Kruse Kronicle

Reading the Old Testament as Jesus Did - Peter Enns

The Kronicler has landed in Chicago this afternoon. Tonight and tomorrow morning I'm privileged to attend Reading the Old Testament as Jesus Did with Peter Enns. I may blog about this later. I've thought about twittering but I think I might find that to distracting. We will see. Anyway, I looking forward to a great event.

Go forth and multiply a lot less

The Economist: Go forth and multiply a lot less

Lower fertility is changing the world for the better.

SOMETIME in the next few years (if it hasn’t happened already) the world will reach a milestone: half of humanity will be having only enough children to replace itself. That is, the fertility rate of half the world will be 2.1 or below. This is the “replacement level of fertility”, the magic number that causes a country’s population to slow down and eventually to stabilise. According to the United Nations population division, 2.9 billion people out of a total of 6.5 billion were living in countries at or below this point in 2000-05. The number will rise to 3.4 billion out of 7 billion in the early 2010s and to over 50% in the middle of the next decade. The countries include not only Russia and Japan but Brazil, Indonesia, China and even south India.

The move to replacement-level fertility is one of the most dramatic social changes in history. It manifested itself in the violent demonstrations by students against their clerical rulers in Iran this year. It almost certainly contributed to the rising numbers of middle-class voters who backed the incumbent governments of Indonesia and India. It shows up in rural Malaysia in richer, emptier villages surrounded by mechanised farms. And everywhere, it is changing traditional family life by enabling women to work and children to be educated. At a time when Malthusian alarms are ringing because of environmental pressures, falling fertility may even provide a measure of reassurance about global population trends. ...

... Why has fertility fallen so fast, so widely? Malthus himself thought richer people would have more children and, as any biologist will tell you, animal populations  increase when there is more food around.

To understand why wealthy people differ from well-fed animals, imagine yourself a dirt-poor (male) peasant 50 years ago. Your fields are in the middle of nowhere. Your village has no school, hospital or government services, certainly no pensions. Few goods come into it from outside, though disease is rampant and security fragile. Ploughing and reaping are done by hand. But if the harvest is normal, you usually have enough to go round. In these circumstances, the benefit of an extra pair of hands to gather the harvest outweighs the cost of feeding an extra mouth (which anyway falls on your wife more than you). And when you can no longer work in the fields, your children will be the only ones to look after you. In such a society, all the incentives point to having large families.

Now imagine you are a bit richer. You may have moved to a town, or your village may have grown. Schools, markets and factories are within reach. And suddenly, the incentives change. A tractor can gather the harvest better than children. Your wife may get a factory job—and now her lost wages must be set against the benefits of another baby. Education, thrift and a stake in the future become more important, and these middle-class virtues go hand in hand with smaller families. Education costs money, so you may not be able to afford a large family. Perhaps the state provides a pension and you no longer need children to look after you. And perhaps your wife is no longer willing to bear endless offspring. Higher living standards, better communications and more education enable you to rely on markets and public services, not just yourself and your family.



Macroeconomic research bears out this picture. Fertility starts to drop at an annual income per person of $1,000-2,000 and falls until it hits the replacement level at an income per head of $4,000-10,000 a year (see chart 2). This roughly tracks the passage from poverty to middle-income status and from an agrarian society to a modern one. Thereafter fertility continues at or below replacement until, for some, it turns up again ...

... Higher standards of living, then, reduce fertility. And lower fertility improves living standards. This is what China’s government says. It is also the view that has emerged from demographic research over the past 20 years.* In the 1980s, population was regarded as relatively unimportant to economic performance. American delegates told a UN conference in 1984 that “population growth is, in and of itself, neither good nor bad; it is a neutral phenomenon.” Recent research suggests otherwise.

Cutting the fertility rate from six to two can help an economy in several ways. First, as fertility falls it changes the structure of the population, increasing the size of the workforce relative to the numbers of children and old people. When fertility is high and a country is young (median age below 20), there are huge numbers of children and the overall dependency ratio is high. When a country is ageing (median age above 40), it again has a high dependency ratio, this time because of old people. ...

...  But the switch from one to the other produces a Goldilocks generation. Because fertility is falling, there are relatively few children. Because of high mortality earlier, there are relatively few grandparents. Instead, countries have a bulge of working-age adults. This happened to Europe after the baby boom of 1945-65 and produced les trente glorieuses (30 years of growth). It is happening now in Asia and Latin America. East Asia has done better than Latin America, showing that lower fertility alone does not determine economic success. Eventually developing countries will face the same problems of ageing as Europe and Japan do. But for the moment, Asians and Latinos are enjoying fertility that is neither too hot, nor too cold. According to David Bloom of the Harvard School of Public Health, the “demographic dividend” (his term) accounted for a third of East Asian growth in 1965-90.

Slowing fertility has other benefits. By making it easier for women to work, it boosts the size of the labour force. Because there are fewer dependent children and old people, households have more money left for savings, which can be ploughed into investment. Chinese household savings (obviously influenced by many things, not just demography) reached almost 25% of GDP in 2008, helping to finance investment of an unprecedented 40% of GDP. This in turn accounted for practically all the increase in Chinese GDP in the first half of this year.

Lastly, low fertility makes possible a more rapid accumulation of capital per head. To see how, think about what happens to a farm as it is handed down the generations in a country without primogeniture. The more children there are, the more the farm is divided. Eventually, these patches become so tiny they cease to be efficient. This is occurring in Bangladesh. ...

... So if population does matter after all, does that mean the Malthusians were right?

Not entirely. Neo-Malthusians think the world has too many people. But for most countries, the population questions that matter most are either: do we have enough people to support an ageing society? Or: how can we take advantage of having just the right number for economic growth? It is fair to say that these perceptions are not mutually exclusive. The world might indeed have the right numbers to boost growth and still have too many for the environment. The right response to that, though, would be to curb pollution and try to alter the pattern of growth to make it less resource-intensive, rather than to control population directly. ...

When pastors’ silent suffering turns tragic

RNS: When pastors’ silent suffering turns tragic

HICKORY, N.C. (RNS) What kind of personal pain would cause a 42-year-old pastor to abandon his family, his calling and even life itself? Members of a Baptist church here are asking that question after their pastor committed suicide in his parked car in September.

Those who counsel pastors say Christian culture, especially Southern evangelicalism, creates the perfect environment for depression. Pastors suffer in silence, unwilling or unable to seek help or even talk about it. Sometimes they leave the ministry. Occasionally the result is the unthinkable.

Experts say clergy suicide is a rare outcome to a common problem. But Baptists in the Carolinas are soul searching after a spate of suicides and suicide attempts by pastors. In addition to the September suicide of David Treadway, two others in North Carolina attempted suicide, and three in South Carolina succeeded, all in the last four years.

Being a pastor—a high-profile, high-stress job with nearly impossible expectations for success—can send one down the road to depression, according to pastoral counselors.

“We set the bar so high that most pastors can’t achieve that,” said H.B. London, vice president for pastoral ministries at Focus on the Family, based in Colorado Springs, Colo. “And because most pastors are people-pleasers, they get frustrated and feel they can’t live up to that.”

When pastors fail to live up to demands imposed by themselves or others they often “turn their frustration back on themselves,” leading to self-doubt and to feelings of failure and hopelessness, said Fred Smoot, executive director of Emory Clergy Care in Duluth, Ga., which provides pastoral care to 1,200 United Methodist ministers in Georgia.

A pastor is like “a 24-hour ER” who is supposed to be available to any congregant at any time, said Steve Scoggin, president of CareNet, a network of 21 pastoral counseling centers in North Carolina. “We create an environment that makes it hard to admit our humanity.”

It’s a job that breeds isolation and loneliness—the pastorate’s “greatest occupational hazards,” said Scoggin, who counsels many Baptist and other ministers. “These suicides are born out of a lack of those social supports that can intervene in times of personal crisis.” ...

