwarotimi Akeredolu said democratic institutions had failed to adequately represent Nigerians and uphold the rule of law.

The Nigerian Bar Association chief also expressed doubts over the government's commitment to tackling corruption.

When President Umaru Yar'Adua was elected in 2007, he pledged zero tolerance for corruption.

"The NBA has serious doubts concerning the commitment of government in combating the menace of corruption. There are outstanding issues of corrupt practices in government circles," Nigeria's This Day newspaper quoted Mr Akeredolu as saying.

As an example, he said, Nigerians were still waiting to hear the outcome of an investigation into the Halliburton scandal.

The US construction firm has admitted paying bribes to top officials between 1994 and 2004. ...

My Automotive Theological Crisis

Mrs. Kronicle thinks it's time for the Kronciler to dump his old '98 Mazada Millenia (Mazda's spelling) and get a newer car (see Wikipedia photo). As I've pondered this, I find it is creating a significant theological crisis for me.

If I sell the car, won't that make me post-millenial? Or could it be that after the sale I will be without a Millenia, therefore amillenial? Mrs. Kroncile spoted a 2002 Millenia for sale on the web that looks good. If I decide to go that diretion, will I have become pre-millenial prior to buying it? And once I buy it, wouldn't that make me post-millenial while in the new Millenia? Does the fact that Mazda chose to spell the brand with one "n" give me a loophole?

This has been a great tribulation for me. I'm paralyzed. Maybe Jesus will rapture me and I won't need to decide. I need counsel from my readers.

Theologians and Economists: Scarcity and Abundance

[Series Index]

What am I going to do today? Whether you’re a meticulous planner or you fly by the seat of your pants, we all face the same reality: Every decision we make to do something today is a decision not to do everything else. We are constrained by the limited number of hours in any given day. But time isn’t the only constraint.

Even if I choose to, I can not repair an engine block or fly a jet. My abilities are limited. Furthermore, I don’t have the tools to fix an engine or access to a jet. My financial and material resources are limited. Constraining all these constraints is my knowledge of tomorrow. What I do today is going to impact what decisions I can make tomorrow.

Then there are the things we need for healthy satisfying lives.  They do not materialize out of thin air. God has created a world of great abundance but we are participants in our own provision. As Henri Nouwen observed, we take of the bread and wine at communion, not the wheat and grape. Human beings transform matter, energy, and data from less useful states into more useful states. We must balance our use of resources with the production of resources if we want a sustainable life. We must engage in productive work that either directly or indirectly (through exchange) provides for us. In short, we have a scarce (i.e., limited) amount of time, capabilities, and resources we must prioritize and use each day.

Our decisions do not occur in a vacuum. We live in families and communities. Each of us has our strengths and weaknesses. Living in community allows us to take advantage of each other’s strengths and minimize weaknesses. Managing our scarce resources in coordination and cooperation with others is a benefit to all. When we add communities together we have regions, nations, and ultimately a global community, in which the challenges of coordination and cooperation become incomprehensibly complex. But the question remains the same: Given scarce (i.e., limited) resources, what should each of us do today and how will we coordinate billions of projects?

This question was less complex in the past. The masses lived bare subsistence lives as slaves, landed peasants, or as subjects of overlords. Life was devoted to agricultural production, with the exception of those recruited or conscripted into various forms of service to the elite. Beyond the elite, non-agricultural trade was mostly limited to exchange between people in local communities. By modern standards, the variety of goods traded was very limited and the trade networks were rudimentary. “Economics” reflection was largely devoted to production and consumption issues within the household. Retrospectively, we can see that labor was nearly consumed by simply generating a subsistence living.

All that slowly changed in the centuries of Second Millennium C. E. in Europe, with increasing specialization of labor and expansion of intricate networks of trade.  The variety of items traded became more elaborate and the costs became less. Eighteenth Century people like Adam Smith and Thomas Malthus began to reflect on what was happening. Over the next century scholars turned to empirical analysis as their work become more focused on these developments. That gave birth to the modern discipline of economics, which at its the core is about discovering how people and societies coordinate their activities given the reality of scarce (i.e., limited) resources. So look at almost any textbook on economics and you will find a definition of economics similar to this one in Greg Mankiw’s industry leading textbook, Principles of Economics: "Economics is the study of how society manages its scarce resources." (4)

What do leading theologians have to say about this? Douglas Meek’s God the Economist: The Doctrine of God and Political Economy, first published in 1989, has been used as a textbook in seminary’s and Christian colleges.

