Michael Sandel on the moral limits of markets:

These examples illustrate a broader point: some of the good things in life are degraded if turned into commodities. So to decide where the market belongs, and where it should be kept at a distance, we have to decide how to value the goods in question—health, education, family life, nature, art, civic duties, and so on. These are moral and political questions, not merely economic ones. To resolve them, we have to debate, case by case, the moral meaning of these goods, and the proper way of valuing them.

This is a debate we didn’t have during the era of market triumphalism. As a result, without quite realizing it—without ever deciding to do so—we drifted from having a market economy to being a market society.

The difference is this: A market economy is a tool—a valuable and effective tool—for organizing productive activity. A market society is a way of life in which market values seep into every aspect of human endeavor. It’s a place where social relations are made over in the image of the market.

The great missing debate in contemporary politics is about the role and reach of markets. Do we want a market economy, or a market society? What role should markets play in public life and personal relations? How can we decide which goods should be bought and sold, and which should be governed by nonmarket values? Where should money’s writ not run?

Christianity Today recently put together a peculiarly insufficient list of ways to help the poor that was ably and summarily criticized by Peter Greer, whose work with Hope International stands somewhere in the nexus of awesome and jaw-dropping.

But they also in the same issue ran a particularly good piece by my friend Mark Galli, in which he rightly points to the role governments play in making macro-economic decisions.  While he didn’t quite specify closely enough that their role should be to free up enterprise to create jobs, the alteration wouldn’t be foreign to the piece, even if an improvement.

But what really caught my eye was this bit:

Thus the church’s most characteristic antipoverty efforts are those that are utterly personal. I believe we instinctively understand this. This is why among the many antipoverty interventions offered, we evangelicals are so fond of child sponsorship, for example. It is not only a proven strategy for making a difference—it works—but more importantly, it is very relational and very personal.

Mark’s point here is perceptive, and unwittingly echoes a line from George MacDonald that has haunted me since I came across it:  ”We are infested with a philanthropy which is the offspring of our mammon worship.”

The line is, frankly, worth repeating.  Read it slowly, and then again:  ”We are infested with a philanthropy which is the offspring of our mammon worship.”

The alternative to that is aptly summarized by MacDonald’s protagonist who utters the remark, Robert Falconer:

“But it is right to do many things for [the poor] when you know them, which it would not be right to do for them until you know them.  I am amongst them; they know me; their children know me; and something is always occurring that makes this or that one come to me.  Once I have a footing, I seldom lose it.  So you see, in this my labour I am content do the thing that lies next to me.  I wait events.”

Or as he says it elsewhere, “No desire for the betterment of the masses, as they are stupidly called, can make up for a lack of faith in the individual”–a faith, presumably, in Falconer’s world that is not gained through the abstracting notions of humanity, but rather the intimate acquaintance with particular people.  ”We must do,” after all, “before we can know.”  That was Falconer too.

That to say, there is a humanity contained in the personal relations that the exchanging of gifts or monies can only approximate, but never truly capture.  Beyond jobs, and on their way to them, many folks in poverty need a helping hand that isn’t strictly metaphorical:  someone to watch the kids or help out with the chores.  As Mark points out, the types of giving that Christians are often drawn to attempt to integrate this dimension into our charitable efforts.  And so much the better.

But even still, a degraded and reductionistic materialism is ever at the door, seeking to erode our sense of the humanity of those involved by the abstract nouns of “social justice” and “end of poverty.”   And, for that matter, “job creation.”  The patterns of speech have a way of distancing ourselves from the situation, or more accurately, from the people who are in it.

Our charitable efforts must be person-first, if they are to be properly “ours” at all.  The only other alternative is to perpetuate the very materialism that often sits near the headwaters of the problem itself.

Following up on yesterday’s musings about the proper distribution of material resources, I thought I’d walk through a bit more O’Donovan for us all.

A lengthy section, no doubt, but one worth sitting through.  And besides, if there’s one rule I have in life, it’s that one can never get enough Oliver O.  With a few additional paragraph breaks and bold sentences, to make it easy on the eyes, then:

The critique of poverty (and of wealth with it) is not founded on a demand that material resources should be equally distributed.

There is no moral significance in distributing goods equally as such.  At graduation ceremonies one may present every child with a Bible, or an economics textbook, just as one may present a political leaflet to every passerby in the street; but in the absence of anything sensible the recipient can do with their new possessions, this scrupulous impartiality will not amount to a serious act of justice.

To ask about the justice of possessions is to ask about their human significance, i.e. how they empower the possessor to act, how they work as a resource for the exercise of human freedom.  And only in certain well-defined contexts can equal distribution confer something like an equal increment of freedom.

The children at the mealtable may demand fair shares, but that is because they have roughly equal appetites; it would make no sense to insist on piling Granny’s plate as high as that of the ravenous nine-year-old.  For the most part, freedoms won from a given material resource will vary as widely as our different histories and projects vary.  Equality of treatment never guarantees equality of outcome.  ”Outcome,” indeed, is a chimerical notion.  Economics can draw lines under its predictions only when it functions in an abstract mathematical mode.  Reinsert the predictions into history, and they are no more than trends.  New communications will always ensue to produce new inequalities.