Might I suggest we need to rethink the whole role of the pastor thing.

Happy 40th Birthday, Internet!

Mashable: Happy 40th Birthday, Internet!

... The real beginning was a couple of decades earlier, although no one can really set the exact date for Internet’s birth. But on October 29, 1969, the first two nodes of ARPANET were interconnected between UCLA’s School of Engineering and Applied Science and SRI International (SRI) in Menlo Park, California. It took 12 years for 213 computers to get linked in the network.

Somewhere after that, things started changing, fast. Netscape – the archetypal browser – was overrun by Internet Explorer (Internet Explorer). It took about 10 years for Netscape’s market share to fall from over 90% to less than 1%. Then Firefox started eating away at Internet Explorer’s market share. Who knows what we’ll be browsing on in 10 years?

Fast forward to today, and the Internet has over 1.5 billion users, and most of them can’t imagine the world without it. ...

Auchan: Wal-Mart's Tough New Global Rival

Business Week: Auchan: Wal-Mart's Tough New Global Rival

Privately held French big-box chain Auchan is growing fast in China, Russia, and elsewhere as it challenges Wal-Mart, Carrefour, and Tesco.

Quick, what's France's answer to Wal-Mart? Until now, it has been Paris-based Carrefour, the global No. 2 retail chain. But increasingly, another French retailer, Auchan, is giving both Carrefour (CARR.PA) and Wal-Mart (WMT) a run for their money.

Over the past decade, Auchan (pronounced oh-shon) has expanded rapidly into China, Russia, and Eastern Europe. Based near the northern French city of Lille, the privately held company is now the world's 14th-biggest retailer, with 1,200 stores in 12 countries and annual sales of $59 billion.

True, that's small change compared with Wal-Mart's annual sales of $405 billion. But by many measures, Auchan is outperforming its bigger rivals in key global markets. In China, it is opening an average of two new stores per month, luring middle-class shoppers away from Wal-Mart and Carrefour by providing wider aisles, better lighting, and a higher-quality product range, says Shaun Rein, managing director of the China Market Research Group in Shanghai.

Auchan now has 132 big-box hypermarkets in China, including 110 operating under the brand name RT Mart in a joint venture with a Taiwanese partner. That puts it neck-and-neck with Carrefour, but behind Wal-Mart, which has 146 stores and owns a stake in a joint venture that has another 104 outlets.

Attracting China's Middle Class

However, Rein says Wal-Mart's "everyday low price" strategy has backfired with Chinese shoppers, who often assume cheaper products are unsafe or counterfeit. And while Carrefour has a reputation for high quality, its stores have a "ruckus atmosphere," resembling Chinese street markets, which is a turnoff to middle-class shoppers, he says. "In China, people are trading up. Auchan is positioned better than Carrefour and Wal-Mart to be able to grab that."

Jonathan Gunz, a senior analyst with London-based retail consultancy IGD, says his group's surveys show that Auchan's Chinese stores are "proving popular, with many customers filling up large shopping trollies—a bonus, considering many retailers are struggling to increase relatively small basket size."

Auchan also is thriving in Russia, where it has built or acquired a total of 34 outlets since entering the country in 2002 and is now the top Western operator of big-box superstores. Carrefour, which opened its first two Russian stores this year, abruptly reversed course this month and announced it was pulling out of the country. Wal-Mart and British retail giant Tesco (TSCO.L), another big discounter, have no stores in Russia.

At the same time, Auchan is pushing into locales ranging from Ukraine, where it plans to open three new stores by the end of the year, to Dubai, where it signed a deal with a local partner in 2008 to develop outlets across the Persian Gulf.  ...

The Conversation Prism (Social Media)

The below chart is actually a poster for your wall. Buy here. It is a fascinating chart about social media but I fear putting it on my wall will give me nightmares.

Monkey Economics

This is a great clip on NPR about a scientist doing a study on economic decision making with monkeys. Fascinating!

Economics at the Jesus Creed: Michael Kruse 8

Installment number eight on economics at Jesus Creed is up today. Today we are looking at whether "family" is a useful metaphor for thinking about economic systems? It is the most common metaphor for the church in Scripture. Join us for some discussion. Economics at the Jesus Creed: Michael Kruse 8.

Why South American economies are rebounding first

Christian Science Monitor: Why South American economies are rebounding first

Commodities-hungry China is pulling Brazil, Chile, and others out of recession. But Mexico and Central America, dependent on US sales, are lagging.

Mexico City; and SÃo Paulo, Brazil - Latin America, long tied to the economic well-being of the United States, finds itself in a rare position these days: recovering from the global financial crisis faster than most of the rest of the world.

After shrinking 2.5 percent this year, the regional GDP is expected to return to 2.9 percent growth next year, according to the International Monetary Fund's World Economic Outlook.

But the recovery has two faces.

Brazil and other commodities-­exporting nations in South America are blazing the way forward thanks to increased trade with China, as Mexico and Central America languish from a sustained drop in demand in the US.

"Every time that the US or Europe or any other of the big world locomotives were in trouble, Latin America fell," says Alfredo Coutino, Latin America director at Moody's Economy.com. "This is the first time in many, many decades in which Latin America is better prepared, in terms of economic strengths, to deal with the external recession." ...

Questions for my PCUSA Friends

I'm working on a project and I have two question for my PCUSA readers. Feel free to offer your ideas even if you aren't PCUSA.

1. Compared to other denominational entities, what are PCUSA congregations uniquely called to do? 

2. What support do congregations need from presbyteries, synods, and the General Assembly?

A Natural Obsession

Seed Magazine: A Natural Obsession

Organic foods are exploding in popularity. But fears of biotechnology—and a widespread mistrust of science—won’t help efforts to create a truly sustainable agriculture.

When delegates from 192 nations arrive in Copenhagen in December for the UN COP15 summit, they will confront a 181-page draft negotiation text, 2,000 bracketed passages still in dispute, and just 11 days in which to come to some sort of consensus. To power them through these discussions, Denmark has promised a smorgasbord of ecologically minded fare: All water will be tap (not bottled), tea and coffee will be fair trade, and the food menu will be no less than 65 percent organic.

Though undoubtedly well-intentioned, this last provision is troubling, but not because anyone really cares about the provenance of Ban Ki-Moon’s turnip greens. Rather, it suggests a willful and dangerous ignorance about the tenuous state of global agriculture, and the prospects for feeding 9 billion people while also addressing biodiversity loss, water shortage, and, yes, climate change. Organic foods are enjoying skyrocketing popularity in the US and Europe, as are their ill-defined sidekicks, “natural,” “whole,” and “real” foods. Yet popular notions that these foods—and the agriculture that begets them—are at once better for people and for the planet turn out to be largely devoid of experimental support. Worse still, “organophilia” tends to go hand-in-hand with technophobic skepticism towards the very sorts of scientific approaches most likely to supercharge an ailing food system while leaving our planet intact. ...

The rich scent of freedom

The Economist: The rich scent of freedom

Will a wealthier China become less authoritarian?

FOR Americans, the psychological tremors of a Chinese moon walk could coincide with another shock. Some time in the next 20 years, if China’s growth stays on course, its economy will overtake America’s to become the largest in the world.

By the 2020s China’s middle class, today in its toddler phase, will be striding into maturity. And by 2050, some economists predict, China’s economy will be double the size of America’s at current exchange rates. As with China’s space efforts, there will be less to this than meets the eye. In 2020 income per person in America will still be four times China’s, and vast swathes of the Chinese countryside will look much the same as they do now.

The numbers may say little about the relative strength of China and America, but they will raise big questions about China itself. With the growth of a middle class, many observers have long believed, the country’s politics will change too. Henry Rowen of Stanford University has predicted that by 2020 Freedom House, an American NGO, will rate China as “partly free” in its annual country rankings (putting it in the same category as relatively open but not fully democratic societies such as Singapore and Hong Kong). Freedom House currently rates China as “not free”, one of 42 such countries in 2009.