Scarcity may not be made the starting point of a system of economic justice. As a starting point, scarcity is an illusion. In almost all situations of human life scarcity has been caused by human injustice. (174)

In Responsive Labor: A Theology of Work, published in 2006, David H. Jensen writes:

The assumption of scarcity should be unsettling to Christians, for it clashes with a bedrock Christian assumption: God’s abundant and superfluous giving to creation, which enables us to share out of abundance. (4-5)

Here is an excerpt from a recent article by Walter Brueggemann at WonderCafe called A Biblical Approach to the Economic Crisis:

Whereas autonomous economics begins with a premise of scarcity, biblical faith is grounded in the generosity of God who wills and provides abundance. And here persons who are members of a covenantal neighborhood respond to divine abundance with generous gratitude, willing to share with sisters and brothers. Those who share, moreover, find in ways they cannot explain that more gifts from God are given. The bread multiplies and loaves abound, a miracle never available to the autonomous. In that world of abundance, covetous greed is inappropriate and incongruous. So Jesus can urge his followers: “Do not be anxious ... for your heavenly Father knows you need all of these things” (Matthew 6:25-32).

Finally, William T. Cavanaugh writes in his new book Being Consumed: Economics and Christian Desire:

Economics, we are told, is the science that studies the allocation of resources under conditions of scarcity. The very basis of the market, trade – giving up something to get something else – assumes scarcity. Resources are scarce wherever the desires of all persons for goods or services cannot be met. In other words, hunger is written into the conditions under which economics operates. There is never enough to go around. But it is not simply the hunger of those who lack sufficient food to keep their bodies in good health. Scarcity is the more general hunger of those who want more, without reference to what they already have. Economics will always be the science of scarcity as long as individuals continue to want. And we are told the human desires are endless. (90)

Do you see the common thread? The only issue these theologians see is distribution. Like manna from heaven, everything we need, from jet aircraft to no. 2 pencils, magically appears. If there is scarcity, it is because someone hasn’t shared. The idea that we somehow participate in our own provision is simply lost on them.

Frankly, this focus on distribution to the exclusion of all else is pervasive among theologians. I have a couple of theories on why this is so. First, the question of production is a non-issue in the Bible. Unlike our day, family heritage and necessity  dictated what work you did. You had little control over your productivity. However, you did have control over how you engaged others in transactions and over what to do with your wealth. Thus, "economic" ethics in the Bible is almost exclusively about dealing justly with neighbors and being generous to the poor in face-to-face communities. Since much of church history after the biblical era developed in a similar economic climate, it too reflected these narrow agendas. Thus, unless there is an intentional effort to appreciate what has changed in the past couple of centuries, theologians tend to gravitate toward economic theories that at least seem to concord with the ancient vision and disparage views that may counter-intuitively be more just and effective.

Second, unlike Judaism, there is a long history of ambivalence, if not animus, by Christian leaders toward the marketplace. It persists to this day in many quarters. In many Mainline theological academies, business and economics is what evolution is to conservative institutions ... an idolatrous ethos that is destroying the world.

Still, one of the most important responsibilities we have in a multi-disciplinary dialog is to do our best to accurately characterize what representatives of each discipline are saying about key issues. A cursory reading of any Economics 101 text would reveal that what these theologians are saying is a pejorative misrepresentation of what economists mean by scarcity. Read the rest of  paragraph after sentence I quoted above from Mankiw's textbook:

Economics is the study of how society manages its scarce resources. In most societies, resources are allocated not by a single central planner but through the combined actions of millions of household firms. Economists therefore study how people make decisions: how much they work, what they buy, how much they save, and how they invest their savings. Economists also study how people interact with on another. For instance, they examine how the multitude of buyers and sellers of a good determine the price at which the good is sold and the quantity that is sold. Finally, economists analyze forces and trends that affect the economy as a whole, including growth in average income, the fraction of the population that cannot fine work, and the rate at which prices are rising. (4)

The mischaracterizations above might be forgiven with a college freshman but these are bright educated men. I pointed out at the beginning of this series that economists make their own contributions to misunderstandings between the two disciplines. In this case, it is the theologians who have erected a barrier to serious dialog between theology and economics through ad hominem rhetoric. It is pervasive in Mainline theological institutions.

Next we take a closer look at what has given rise to the intricate economic network that coordinates the vast numbers of people and how that has changed the world forever.

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U.S. men among most helpful around house

Chicago Sun-Times: U.S. men among most helpful around house

Men, start putting some elbow grease into your housework if you're looking to rev up your relationship.

American men fared pretty well, ranking fourth in the world -- behind their peers in Norway, Sweden and the U.K. -- in being helpful, and therefore attractive mates or husbands, says a study by Oxford University researcher Almudena Sevilla-Sanz.

Women living in countries where men took more responsibility for housework and child care were more likely to marry or live with a man, the study showed.

Women living in countries with less helpful men were 20 to 50 percent less likely to be living with a man than women in the egalitarian countries.

The worst husbands are in Australia, where men are known for loving beer and sports.

Of course, turnabout is never fair play. Men were more interested in partnering with women who want to take on all the housework and child care, the study shows.

Theologians & Economists: The Oikonomos?

[Series Index]

We begin this post by recounting a story from Starfish and the Spider. The authors relate a story about David Garrison’s (CEO of Netcom … an AOL type operation) attempt to raise funds from a French venture capital firm in 1995.

… There were about thirty people in the room … It was like they were hearing fantastic tales from this young American about some computer that will change the world. But then we got stumped. One of the investors started asking who was the president of the Internet. We went in circles about how ‘there is no president.’ …

Dave’s explanations were far from satisfactory to the French investors. If they were going to shell out cash for a public offering, they wanted to make sure that someone was in charge, to ensure that this wasn’t a chaotic system. …

Dave recalls that their questions were “based on the concept of ‘It has to be centralized, there has to be a king, or there has to be an emperor, or there has to be a – something.’ These key investors … were a “very intelligent group of people,” but they didn’t get it. Dave tried another approach: the Internet was a network of networks. “We said, ‘There are thirty to forty thousand networks, and they all share in the burden of communication.’ And they said, ‘But who decides?’ And we said, ‘No one decides. It’s a standard that people subscribe to. And they kept coming back, saying, ‘You don’t understand the question, it must be lost in translation, who is the president of the Internet?’ …

Eventually Dave surrendered. He gave the French what they wanted. “I said I was the president of the Internet, ’cause otherwise we weren’t going to get through the sales spiel. … (32-33)

Substitute “economy” for “internet” and you have the challenge economists face in talking about the economy.

Previously we saw that the primary metaphor for God’s people is the family of God. Inherent in the family metaphor is the idea of the paterfamilias and the oikonomos; the head of the household and the household manager or steward. The paterfamilias had final authority and ownership but the oikonomos managed the daily affairs. This has became the Christian metaphor for our relationship to God and the created order, which includes societal matters. But critical to this notion of household management is the fact that stewards have intimate knowledge of the people and circumstances under his care.

Clearly ancient cultures had structures that transcended the household. They were pyramid shaped and vertically oriented. Each family or community answered to some authority who had fairly intimate knowledge of those under his charge. Those authorities were under other authorities who knew the authorities under them … and so on up to a king. People produced most of what they consumed and what trade there was happened between people who were in face-to-face community. Therefore managing the economy was primarily about the daily affairs of people in face-to-face communities and the transfer of wealth upward through the system through taxation for administration of the King’s projects. There was not an economy to manage in the modern sense.

In contrast to this model, a web of horizontal economic relationships began to emerge in Europe over the centuries. Awareness of this growing web began to be noticed in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries. Since that time, economic connections have become an evermore dynamic and complex web of nodes and linkages. Yet there is no oikonomos managing the web. There is no president of the web.