For China, which routinely imprisons dissidents, heavily censors the media, bans any opposition to the Communist Party, bars citizens from electing the country’s leaders and officially allows religious activity only in places of worship controlled by the government, this would be a big step forward. Mr Rowen bases his optimism on the numbers. By 2020, he reckons, China’s GDP per person at 1998 purchasing-power parity will be over $7,500. In 1998 all but three of the 31 countries above this level of GDP per person were rated as free. People who live in rich countries (oil-rich ones notably excepted) generally enjoy high levels of political rights and civil liberties, Mr Rowen concludes.

But what if he is wrong? ...

I heard Mart Laar, former prime minister of Estonia, speak a few years ago. He said the biggest threat to the world's future is China not terrorism. Two bad scenarios are possible. One is that China increases in its economic influence and there is internal pressure for greater political freedom. Hardliners react and end up debilitating China's economy. The worse scenario is that they succeed in becoming a dominant power while suppressing political reform.

The success of the family firm

BBC: The success of the family firm

They may survive ten generations - but they can be destroyed by infighting.

If your family business survived the French Revolution, a common or garden recession ought to be a breeze. Or so you'd think.

The French group Wendel has been around for more than 300 years; it used to make steel, nowadays it invests in various businesses, including the construction group St Gobain.

It's probably one of the longest-lived companies in the world - maybe because, generation after generation, it's had the stability of the family behind it. ...

Interesting short interview with Randy Carlock of International Centre for Family Enterprise:

The Rise of the 'Homepreneur'

Business Week: The Rise of the 'Homepreneur'

New research shows the economic importance of home-based businesses: They account for more than half of all U.S. businesses and employ more people than venture-backed companies.

More than half of all U.S. businesses are based at home. These companies often are dismissed as quaint hobbyist ventures, but new research suggests that's a mistake. An estimated 6.6 million home-based enterprises provide at least half of their owners' household income. Together these "homepreneurs" employ one in 10 private-sector workers, and by many measures they're just as competitive as their counterparts in commercial spaces.

Ask Stephen Labuda, the 35-year-old president of Agency3, a Web development firm he runs from his home in Cambridge, Mass. A former programmer at Deutsche Bank (DB), Labuda started building Web sites as a side job in 2003 and took the venture full time three years later. Agency3's revenue is in the millions, and Labuda is about to hire his fifth employee, who will work remotely, like the rest of the staff and the slew of contractors he taps. "I'm not intending to go rent office space," he says.

You can trace the rise of home-based businesses to the early days of telecommuting in the 1980s and the mass adoption of the Internet in the 1990s. Cloud computing, online collaboration, and smartphones have accelerated the trend, and recent research clarifies the economic significance of companies like Labuda's. "We're seeing more and more home-based businesses that are real businesses," says Steve King, who coauthored the new report with his wife, Carolyn Ockels. (The couple runs Emergent Research, a small research and consulting shop, from their home in Lafayette, Calif.) The pair analyzed U.S. Census data and Small Business Administration research, along with data from the Small Business Success Index, a survey of 1,500 companies sponsored by Network Solutions and the University of Maryland's Robert H. Smith School of Business. ...

Business: The New Liberal Art

Business Week: Business: The New Liberal Art

Interest in business is surging at elite liberal arts colleges, and schools that once shunned the business major are now offering coursework.

Ever since fleeing Europe's tyranny for the New World, Americans have established a collegiate system which emphasizes a broad, liberal arts education. Even as larger state schools mimicked European universities and offered undergraduate majors in vocational fields, the Ivy League schools and their peers, for the most part, resisted. "In America, we think more in terms of a broad undergraduate education," says Paul Danos, dean of Dartmouth's Tuck School of Business (Tuck Full-Time MBA Profile). "Other parts of the world are much more specific. They believe in the benefit of students going directly into their major and taking several years of very narrow, technical work. We don't think of it that way."

But as the financial industry becomes an increasingly sought-after destination for talented undergraduates, some top schools are reconsidering that age-old bias. In the last three years, liberal arts colleges that once shunned the business major have begun making business courses available to undergrads. And with the job market in turmoil, interest in these programs has surged. At Tuck, growing demand has led the school to triple the number of business classes it offers. Columbia, which has seen increased interest among undergrads for the business courses in its catalog, is considering a program similar to one at Northwestern's Kellogg School of Management that yields a business certificate upon completion. That program itself has been so popular that it expanded just a year after its inception.

Once wholly committed to their vision of students well-versed in philosophy, history, and science, these schools appear to be changing course. According to Amir Ziv, vice-dean at Columbia Business School, behind this shift in attitude is "a lot of demand from the undergrads to know something about business."

For liberal arts students, a little bit of business knowhow is a powerful thing, giving them the confidence they need to work in a business setting. ...

Poll: Americans' belief in global warming cools

USA Today: Poll: Americans' belief in global warming cools

WASHINGTON — The number of Americans who believe there is solid evidence the Earth is warming because of pollution is at its lowest point in three years, according to a survey released Thursday.

The poll of 1,500 adults by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press found that only 57% believe there is strong scientific evidence the Earth has gotten hotter over the past few decades, and as a result, people are viewing the situation as less serious. That's down from 77% in 2006, and 71% in April 2008. ...

... But while the evidence appears clear, only about a third, or 36% of the poll respondents feel that human activities — such as pollution from power plants, factories and automobiles — are behind a temperature increase. That's the first decline since 2006. ...

My journey into the heart of Generation Y shopping habits

Mercury News: My journey into the heart of Generation Y shopping habits

I am a proud, flag-waving member of Generation X, the latchkey kids born between the early 1960s and late 1970s who listened to grunge music while worrying that we'd never make as much money as our parents. My children, 4 and 6, are part of the emerging Generation Z, a demographic too young to be stereotyped.

In between are the mysterious creatures known as Generation Y. Born between the late 1970s and late 1990s, these so-called "millenials" intrigue me. As the first generation raised on the Internet, I suspect that they offer a glimpse into our future.

They are more comfortable with technology than any other generation, they live at a faster pace, and yet they are more distracted. They mature slower, marry later, but use social networks to build large groups of friends. They have more choice and opportunity, and also more stress and anxiety as a result. ...

...According to Yarrow, Generation Y has embraced shopping to a degree that leaves the mall rats of my youth in their dust. According to her research, the average member of Generation Y visits the mall four times a month and stays more than 90 minutes each time, compared with all shoppers who average three visits and 70 minutes. And not surprisingly, they have embraced online shopping, especially using social networking to get advice from friends about what to buy, to a greater degree than older generations.

But here's the statistic that really floored me: Gen Y shoppers spend five times more than their parents did at the same age, and that's after adjusting for inflation. Five times!

"Generation Y is changing retail in a way we haven't seen before," Yarrow said. "I was naive when I started this. They have much more power than I thought."

To a much greater degree than when I was growing up, stores are now social locations for teens and young adults, Yarrow explained. Gen Y comes to the mall to hang out, play and connect with their peers.

And retailers have responded by transforming their stores into clublike refuges. ...

... It's not just the amount of shopping by this generation that's unique, but the reasons behind it. Yarrow found that buying stuff is the way Generation Y has learned to express itself. It's not necessarily about accumulating large amounts of stuff, or declaring your financial status as was the case with the buying habits of baby boomers.

Rather, shopping is a new form of self-expression. "Stuff is a natural, easy way to say who you are," Yarrow said. ...

... For Gen Y, it's not about the price, it's about buying different things to tell the world who you are and how you're feeling, Yarrow said. ...