It is deeply ingrained in the minds of many today, like our Frenchmen above, that “somebody must be in charge” … in this case … of the economy. The ability to grasp and internalize the web concept escapes them. U. S. presidents and the electorate certainly play to this misconception, with president’s claiming credit for a good economy and the electorate holding them accountable for a bad one.

I suspect the oikonomos model intensifies the inability of many theologians to see the new reality. For some it is not only that there conceptually must be someone in charge; it is that there ought to be someone in charge. If there isn’t, then something has gone awry.

To these theologians, a leaderless economic web is anarchy and disorder. Calls for correcting social injustices often come with the implication that “the president of the economic web” (whoever that may be) is not doing his or her job. We need to compel the “president” to run things better. People who will not generally support centralized management toward particular ends are thought to be morally and intellectually suspect, likely having been duped by individualistic ideologies. (The issue is referee versus manager … one who monitors adherence to rules versus one who is responsible for the performance and outcome of the game. It is to the latter that I’m referring.)

Further adding to the confusion is the wedding of an oikonomos model to the wing of economics that believes that, through careful scientific work, the principles of economics can be uncovered and objectively applied to achieve certain objectives. The theologians reject the ends to which economists might direct things, but the notion that the economy can and should be directed is retained. The answer is to bring a discerning Christian voice into the mix of economic management. The question of how the information that is required to make just outcomes happen on a personalized basis for millions of people is known is off the radar. Modernist hubris about being able to remake the world through centralized control by an expertocracy is equated to being God’s oikonomos.

Not all Mainliners think that someone should be in charge. Some view the recent arrival of large impersonal leaderless economic structures as contrary to Christian life. All life must be in face-to-face communities to be Christian. They see the new web of economic connectedness as an evil. We should disconnect and become self-sustaining localized economic communities. They, at least, have come to grips with reality that something new has emerged.

So we are called to be the oikonomos … but there is no way we can manage the modern massively complex and dynamic web-like economy we live in. The complexities are too great. Is there an alternative way we function as the oikonomos in web-like economy? We will visit that question shortly but we first need to visit one more misunderstanding that plagues the theology and economics dialog: scarcity versus abundance.

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Emerging Asian economies: On the rebound

Asia’s emerging economies are recovering much more quickly than economies in other parts of the world. Can they keep it up?

MORE green shoots have appeared in America in recent weeks, but they are nothing by comparison with the lush jungle sprouting in the East. Asia’s emerging economies probably grew at an average annualised rate of over 10% in the second quarter, while America’s GDP fell by 1%. In 2009 as a whole, recent forecasts suggest that emerging Asia could grow by at least 5%, while the G7 economies contract by 3.5%. The growth gap between the two has never been wider. How have these export-dependent economies managed to decouple from the developed world? And can their recovery last?

Average growth figures conceal big differences within Asia over the past year. China, India and Indonesia were among the few economies in the world that continued to expand throughout the global downturn (though China’s virtually stalled late last year). But the smaller, more open Asian economies were badly hit. Between September and March real GDP fell by an average annualised rate of 13% in Hong Kong, Malaysia, South Korea, Singapore, Taiwan and Thailand.

Yet the countries that have so far published second-quarter GDP figures show an impressive bounce. Comparing the second quarter with the first at an annualised rate, China’s GDP grew by 15%, South Korea’s by almost 10%, Singapore’s soared by 21% and Indonesia’s managed a respectable 5%. Other countries in the region are also likely to show a rebound. It is true that output in South Korea and Singapore was still lower than a year earlier, but quarterly changes are more useful for spotting turning points—and this is how growth rates are most commonly measured in America. ...

Theologians & Economists: "Family Writ Large" and the Information Gap

[Series Index]

Without a doubt, family is the most pervasive metaphor for the people of God in the Bible. We are all children of Abraham. We are the household of God where God is the paterfamilias. We are all brothers and sisters in Christ with God as the head of the household.

Families are face-to-face communities. People know each other’s character and abilities. They are accountable to each other. They know when someone is pulling their weight and when someone is free-riding on the work of others. They sacrifice for each other according to needs. Greco-Roman households, which could include several families, were unlike modern families in that they largely produced what they consumed and consumed what they produced.

The large impersonal socioeconomic forces we wrestle to understand and manage today were largely invisible to ancient cultures. These realities were inexorable forces of the gods and of nature. If the desire is to improve the human lot in such a context, one is not occupied with how to master what is in the purview of the gods but rather with what can be changed … the behavior that occurs within face-to-face communities. The disciplines of sociology and economics only emerged in the past 100-150 years.

Greek sages like Aristotle offered practical instruction for life in what become known as “household codes.” Instruction was given to the paterfamilias of the household on issues like financial management and on governing the behavior of wives, children, slaves and others connected with the household. Various passages in the New Testament are presumed to be modeled on these codes, like Ephesians 5:18-6:9, Colossians 3:18-4:1, and 1 Peter 2:11-3:17. Scholars Carolyn Osiek and David Balch even suggest that Jesus may have been riffing on the household code in Matthew 19 and 20. (See earlier post.)

Old Testament teaching is also about face-to-face communities. Broad macro social structures are not in view. A surface appraisal of some passages … like the jubilee or gleaning requirements … might seem to suggest otherwise but this has more to do with projecting our experience back into the text.

The jubilee redistributed nothing. It prohibited the permanent sale of land and labor by one member of a community to another. A “sale” of land or labor functioned as a lease agreement. The price was based on the number years between the agreement and the next jubilee. At the jubilee, the land and labor reverted back to the permanent owner. These provisions established God as the landholder with his people as his tenants, divided by tribe and clan into face-to-face communities. Our modern tools of economic analysis tell us that the jubilee had economic impact but it is anachronistic to see the jubilee as economic justice initiative. The jubilee regulated land and labor transactions of people in face-to-face community.

Gleaning was also mandated but who did the gleaning? The poor in the community who were known to the farmer. Gleaning was a provision that made it ethically incumbent to care for the poor who were a part of one’s face-to-face community.

It is also instructive to note the outcry of the prophets. Despite claims to the contrary, there is no condemnation of inequality in wealth distribution … as though someone had done an analysis of income quintiles and found something amiss. What we find are repeated invectives against corruption at the city gates (the courts), the use of bribes, and the use of dishonest weights and measures. We find condemnations of the rich who acquired wealth dishonestly. These are about unethical behavior in face-to-face communities. To the degree that “social justice” is discussed in the Bible, indeed throughout pre-Nineteenth Century history, it is about ethics of people in face-to-face communities.

So what has changed? Through specialization of labor and the emergence of markets in Europe, people’s lives became ever more interdependent. With the explosion of the industrial revolution in the late Eighteenth Century, individual economic behavior became inextricably linked with millions of people. We were now economically connected through large impersonal communities with people we will never know (and as we will see, these changes have led to more than a doubling of life expectancy and a stunning improvement in the quality of life for much of the world’s population.) And therein is the problem.

All our ethical reflection up until very recently presumed the management of behavior in the context of face-to-face communities. As noted, these communities have built in knowledge among the members about each others character, abilities, needs, and shortcomings. There is accountability. But face-to-face communities can only grow so large. Anthropologist Robin Dunbar says that the maximum size an individual’s social network can grow and still maintain stable interpersonal relationships is about 150 people. Groups that have attempted communal living find that beyond this size mutual monitoring of each other’s behavior disappears, innovators break with the community creed, free-riders begin to take advantage of the community, and overly productive workers become disillusioned. The Hutterites, a communal group that has endured over generations, require that a community split into two communities when they reach 120 members. Congregational growth studies tell us that one of the most difficult transitions is when a congregation grows into the 150-200 range. It moves from a being a family church to a programmatic church. It is simply impossible for large group with hundreds of people, much less thousands or millions, to function as a family or face-to-face community.

No person or human entity has the omniscience to sort out issues on a case by case basis, weighing each individual’s particulars, and then make just decisions. The interpersonal knowledge necessary to manage the affairs of millions of people is simply absent. Yet when it comes to economics, the dominate means by which theologians wrestle with economic questions is to impose face-to-face ethics on large impersonal economic structures, merely presuming that someone has the knowledge to adjudicate wisely.  Other theologians discern the difference in face-to-face structures, but reject the presence of impersonal socioeconomic structures as anti-Christian because they can’t be made to function according to face-to-face ethics.