I was at conference earlier this year on financial giving in the church. One of the topics covered was generational differences in giving. With G.I. and Silent generations (born before the end of WWII ) it is about loyalty and duty. For Boomers it tends to be more a vision and control. For Gen X its about giving to what works ... show me the results. They were unclear as to what does/will motivate Gen Y (or the Millennials). From the reading and observing I've done, I think the motivation is about identity. You give to make a statement about yourself and to find solidarity with a community you want to be identified with.  I found the last two quotes interesting in that regard.

But what I find particularly interesting is the consumerism. Isn't this the generation that is lecturing me (a trailing edge Boomer) about consumerism and how I'm destroying the planet because of it? :-)

6th Straight Monthly Increase in Leading Indicators; Largest 6-Month Gain SInce 1983

Carpe Diem: 6th Straight Monthly Increase in Leading Indicators; Largest 6-Month Gain SInce 1983; Recession's Over

 

The recession may be over but it isn't going to feel much like it until employment begins to recover.

Theologians and Economists: Reading Scripture in Context

[Series Index]

In my previous post I wrote that economics is not in the Bible. Many of the terms that are central to the economics can’t even be translated into Greek or Latin. Certainly people of the Old and New Testament eras labored, traded, and used money, but they did not see what we would call economic activity as a semi-autonomous sphere of life to be studied and managed. It is tempting for us to read our modern economic framework back into the Scripture, especially when we see words and activities presented that has similarity to our context.

Christians of all political stripes fall prey to reading passages out of context in support of modern agendas. As I’ve pointed out at this blog before, political left leaning theologians have had a habit of projecting current agendas back into Scripture. For example, concerning Jubilee, Jim Wallis writes in “God’s Politics”:

Jesus said, “Blessed are the poor,” and opened up his own ministry by proclaiming, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor” (which was a direct reference to the Jubilee Year in the Hebrew Scriptures where, periodically, the debts of the poor were canceled, slaves were set free, and land was redistributed for the sake of equity.) (15-16)

Jubilee 2000, the campaign for canceling debt for emerging nations, took Jubilee as its theme.

First of all, while there are passages that speak to debt cancellation there is no mention of debt in the Leviticus 25 passage. Second, Leviticus 25:39-40, explicitly prohibits Israelites from taking each other as slaves. There were no “slaves” to set free if the Jubilee provisions had been followed. Third, the Jubilee provisions for land and labor functioned similar to a lease agreement. Land was sold on the basis of the number of crops until the next Jubilee, at which point the land reverted back to the seller. The same was true for labor. The “lease” simply expired. The land was not “redistributed for the sake of equity.”

Clearly, the re-institution of Jubilee in Jesus’ day would have had profound socio-political consequences. By his time the specifics of the Jubilee had become less significant to the Jews than its meaning of generally setting everything right. But the way the Jubilee Code is portrayed above is not consistent with what Leviticus says. It is distorted in order to serve a present economic agenda.

As we turn to the New Testament, many passages are similarly abused. What I want to do in the next few posts is to do a case study on the Parable of the Talents in Matthew 25:14-30 and its sister parable in Luke 19:12-28. These parables are ones that frequently come to mind when people are asked to think of teaching Jesus gave on economic issues. Consistent with our capitalist ethic of investing and being productive, they are often used as stories of financial stewardship. Is that the case? Stay tuned.

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Microsoft launches Windows 7

Reuters: Microsoft launches Windows 7

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Microsoft Corp launched Windows 7 on Thursday in its most important release for more than a decade, aiming to win back customers after the disappointing Vista and strengthen its grip on the PC market.

The world's largest software company, which powers more than 90 percent of personal computers, has received good reviews for the new operating system, which it hopes will grab back the impetus in new technology from rivals Apple Inc and Google Inc.

"It's the first really significant release of Windows in a decade," analyst Brendan Barnicle of Pacific Crest Securities told Reuters Television. "Given the missteps around Vista, people really questioned Microsoft's relevancy in the technology space. So this is a critical first step for Microsoft regaining that credibility."

The new system -- which is faster, less cluttered and has new touch-screen features -- comes almost three years after the launch of Vista, whose complexity frustrated many home users and turned off business customers. ...

Unleashing the Counter-Reformation

Economist: Unleashing the Counter-Reformation

The pope makes it easier for Anglicans to convert to Catholicism en masse—but creates a rod for his own back.

SINCE the Church of England voted 17 years ago to admit women to the priesthood, disenchanted individual members of the 80m-strong worldwide Anglican Communion have been quietly converting to Roman Catholicism. Since 2003, when the Episcopalian church, the American branch of the Communion, first ordained an openly gay bishop, the number of alienated conservatives has been swollen by those dismayed by their Church’s growing tolerance of homosexuality.

Many traditionalist Anglicans, nevertheless, have held back, reluctant to sacrifice their liturgy and heritage. On October 20th Pope Benedict offered them a way out of their unease and into the Catholic church. In so doing, he created a new headache for the beleaguered Anglican leadership—and resuscitated an old conundrum for the Vatican. ...

One Educator/Author's Use of Blogging

N. Gregory Mankiw is an economics professor at Harvard and author of leading economics textbooks. He has also been blogging for a few years now.

What he has done is map his blog posts to his textbook. Students can read the book and then use the map to find blog posts he has written that highlight, illustrate or elaborate points he makes in the textbook. You check out the mapping by clicking here.

Pretty cool!

Transformation into Servanthood for a Dying Urban PCUSA Congregation

New Research Explores How Different Generations View and Use the Bible

Barna Group: New Research Explores How Different Generations View and Use the Bible

... However, despite these similarities, the Barna studies show that the youngest generations are charting a new, unique course related to the Bible. Here are the types of changes being forged by young adults:

• Less Sacred – While most Americans of all ages identify the Bible as sacred, the drop-off among the youngest adults is striking: 9 out of 10 Boomers and Elders described the Bible as sacred, which compares to 8 out of 10 Busters (81%) and just 2 out of 3 Mosaics (67%).
• Less Accurate – Young adults are significantly less likely than older adults to strongly agree that the Bible is totally accurate in all of the principles it teaches. Just 30% of Mosaics and 39% of Busters firmly embraced this view, compared with 46% of Boomers and 58% of Elders.
• More Universalism – Among Mosaics, a majority (56%) believes the Bible teaches the same spiritual truths as other sacred texts, which compares with 4 out of 10 Busters and Boomers, and one-third of Elders.
• Skepticism of Origins – Another generational difference is that young adults are more likely to express skepticism about the original manuscripts of the Bible than is true of older adults.
• Less Engagement – While many young adults are active users of the Bible, the pattern shows a clear generational drop-off – the younger the person, the less likely then are to read the Bible. In particular, Busters and Mosaics are less likely than average to have spent time alone in the last week praying and reading the Bible for at least 15 minutes. Interestingly, none of the four generations were particularly likely to say they aspired to read the Bible more as a means of improving their spiritual lives.
• Bible Appetite – Despite the generational decline in many Bible metrics, one departure from the typical pattern is the fact that younger adults, especially Mosaics (19%), express a slightly above-average interest in gaining additional Bible knowledge. This compares with 12% of Boomers and 9% of Elders. ...

Economics at the Jesus Creed: Michael Kruse 7

My seventh installment of ten on economics is up at Jesus Creed. Today we are looking at the idea of profit. Please join us there for conversation: Economics at the Jesus Creed: Michael Kruse 7

Climate Hoax: The U.S. Chamber's "Reversal"

Business Week: Climate Hoax: The U.S. Chamber's "Reversal"

The press conference at the National Press Club, ostensibly called by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, was packed with reporters—and the message was stunning. Purporting to speak for Chamber President Thomas J. Donohue was a guy introduced as “Hingo Sembra.” In the wake of high profile defections of companies from the Chamber over the Chamber’s opposition to climate change legislation, “Sembra” said, the Chamber had decided to do an about-face and back the bill. “Without a stable climate, there will be no business,” he explained. “The Chamber believes that if we do not help to prepare a strong climate bill for the President, we will face a new foreclosure crisis, due once again to the shortsightedness of a few.”