This failure to come to grips with the implications of impersonal communities of cooperative behavior is one of the single biggest obstacles theologians have in understanding economics.

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Parents, kids today more in harmony than prior generations

USA Today: Parents, kids today more in harmony than prior generations

Popular wisdom suggests many young people and their Baby Boomer parents get along great — unlike many Boomers and their own parents did back in the '60s and '70s. So does that mean the generations see eye to eye?

Not at all. But they aren't fighting about it like they used to. Forty years after Woodstock, the generation gap has mellowed.

A survey out today from the Pew Research Center finds two-thirds of Americans 16 and older see an age divide in every one of the eight areas listed. Among the biggest gaps:  ...

Star Trek Meets Monty Python

Came across this today. Three years old but I like it.

IPO Registrations Are Returning From The Shadow Of The Valley Of Death

Tech Crunch: IPO Registrations Are Returning From The Shadow Of The Valley Of Death

World population projected to reach 7 billion in 2011

CNN: World population projected to reach 7 billion in 2011

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- The world's population is forecast to hit 7 billion in 2011, the vast majority of its growth coming in developing and, in many cases, the poorest nations, a report released Wednesday said.

 A staggering 97 percent of global growth over the next 40 years will happen in Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean, according to the Population Reference Bureau's 2009 World Population Data Sheet.

"The great bulk of today's 1.2 billion youth -- nearly 90 percent -- are in developing countries," said Carl Haub, a co-author of the report. Eight in 10 of those youth live in Africa and Asia.

"During the next few decades, these young people will most likely continue the current trend of moving from rural areas to cities in search of education and training opportunities, gainful employment, and adequate health care," Haub continued, calling it one of the major social questions of the next few decades. ...

Theologians & Economists: The Mainline Theological View of Economics

[Series Index]

George Bernard Shaw said, “If all economists were laid end to end, they would not reach a conclusion.” It is true that economists are hardly a monolithic bunch, yet it would be untrue to say that there are not core economic principles that economists agree upon … things like the relationship of supply and demand, price (microeconomic) theory of value, or the centrality of markets. The disagreement usually comes at the point of how well things like the market function and what interventions should be made. But today I don’t want to explore what economists think about economics. I want to see if I can capture what Mainline theologians and pastors typically think economics is about. I think it would go something like this …

**********

God is creator and Lord over all that is. He created humanity to be caretakers of his beautiful creation. In a real sense, the Earth is God’s household and we are the household managers. Furthermore, God has created an abundance that we are all to share with each other, in shalom-filled relationships, as we seek the common good of the community.

Economics is dominated by anti-Christian capitalist values born out of  Modernism's quest for self-autonomy. Instead of abundance, economists postulate scarcity and then glorify selfishness and greed in competition over the scarcity. They postulate an “invisible hand” powered by selfishness as a replacement for the providence of God and Christian ethical behavior. Capitalism is dependent on endless consumerism, which is destroying the planet. (Of course, conservative Christians see no problem with this since the earth will be destroyed eventually anyway.) It depersonalizes people, turning them into commodities for exploitation by economic players. It violates biblical values of equality, making the rich richer and the poor poorer, all the time justifying paying people less than a living wage.

Therefore, while capitalism may have accomplished some great things, it can hardly be considered just and worthy of our commendation. Economists who so ardently defend capitalist market economies have made an idol of their ideology … let’s call it theocapitalism. Christian mission requires that we put God and his Kingdom first, redirecting markets toward the common good … that we rediscover our connectedness to others and function as the human family God has called us to be.

**********

Well, how was that? I’m not suggesting that Mainline theological academies are monolithic but I think I’ve captured the basic gist of what you might expect.

Next I will turn to a few pivotal points that I believe are deeply and pervasively misunderstood by theologians about economics. You still may not agree with the economist's perspective but it is important that we grasp what they actually say if there is to be honest dialog.

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Was Sec. of State Clinton Out of Line?

I don't think so. If the translation she received was correct she had every right to get testy. The misunderstanding was graciously resolved. I don't get the big deal.

Jesus as Rabbi: Ken Bailey vs. Tom Wright

What was the nature of Jesus' preparation for ministry? Was Jesus a rabbi who received intensive training in a learning community or was he prophet who told compelling stories over and over that were burned into the memories of his hearers?

Kenneth Bailey writes:

In Jesus’ day, across the villages of Galilee and Judea, there were associations of serious-minded Jews who called themselves the haberim (the companions/friends). The name was taken from Psalm 119:63, which reads, “I am a companion [haber] of all who fear thee, / of those who keep thy precepts.” These associations were composed of men who were employed in secular trades but who spent their spare time debating the Law and trying to apply it to their world. A young Jew in his early teens had the option of joining such a group. If he decided to do so, he was committed to becoming a “student of the rabbis” and participating in their discussions. Those Jews who wished to spend their spare time in activities other than scholarly debates were not a part of these associations. The rabbis called such types am ha-arets, “the people of the land.” This title was not a compliment, and considerable hostility developed between these two groups. It seems to assume that Jesus joined the haberim. The story about him in the temple at twelve years of age emphasizes his intelligence and his scholarly bent (Lk. 2:41-51). With this pattern of culture in mind, it is easy to assume that Jesus went on to spend eighteen years in sustained discussion with the brightest and best thinkers in Nazareth and the surrounding villages. When, at the age of thirty, Jesus began his public ministry, he demonstrated time and again considerable skill in the rabbinic style of debating, and, therefore, it is not surprising that the community called him “rabbi.”

The title rabbi emerged in first-century Judaism as a title of respect for a scholar. Students used it for a teacher, and the community at large used it for the scribes and sages. Eduard Lohse states, “When Jesus is called Rabbi by His disciples and others, this shows that He conducted Himself like the Jewish scribes. David Flusser, the able Israeli scholar writes, “It is easy to observer that Jesus was far from uneducated. He was perfectly at home both in holy scripture and in oral tradition, and he knew how to apply this scholarly heritage. Flusser goes on to note that carpenters in particular had a reputation for learning. With this in mind Flusser then rejects “the common, sweetly idyllic notion of Jesus as a naïve and amiable, simple manual workman.” (Kenneth E. Bailey, Jacob and the Prodigal: How Jesus Retold Israel's Story. (Downer's Grove, IL: Intervarsity Press, 2003) 24-25.)

N. T. Wright writes:

The material available [to the gospel writers] would, then, have been 'oral history', that is, the often-repeated tales of what Jesus had said and done. This is to be distinguished from 'oral tradition' proper, according to which a great teacher will take pains to have his disicples commit to memory the exact words in which the teaching is given. If that had been Jesus' intention, and the disciples' practice, one might have supposed that at least the Lord's Prayer, and the institution of the eucharist, would have come out identical in the various versions (in Paul as well, in the latter case) that we now possess. Jesus it seems, did not act as rabbi, saying exactly the same thing over and over until his disicples has learned it by rote. He acted more as a prophet, saying similar things in a variety of contexts; not only his diciples, but most likely many of the wider circle of follower, would have talke about them, in their own words, for years to come. And it is morally certain that they would, without even thinking about it, have cast this material into a variety of forms, which we can no observe in their eventual literary contexts. (N. T. Wright, The New Testament and the People of God (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1992) 423-424.)

I'm not conviced that Bailey's view is in contradiction to the idea that Jesus went out and told stories to the masses that may have varied in the specifics. I wonder what others who have studied this in more depth have learned?

You Deleted Your Cookies? Think Again

Wired: You Deleted Your Cookies? Think Again

You Deleted Your Cookies? Think AgainMore than half of the internet’s top websites use a little known capability of Adobe’s Flash plugin to track users and store information about them, but only four of them mention the so-called Flash Cookies in their privacy policies, UC Berkeley researchers reported Monday.

Unlike traditional browser cookies, Flash cookies are relatively unknown to web users, and they are not controlled through the cookie privacy controls in a browser. That means even if a user thinks they have cleared their computer of tracking objects, they most likely have not.

What’s even sneakier?

Several services even use the surreptitious data storage to reinstate traditional cookies that a user deleted, which is called ‘re-spawning’ in homage to video games where zombies come back to life even after being “killed,” the report found. So even if a user gets rid of a website’s tracking cookie, that cookie’s unique ID will be assigned back to a new cookie again using the Flash data as the “backup.” ...