“Sembra” went on to hold a Q&A session, elaborating on the Chamber’s purported new position. But suddenly, Eric Wohlschlegel, the Chamber’s real press person, burst in through the back door of the Press Club’s Zenger Room. “This press conference is a hoax,” he said. “I don’t know who these people are, but they don’t represent the Chamber!”

Wohlschlegel had heard about the event just a few minutes before, when a reporter mistakenly turned up at the U.S. Chamber itself looking for the press conference. Press conference? What press conference? Hearing what it supposedly was about, Wohlschlegel rushed over to the Press Club to confront the imposters.

It was too late for at least one media outlet. Reuters had already run a story on its webpage with the news of the Chamber’s reversal—and the story had been also picked up by the New York Times web page. Reuters and the New York Times ran a hasty correction. CNBC also was taken in.

Oops!

Nudging Recycling From Less Waste to None

New York Times: Nudging Recycling From Less Waste to None

At Yellowstone National Park, the clear soda cups and white utensils are not your typical cafe-counter garbage. Made of plant-based plastics, they dissolve magically when heated for more than a few minutes.

At Ecco, a popular restaurant in Atlanta, waiters no longer scrape food scraps into the trash bin. Uneaten morsels are dumped into five-gallon pails and taken to a compost heap out back.

And at eight of its North American plants, Honda is recycling so diligently that the factories have gotten rid of their trash Dumpsters altogether.

Across the nation, an antigarbage strategy known as “zero waste” is moving from the fringes to the mainstream, taking hold in school cafeterias, national parks, restaurants, stadiums and corporations.

The movement is simple in concept if not always in execution: Produce less waste. Shun polystyrene foam containers or any other packaging that is not biodegradable. Recycle or compost whatever you can.

Though born of idealism, the zero-waste philosophy is now propelled by sobering realities, like the growing difficulty of securing permits for new landfills and an awareness that organic decay in landfills releases methane that helps warm the earth’s atmosphere. ...

Education Last Century, and Economic Growth Today

NYT Economix: Education Last Century, and Economic Growth Today

No entirely sure what to make of this high correlation between education a century ago and GDP today but it is a fascinating graph.

"God's Battalions" - Book Review

Rodney Stark says the prevailing wisdom concerning the Crusades goes something like this:

During the Crusades, and expansionist, imperialistic Christendom brutalized, looted, and colonized a tolerant and peaceful Islam. (8)

But is this true? Rodney Stark examines this thesis in, God Battalions: The Case for the Crusades.

Stark begins by exploring characterizations of Muslim culture at that time. He notes that Muslim conquest was accomplished largely through small but superior Arab forces that set up military occupation in regions they conquered. By treaty, regions officially become Muslim. Yet in most regions it was 250 years before 50% of the population became Muslim. Furthermore, the historical record shows that most of the great advances in science and other intellectual pursuits, came from the dhimmi, the people under the “protection” of the Muslim rulers … in most cases Eastern Christians. The Muslims had the works of the Greeks but tended to treat  writings on science, for example, much like the Qur’an … something to which all observations must be made to conform, not as foundations for future exploration and revision. He relates the treatment of Christians and Jews at the hand of Muslim leaders.

The rest of the book is Stark walking us through the various crusades, exploring the motivations, events, and outcomes. He hardly paints a flattering picture of the womanizing violent knights of Europe. But he shows that the Crusaders’ motivations were neither plunder or colonization (a somewhat anachronistic idea) but genuine desire to protect the Holy Land for Christian pilgrimages and to protect pilgrims from constant harassment and slayings at the hand of local forces. 

Stark shows how historians have frequently distorted events. For instance, it is pointed out that when the Christians conquered Jerusalem, they slaughtered the inhabitants, but when the Muslims retook Jerusalem they sold some into slavery and let others go. However, when the Christians laid siege to Jerusalem, the inhabitants would not surrender. When the Muslims laid siege to the city, the inhabitants did surrendered. In both cases, Christians and Muslims acted according to the custom of the day. The same Muslim forces that were ”gracious” at Jerusalem, wiped out other cities that would not surrender. Stark also notes that there is a widely held myth that the Crusades have been a festering sore spot for Muslims for centuries. In fact, it appears that this meme emerged at the end of the Nineteenth Century as European powers began to take interest in the Middle East and was probably built on Eighteenth Century Enlightenment proponents' attempts to discredit the Catholic Church.

Again, Stark’s analysis neither defends nor condones the mindset and actions of the Crusaders. It is rather the mischaracterization of both Christian and Muslim history that he takes issue with. Written in Stark’s characteristic engaging style, it is a great read for anyone wanting better insight into this era history.

Poll finds wide support for women in workplace

MSNBC: Poll finds wide support for women in workplace

Men and women are accepting — and even embracing — the increasing role of women in the workplace, but many are still struggling with the repercussions  on family life.

Those are some of the findings of a nationwide survey released Thursday in conjunction with a major report on the status of women by Maria Shriver and the Center for American Progress.

"The Shriver Report: A Woman’s Nation Changes Everything" takes an in-depth look at what has happened, and what still needs to happen, now that women make up virtually half the work force, up from about one-third of the work force 40 years ago.

The survey found that around three-quarters of men and women believe that the growing presence of women in the workplace has been very or somewhat positive for American society and the economy.

Both men and women generally said they believe women can be equal partners in work, regardless of family responsibilities. For example, nearly 45 percent of men and 56 percent of women surveyed strongly disagreed with the notion that mothers cannot be as productive at work as people without children. ...

What's Happening to Women's Happiness?

Oprah.com: What's Happening to Women's Happiness?

... First, since 1972, women's overall level of happiness has dropped, both relative to where they were forty years ago, and relative to men. You find this drop in happiness in women regardless of whether they have kids, how many kids they have, how much money they make, how healthy they are, what job they hold, whether they are married, single or divorced, how old they are, or what race they are. (The one and only exception: African-American women are now slightly happier than they were back in 1972, although they remain less happy than African American men.) ...

... The second discovery is, this: though women begin their lives more fulfilled than men, as they age, they gradually become less happy. Men, in contrast, get happier as they get older....

... For example, these trends are not caused by women working longer hours than men. ...

... Nor are they caused by gender-based stereotyping. ...

... Nor, surprisingly, is it caused by women bearing a disproportionate burden of the workload at home, the 'second-shift' as some have labeled it. ...

Interesting article but for the answer the author basically says "read my book." My bet is that this has to do with unrealized expectations. Nearly every time a group of people experiences a greater degree of freedom and opportunity, happiness goes down. Prior to the change, one simply refused to have high expectations or reasoned that their lack of "achievement" was due to forces beyond their control, and adapted. Once freedom emerges, expectations soar to unrealistic levels and "excuses" for failure to achieve are eliminated. That is a lot of pressure. I think it takes a couple of generations to reach a healthy balance between expectations and reality. What do you think?

Small PCUSA Church Does Youth Evangelism?

Yes.

Greed Is Not Good, and It’s Not Capitalism

The American: Greed Is Not Good, and It’s Not Capitalism

Capitalism doesn’t need greed. What capitalism does need is human creativity and initiative.

... The rhetorical problem with this approach isn’t hard to spot. Most Americans are at least nominally religious, with moral sensibilities shaped by the Judeo-Christian tradition. The Bible and the Christian tradition both roundly condemn greed, and “progressive” religious leaders such as Tony Campolo and Jim Wallis have used this to drive a wedge between otherwise conservative Americans and the free market. Campolo, for instance, has condemned capitalism as based on the “greed principle.” But are these critics right? Must we choose between capitalism and Christianity, or, more generally, between markets and morality? I think not.

You might think that greed has been bound up with defenses of modern capitalism from the very beginning. You might recall Adam Smith, the father of modern capitalism, who famously wrote, “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.” Ayn Rand and others seemed to extend Smith’s point by treating greed as the basis of a free economy. There are connections here of course; but Smith never argued that greed is good. His view was far different, and far more subtle.

First, Smith argued that in a rightly-ordered market economy, you’re usually better off appealing to someone’s self-love than to their kindness. The butcher is more likely to give you meat if it’s a win-win trade—if there’s something in it for him—than if you’re just asking for a handout. This is, or should be, common sense.

Second, Smith knew the difference between self-interest and mere selfishness. Every time you wash your hands or take your vitamins or clock into work on time or look both ways before you cross the street, you’re pursuing your self-interest—but none of these acts is selfish. Indeed, generally speaking, you ought to do these things. Greed, in contrast, is a sort of disordered self-interest. Adam Smith, the moral philosopher, always condemned it as a vice.

Third, Smith never argued that the more selfish we are, the better a market works. His point, rather, is that in a free market, each of us can pursue ends within our narrow sphere of competence and concern—our “self-interest”—and yet an order will emerge that vastly exceeds anyone’s deliberations.

Finally, and most importantly, Smith argued that capitalism channels greed. He recognized that human beings are not as virtuous as we ought to be. While many of us may live modestly virtuous lives under the right conditions, it is the rare individual who ever achieves heroic virtue. Given that reality, we should want a social order that channels proper self-interest as well as selfishness into socially desirable outcomes. Any system this side of heaven that can’t channel human selfishness is doomed to failure. That’s the genius of the market economy.

And that’s the problem with socialism and all sorts of nanny-state regulatory prescriptions: They don’t fit the human condition. They concentrate enormous power in the hands of a few political leaders and expect them to remain uncorrupted by the power. Then through aggressive wealth redistribution and hyper-regulation, they discourage the productive pursuit of self-interest, through hard work and enterprise. Instead, they encourage people to pursue their self-interest in unproductive ways such as hoarding, lobbying, or getting the government to steal for them.

In contrast, capitalism is fit for real, fallen human beings. “In spite of their natural selfishness and rapacity,” Smith wrote, business people “are led by an invisible hand ... and thus without intending it, without knowing it, advance the interest of the society.” Notice he says “in spite of.” His point isn’t that the butcher should be selfish, or even that the butcher’s selfishness particularly helps. Rather, he argues that even if the butcher is selfish, he can’t make you buy his meat. He has to offer you meat at a price you’ll willingly buy. He has to look for ways to set up a win-win exchange. Surely that’s good.

So a free market can channel the greed of a butcher. But that’s not the only thing it can channel. It can just as easily channel a butcher’s noble desire for excellence of craft, or his desire to serve his customers well because he likes his neighbors, or his desire to build a successful business that will allow his brilliant daughter to attend better schools and fully develop her gifts. Capitalism doesn’t need greed. What capitalism does need is human creativity and initiative. ...

One of my favorite economics blogs is economist Gavin Kennedy's Adam Smith's Lost Legacy. Kennedy is an expert on Adam Smith. He scans the media for mentions of Smith and then critiques how people characterize his thought. Most folks he reviews don't seem to do so well. Kennedy caught this article by Richards and critiques whether Richards gets it right. How did Jay do?: Jay Richards on Selfishness.

Jay compresses two paragraphs together from Wealth Of Nations to make this unnecessary point about the so-called “invisible hand”. However, the example he makes of the “butcher, brewer, and baker” paragraph (Wealth Of Nations, Book I.ii.2:27) is spot on and worthy of wider circulation.

Regular eaders of Lost Legacy will know that Smith was not referring to all “business people” being “led by an invisible hand”, but only to those in a special case when they preferred the home trade to foreign trade, the trigger for their behaviour being their risk-avoidance regarding foreign trade (Wealth Of Nations, Book IV.ii. paragraphs 1 to 9: 452-56).

However, this corection is for the record only and in no way diminishes the excellent case that Jay Richards makes against the elision of self-interest into selfishness. Bernard Mandeville (1734: Fable of the Bees ) and his modern epigone, Ayn Rand, were absolutely wrong about selfishness. Adam Smith (and Jay Richards) was absolutely right about the anti-commercial sentiments of "selfishness".

A candidate for the October Lost-Legacy Prize?

The Amazing Future of the Magazine

Living Art Media: The Evolution of Print

How dynamic content and developing technologies can revive an industry with an uncertain future.

It’s the year 2015 and a commuter is heading to work on the train. After taking a sip of his coffee, he glances down to see a moving picture of his wife blowing kisses to him on the front of the cup. Smiling to himself he turns the cup around to check the coffee level, shown as a horizontal line dancing with the motion of the train. Placing the cup down on the tray, he picks up the local newspaper and glances at the headlines. The paper is alive with moving pictures and type that begs for his attention. He swipes his finger across the top of the paper and when a password box pops up he taps something in. Suddenly the paper transforms itself into a much more pleasing layout reading “Welcome Mr. Smith.” All the articles are custom tailored to him.

For now this reads like a scene from a Hollywood sci-fi blockbuster but the truth is we may be just a few short years from realizing this. ...

Be sure to catch this clip particularly the end where you see what a future mag may look like.

Praise for Technology

Houston Chronicle: Praise for Technology

Tweeting during church services gets blessing of pastors.

It's Sunday night at Woodlands Church, and Pastor Kerry Shook tells parishioners to pull out their cell phones.

He has pocketed his own iPhone for now, but tells everyone else to turn theirs on.

“OK guys, you can start the twitters,” he tells the crowd of about 250.

The nondenominational church recently started a new service encouraging parishioners to tweet their thoughts, reflections and questions in 140 characters or less via Twitter, the popular micro­blogging social network.

Using the real-time messaging tool in church is gaining some steam nationwide and in Houston as some pastors look to make church more interactive, draw in new faces and appeal to younger demographics. Some see it as a diversion, but others — especially in contemporary services — are bringing smart phones to the pews and tweeting away.

The trend is likely to grow more among emerging churches still building their traditions and congregations, said Glenn Shuck, a professor in the religion department at Williams College in Massachusetts.

“In a sense it lends itself more to Protestantism than Catholicism,” he said. “At a Catholic church it would be seen as a disruption, just as it would be at any established church, because power flows from the priest to the parishioners. In this case … it certainly allows parishioners to have a great deal more involvement in what one might call ‘doing church.' ”

At Woodlands Church, the tweets are reviewed by church staff and pop up on a screen behind Shook as he preaches.

He ignores them all until he's done speaking, at which point he takes a look and addresses questions selected by a team backstage. ...

Will solar speed up emerging cell phone revolution?

Reuters: Will solar speed up emerging cell phone revolution?

KAMPALA/HONG KONG (Reuters) - Watching his sons kick around a makeshift ball made from tightly bound plastic bags, Ugandan handyman Jackson Mawa marvels at the way business has improved since he bought a solar-powered mobile phone.

"I am self-employed. Sometimes people call me and they find my (cell) phone is off. I have been having that problem a lot due to battery charging. So when (Uganda Telecom) brought out the solar phones, since I got it, that very day, I have never had any problem with my phone," said Mawa, clutching the device.

It might not sound like much but for Mawa and millions of people in Africa and Asia, with no connection to electricity grids or unreliable and expensive power access, these little solar-powered gadgets are proving to be revolutionary.

Farmers can check market prices before deciding which crop seeds to sow, speak to buyers from their fields and get weather forecasts. And unlike with standard mobile phones, they don't have to worry about their phone battery losing power.

Solar cell phones could build on the economic advantages that mobile phones have already brought to far-flung regions of Africa and the Indian subcontinent, including price transparency and more accurate and timely information.

Mobile phone penetration in these regions has been held back by a lack of electricity: there is simply no way to charge a cell phone in many rural areas of developing countries.

An estimated 1.6 billion people have no access to electricity at all, while another 1 billion people have no electricity for much of the day, according to estimates by development groups.