Sorta gives new meaning to the idea of "the Cookie Monster."

In defence of the dismal science

The Economist: In defence of the dismal science

In a guest article, Robert Lucas, the John Dewey Distinguished Service Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago, rebuts criticisms that the financial crisis represents a failure of economics.

THERE is widespread disappointment with economists now because we did not forecast or prevent the financial crisis of 2008. The Economist’s articles of July 18th on the state of economics were an interesting attempt to take stock of two fields, macroeconomics and financial economics, but both pieces were dominated by the views of people who have seized on the crisis as an opportunity to restate criticisms they had voiced long before 2008. Macroeconomists in particular were caricatured as a lost generation educated in the use of valueless, even harmful, mathematical models, an education that made them incapable of conducting sensible economic policy. I think this caricature is nonsense and of no value in thinking about the larger questions: What can the public reasonably expect of specialists in these areas, and how well has it been served by them in the current crisis?

One thing we are not going to have, now or ever, is a set of models that forecasts sudden falls in the value of financial assets, like the declines that followed the failure of Lehman Brothers in September. This is nothing new. It has been known for more than 40 years and is one of the main implications of Eugene Fama’s “efficient-market hypothesis” (EMH), which states that the price of a financial asset reflects all relevant, generally available information. If an economist had a formula that could reliably forecast crises a week in advance, say, then that formula would become part of generally available information and prices would fall a week earlier. (The term “efficient” as used here means that individuals use information in their own private interest. It has nothing to do with socially desirable pricing; people often confuse the two.) ...

Grass-roots food initiative in Africa serves Clinton's goals

Christian Science Monitor: Grass-roots food initiative in Africa serves Clinton's goals

Group helps to match African farmers, especially women, with on-the-ground experts and better technology.

Washington - As she continues her seven-country tour through sub-Saharan Africa, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton will focus on the $20 billion food security and agricultural development initiatives that world leaders including President Obama launched earlier this year.

But as crucial as big dollars are, the key to meeting Africa's agricultural potential will be the connections fostered between Africa's farmers on the one hand, and new technologies – and the experts that understand them – on the other, some Africa specialists say.

To that end, an organization of former Peace Corps volunteers is developing a plan to help match up African farmers with the experts, technologies, and new ideas that can help African fields bloom.

Called Africa Rural Connect, or ARC, the advocacy group aims to connect 200,000 current and past Peace Corps volunteers, the African diaspora, and farm and technology experts with Africa's millions of small farmers. Behind ARC is the conviction that, as useful as big international programs may be, sometimes the best ideas come from farmers or unsung development experts.  ...

Unemployment Drops for First Time Since April '08

Market Charts: Unemployment Drops for First Time Since April '08

It always takes several months before a decision is rendered on when an recession begins and end, but when they get there I'm willing to bet that the stats will show the recession ended with the second quarter of this year. Unemployment is usually among the last things to turnaround and it usually does so shortly after the recession has ended.

Statistics tell parents that the world is not so dangerous for their children

Kansas City Star: Statistics tell parents that the world is not so dangerous for their children

... Despite the trepidation that naturally arises when releasing our kids into the big, bad world, statistics show that for the vast majority of American young people, their world is not as dangerous as it is so often made out.

Tragedies — car crashes, serious sports injuries, childhood suicide, water accidents, to name a few — touch thousands of families every year. There is no diminishing that hurt.

But for most people, in most situations, the odds are good that all will be fine.

Motor vehicle accidents, for example, sadly killed 13,000 youths in 2006. They’re the No. 1 killer of young people ages 1 to 24.

Yet the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s data reveal that the likelihood that a car wreck will take the life of someone before age 18 is about one in 10,000. Take away teen drivers, it’s about three in 100,000 for children 14 and younger.

Child abduction by a stranger, perhaps a parent’s worst fear?

“Of all the dangers to children, this is the one most alarming and the most frightening and probably the least likely to ever happen,” said Paula S. Fass, a University of California-Berkeley professor who wrote “Kidnapped: Child Abduction in America.”

The odds are about 1.5 in a million.  ...