Fortuitously, perhaps, most of these people live in sunny climates. And this is where solar mobile phones come in. ...

Louis C. K. - Everything is Amazing, but Nobody's Happy

I love this one. Thanks Brad. (See video at YouTube here.)

No improvement for fourth-graders on national math test

Christian Science Monitor: No improvement for fourth-graders on national math test

The 2009 math scores reported by NAEP, a national assessment, represented the first time since 1990 that no gains were made.

For the first time since 1990, America's fourth-graders showed no improvement in math – a disappointing finding in the latest release from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), known as the nation's report card.

In four states, scores for fourth-graders actually declined between 2007 and 2009 – the first time any state has shown a drop since all 50 states began participating in the assessment in 2003.

The news is better at the eighth-grade level, where scores did rise by two points since 2007. But achievement gaps between white and minority students stayed the same.

"This is a warning light that there's something going on here, and school districts should look into it," says Jack Jennings, president of the Center on Education Policy in Washington. But noting that long-term trends are still positive, he says, "it's not an alarm bell."

Particularly surprising is the fact that the plateau is in elementary school – in general, the most reliable source of good news for education gains. And it occurred across the board: There was no change from 2007 for any racial or income group; no change in any achievement gap; and no change in the percentage of students at any of the three achievement levels (basic, proficient, and advanced). ...

Theologians and Economists: Economics Isn't in the Bible

[Series Index]

I’ve recently been reading M. I. Finley’s classic The Ancient Economy. Early in the book he is explaining that Greek oikonomia (meaning “household management” and the word from which we get “economics”) dealt almost exclusively with the politics of managing the household. It had virtually nothing to do with what we would today call economics except in the most banal sense. He goes on to write:

Since revenues loom so large in the affairs of a state, it is not surprising that occasionally oikonomia also was used to mean the management of public revenues. The one Greek attempt at a general statement is the opening of the second book of the pseudo-Aristotelian Oikonomikos, and what is noteworthy about these half dozen paragraphs is not only their crashing banality but also their isolation in the whole surviving ancient writing. It was the French, apparently, who first made a practice of speaking of l’economie politique, and even they normally meant by it politics rather than economics until about 1750. By then a large body of writing had grown up on trade, money national income and economic policy, and in the second half of the eighteenth century “political economy” at last acquired its familiar, specialized sense, the science of the wealth of nations. The shorter “economics” is a late nineteenth-century innovation that did not capture the field until the publication of the first volume of Alfred Marshall’s Principles of Economics in 1890.

Marshall’s title cannot be translated into Greek or Latin. Neither can the basic terms, such as labour, production, capital, investment, income, circulation, demand, entrepreneur, utility, at least not in the abstract form required of economic analysis. In stressing this I am suggesting not that the ancients were like Moliere’s M. Jourdain, who spoke prose without knowing it, but that they in fact lacked the concept of “economy”, and, a fortiori, that they lacked the conceptual elements which together constitute what we call “the economy”. Of course they farmed, traded, manufactured, mined, taxed, coined, deposited and loaned money, made profits or failed in their enterprises. And they discussed these activities in their talk and their writing. What they did not do, however, was to combine these particular activities conceptually into a unit, Parsonian terms into “a differentiated sub-system of society”. Hence Aristotle, whose programme was to codify the branches of knowledge, wrote no Economics. Hence, too, the perennial complaints about the paucity and mediocrity of ancient “economic” writing rest of a fundamental misconception of what those writings are about. (20-21)

What this means is that there is no “economics” in the Bible. When the biblical writers touch on topics we would normally associate with economic matters, they are not processing them through an economic model. They are processing them through the norms Ancient Near East culture, Second Temple Judaism, or Greco-Roman culture. Kinship and politics were the driving institutions. Honor and shame, as well as patron and client relationships, were the primary guides in matters we would think of as economic.

That is not to say we can’t learn anything from Scripture about economic ethics. It does mean we need to be exceedingly cautious about inferring that free market economics, liberationist redistribution, or distributivist “small is beautiful” ideals (or any other economic models), somehow underlie teaching and events in the Bible as God’s transcendent model for economic behavior.

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Kentucky girl loses state golf title after admitting scorecard error

USA Today: Kentucky girl loses state golf title after admitting scorecard error

Emma Talley wants people to know that she didn't try to cheat. In fact, she'd probably be a two-time state golf champion right now if she didn't turn herself in for a scorecard mistake.

Talley, a sophomore at Caldwell County High School, was in line to win her second straight Leachman Buick & GMC/KHSAA State Golf Championship on Sunday at Bowling Green Country Club. After shooting a 1-under-par 71 on Saturday, she finished Sunday's final round with a 73. The 144 total was five shots better than her nearest competitor, Sacred Heart's Lindsay Gahm.

But when her round was complete and her score had been posted, Talley's father, Dan, had a feeling something was wrong.

"He just asked me, 'Are you sure about everything?'" Talley said Monday afternoon. "I thought back … and right there and then I knew what I had to do. I had to disqualify myself, unfortunately."

Turns out Talley had signed an incorrect scorecard, which by rule would mean an automatic disqualification if caught by a rules official. Instead of recording a bogey-6 on the par-5 No. 18 hole, Talley and her playing partner both recorded a par-5. Talley then signed a scorecard that read 72 instead of 73.

"I just got caught up in the moment and wrote down the wrong score," Talley said.

The disqualification meant Gahm was declared the state champion. It also earned Talley a measure of respect from many who attended the event. ...

She may have lost at golf but she is winning at so much more.

Do Millennium Villages work? We may never know

AidWatch: Do Millennium Villages work? We may never know

... Imagine that you are a policymaker in a developing country, with limited resources at your disposal. What can you learn from the Millennium Villages? So far, not very much. Evaluations from the MVP give us a picture of how life has changed for the people living in the Millennium Villages, and information about how to best manage and implement the MVP.

Sandra Sequeira, an evaluation expert at London School of Economics, sums up the quandary neatly. “Their premise is that more is always better, i.e. more schools, more clinics, more immunizations, more bed nets. But we don’t live in a world of unlimited resources. So the questions we really need to answer are: How much more? Given that we have to make choices, more of what?”

These are tough questions that the Millennium Villages Project will leave unanswered. For a huge pilot project with so much money and support behind it, and one that specifically aims to be exemplary (to “show what success looks like”), this is a disappointment, and a wasted opportunity.

Dow Jones breaks through 10,000

BBC: Dow Jones breaks through 10,000

The Dow Jones Industrial Average has topped the 10,000 mark for the first time in a year.

World markets were boosted by the news that US bank JP Morgan Chase reported a better-than-expected profit in the July-to-September quarter.

The Dow closed 144.8 points higher at 10,015.86 - its highest level since October 2008.

Earlier, European markets had also closed higher, with banking stocks leading the way up.  ...

Now if we could bring along some job growth in the Dow's wake, we could really be celebrating.

Baby Boomers in 50s Among Least Happy Americans

Marketing Charts: Baby Boomers in 50s Among Least Happy Americans

Hehehe. This one isn't hard to explain. The fifty somethings are working to take care of those happy older folks while trying to get those happy young adults through college and established in life. Meanwhile they a have to put up with those idealistic oldster Boomers and those young  idealistic Gen Yers who want to spend the country into oblivion. :-)

Walmart to Launch Straight Talk Exclusively, Nationwide

Yahoo Finance: Walmart to Launch Straight Talk Exclusively, Nationwide

BENTONVILLE, Ark., Oct. 14 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Dedicated to providing families affordable wireless solutions, Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. (NYSE: WMT - News) announces today it will launch Straight Talk, a new solution in no-contract cellular, exclusively at more than 3,200 Walmart stores nationwide starting October 18, 2009. Straight Talk will bring to the market a new low price for no-contract wireless service with two prepaid plans now available to customers nationwide at $30 and $45 a month. Straight Talk will only be available in Walmart stores and online at www.Walmart.com and www.StraightTalk.com.

The average U.S. adult spends $78 on his or her cell phone bill to receive 1,000 minutes a month.* By switching to the $30 Straight Talk plan, for example, the average 1,000 minutes-per-month consumer could save more than $500 per year and still be on a reliable nationwide network.

To help drive down no-contract wireless pricing for customers, Walmart will launch Straight Talk providing customers the following two options:

Straight Talk "All You Need" 30-day Plan that includes the following for only $30 a month:

• 1,000 minutes, 1,000 texts and 30MB of mobile web access
• Nationwide coverage
• 411 Information calls at no extra charge

Straight Talk's Unlimited 30-day Plan that includes the following for $45 a month:

• Unlimited minutes, unlimited text and unlimited mobile web access
• Nationwide coverage
• Unlimited 411 Information calls at no extra charge ...

Economics at the Jesus Creed: Michael Kruse 6

My sixth installment on economics is up at Jesus Creed. Today we are looking at the nature of wealth. This is a complex post where I have probably oversimplified. Hopefully I've given enough for a good discussion. Feel free to join us for conversation.

Economics at the Jesus Creed: Michael Kruse 6

Human rights are the wrong basis for healthcare

Financial Times: Human rights are the wrong basis for healthcare William Easterly

The agonising US healthcare debate has taken on a new moral tone. President Barack Obama recently held a conference call with religious leaders in which he called healthcare “a core ethical and moral obligation”. Even Sarah Palin felt obliged to concede: “Each of us knows that we have an obligation to care for the old, the young and the sick.”

This moral turn echoes an international debate about the “right to health”. Yet the global campaign to equalise access to healthcare has had a surprising result: it has made global healthcare more unequal. ...

...So what is the problem? It is impossible for everyone immediately to attain the “highest attainable standard” of health (as the health rights declaration puts it). So which “rights to health” are realised is a political battle. Political reality is that such a “right” is a trump card to get more resources – and it is rarely the poor who play it most effectively.

The biggest victory of the “right to health” movement has been the provision of aid-financed antiretroviral treatment for African Aids patients, who include the upper and middle classes. Aids treatment got funding from, among many others, the Bush and Obama administrations, the Clinton Foundation, the Gates Foundation and the UN Millennium Development Goals campaign. The WHO 2004 report that emphasised the “right to health” did so on behalf of only one specific effort – Aids treatment.

Saving lives in this way is a great cause – except to the extent that it takes resources away from other diseases. Alas, many observers fear that is exactly what it did. ...

...The lesson is that, while we can never be certain, the “right to health” may have cost more lives than it saved. The pragmatic approach – directing public resources to where they have the most health benefits for a given cost – historically achieved far more than the moral approach.

In the US and other rich countries, a “right to health” is a claim on funds that has no natural limit, since any of us could get healthier with more care. We should learn from the international experience that this “right” skews public resources towards the most politically effective advocates, who will seldom be the neediest.

Global Worker Surge Was Behind Recession

Wall Street Journal: Global Worker Surge Was Behind Recession

Some say the worst recession since the Great Depression was caused by an implosion of standards on Wall Street. Others blame bad government policy that set the stage for all the pain.

What if that’s wrong, and if instead, all the troubles were linked to a surge in the global work force in the wake of globalization?

A new paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, by Ravi Jagannathan, Mudit Kapoor and Ernst Schaumburg, argues imbalances caused by a jump in the world’s labor force are the key reason for the global recession.

“The large increase in the developed world’s labor supply, triggered by geo-political events and technological innovations, is the major underlying cause of the global macro economic imbalances that led to the great recession,” the paper said. “The inability of existing institutions in the U.S. and the rest of the world to cope with this shock set the stage for the great recession.”

All of the crisis’ main drivers - a global savings glut, easy credit and inadequate regulation - “are closely interlinked” and rooted in the sharp rise in the global work force, the paper said. ...

Crazy Finish at Michigan High School Football Game

Yahoo: Crazy Finish at Michigan High School Football Game

Quick lesson in high school football. The game isn't over until the official blows the whistle on the final play.

Canton (Michigan) Plymouth High learned that the hard way earlier this month.

The school thought it had defeated Westland (Michigan) John Glenn when it blocked a last-second field goal attempt. But when its players ran off the field in celebration, none of the players realized that the ball hadn't crossed the line of scrimmage and was still in play.

No official had blown the ball dead.

So while Wilson celebrated, John Glenn's Tony Wilton alertly picked up the ball and ran 33-yards for the winning score.

It's a play, Wilton will never forget. Here's how it went down....

I think there is a life lesson in this story somewhere.

Gandhi Wuz Robbed

New York Times: Gandhi Wuz Robbed Maureen Dowd

When he heard the Nobel Peace Prize shocker on Friday, Bill Clinton went into one of his purple rages. He picked up the phone and dialed the one person on earth who would be as steamed as he was.

CLINTON: Hey, man, it’s me. This thing is plumb crazy. Can you believe it?

W: No way, Jose!

CLINTON: First that prig Carter. Then that prig Gore. And now President Paris Hilton. The guy’s in office three days and he gets the peace prize? He should have gotten the Nobel in chemistry, because chemistry’s all he’s got. Talk about a fairy tale. This ... is ... just ... wrong! It’s killing me, man. I feel like my head’s explodin’. First I had the vast right-wing conspiracy, and now I have the vast left-wing conspiracy.

W.: I hear ya, 42. As if his head wasn’t big enough. This cat is all cage, no bird. He doesn’t have a clue.

CLINTON: Heck no.

W.: See, I’m the one who should be mad. Let me tell you, this Norwegia thing has nothing to do with him. It’s just another way for the pinkos of the world to drop a cow patty on my legacy. All that garbage in the prize statement about how special La Bamba is for bringing back wimpy multilateral diplomacy, dialogue and negotiations, the kind my dad and Scowcroft loved. Those Nobel ninnies are so lulu left they make the U.N. look like a Fox jamboree. The rookie already got rewarded once for not being me when he got elected. Gosh, what would he do without me?

CLINTON: Fine, but you never expected to win this prize. You were the quote-unquote war president and proud of it. I had to put up with a gazillion hours of Arafat’s insanity, but I guess that still wasn’t enough for those Oslo ice queens. I guess ending ethnic cleansing in Bosnia wasn’t enough, or bringing peace to Northern Ireland. ...

Counselors: Online affairs skyrocketing

Tulsa World: Counselors: Online affairs skyrocketing

Married people are increasingly using social networking sites to cheat, they say.

Two decades ago, they were high school sweethearts.

On a whim, he Googled her on his office computer, and found she lived in a nearby state.

"It's innocent enough," he told himself as he fired off an e-mail to her, "just two old friends reconnecting."

Months later, after an exchange of e-mails, then cell phone calls, in which they eventually talked about their tepid marriages, they agreed to meet at a hotel in Dallas.

This scenario, a composite of clients of Tulsa marriage counselor Brent Sharpe, has become commonplace as the Internet and social media lubricate relationships between people.

"In the last three years, we've seen an astronomical increase in Internet-related affairs," said Sharpe, with the Life Connection Counseling Center. "This whole affairs thing is just off the charts."

Sharpe, a pastor who works primarily with Christian clients in his counseling center, said more than 50 percent of his practice is affair recovery, much of it Internet-related.

"Anything that's good always has its dark side," he said of the Internet.

"Twenty years ago, there was no way to find a high school sweetheart," he said. And social boundaries restricted the face-to-face contact needed for an affair to develop.

The Internet has removed those boundaries, he said, "allowing a relationship to begin to flourish where it never got any traction before." ...

This all makes sense to me. There is a stat that says that one in eight couples together today met through the internet. If true, then it seems it would have strong impact on illicit relationships as well.