Measures of equal distribution, then, can achieve only momentary states of equality, and are not a universal response to poverty.  They may or may not be a sensible strategy for dealing with it in any given circumstance.  Yet there is a categorical case for undertaking them on the threshold where social participation itself is threatened or denied.

Let us imagine a society confronting a serious problem of refugees, who have lost their homes and their possessions in a disaster or a war, and are sitting in large numbers in camps.  The first call they make, of course, given the predictable threats from starvation and disease, will be for a program of food, shelter, and medicine.  That is their claim to equal treatment on the threshold of death.

But when that provision is in place, something will have to be done about their resettlement and the provision of basic equipment for them to earn a living.  This, too, is simply the claim of equal humanity for equal treatment.  As we must respond to them on the threshold of death, so we must respond to them on the threshold of social exclusion.

Both responses are concerned with a minimal provision equally necessary to all human beings.  There may then be very good reasons to do more than the minimum:  to provide their children with educational opportunities, to assist them to learn new skills that might avert future such disasters, and so on.  But these further measures will not apply universally to every person by virtue of his or her bare humanity; so the argumentfor them will be made in terms of relative attributive claims, where one claim competes with another.

The criteria of human equality establishes the minimum demand, the demand on the threshold, which takes priority over all other possibilities of attributive justice.

 

What sort of problem is wealth inequality, if it is a problem at all?

That’s the question that’s been ably posed to me by a commenter, who wrote the following:

• wealth distribution is more unequal in the US now than at any time in its history, including pre-Great Depression. executives now are paid 100s of times more than their employees, whereas just a few decades ago it was a tiny fraction of that. 40% of the US’s wealth is in the hands of 1%. The top 400 earners make as much as the bottom 1/3 of the country… yadayadayada
• wealth inequality is bad for democracy: as disparity grows, the concerns of the two ends become disparate as isolated.
• wealth inequality is bad socially: as it grows, people live much much different lives. The wealthy live in tiny isolated hovels of gated communities, private schools and private subcultures
• wealth inequality is bad economics: as disparity grows, it hurts our GDP because there are less people able to buy products at affordable rates. Our economy is best with a strong middle class, but wealth disparity hollows out the middle class.
• wealth inequality is bad THEOLOGY: 1/5 of the Bible’s verses deal with money, and a good portion of it talks about the negative effects of the disparity of the wealthy and the poor. Shalom entails some sort of shared community life.

For all those reasons and more, I don’t think you’re dealing squarely with the issue when you say “I don’t have a problem with wealth inequality.” Neither do I; I think you can make a sound theological argument for certain people earning more than someone else.

What I have a problem with is when the two ends of the spectrum become so disparate that you need bodyguards and gated communities because the two sides are so unequal. It’s a problem of degree, then; not fact. There is a BIG gap between socialism and where we are today, and I’m asking you to address that.

He prefaced the comment by tweaking me for having written a book on the “spirituality of the material” and giving unsatisfactory answers on the subject of just material distribution.  Fair enough, I suppose, though it does lead into my first thesis.

• While material goods and their proper distribution is wrapped up with our physicality as humans, we can speak of the latter without speaking of the former because human bodies are unique in their physicality (to put it badly).  To put it differently, I exist in a different relationship with my body than I do my physical goods or the world around me.  We should think through this quite a bit more in order to figure out the relationship between property rights and the other rights we bear as humans.
• Wealth inequality may lead to social fragmentation, but it need not necessarily do so.  I take it that’s partly the argument of Charles Murray’s new book, which if someone wants to buy me I’ll be happy to read and write about.  It’s social cohesion that matters, but that means the argument needs to get framed properly.  The question isn’t wealth inequality per se, but rather the forms of life that those with wealth choose to embrace.
• That, of course, covers the Biblical point as well.  Shared community life is important, and we ought reflect about what charity actually means when disconnected from the context of genuine human relationships.  As Peter Leithart pointed out in an illuminating piece, within the structure of the Torah justice is attached to festivity.

But let’s return to the point about the just distribution of resources.  In an important sense, if we evaluate the question in strictly material terms–the way the question is originally posed, and the way most objectors to wealth inequality pose it–we will miss the actual injustice at work in a society.

As Oliver O’Donovan puts it, poverty is marked by “an insufficient command of material resources to take a part in the communications of society, so that one’s social role is impeded or denied altogether.”  The marginalization of those without means is certainly a problem:  but “wealth inequality” as a critique begs  the question between whom?, and more often than not we’ve already smuggled the social problem into the terms of the question itself.

As such, we do well to be concerned about the growing social divisions.  But that is a separate critique, and a more poignant one, than the critique of wealth disparity per se.  To stop there is to stay within the terms of the materialism at the heart of our society, and not to offer a meaningful and viable alternative.

Dr. Craig Carter was gracious enough to respond to my write-up of the Wallis-Brooks non-throwdown.  Excerpts and brief replies follow.

What does it mean for society to be “consumerist” or “materialist”? What do these terms even mean? They do have a certain meaning when used within a Marxist analysis of the evils of capitalist society, but is that the same as their meaning within a Christian analysis of sin and sanctification? I suspect not. Many people use a Marxist approach to link economic growth, free enterprise, materialism and consumerism together as part of one great evil called capitalism. This seems to me to confuse matters greatly because the last two items on that list are sinful distortions of the first two items, which themselves are necessary to human flourishing.

I grant that I deployed the terms with a certain sort of looseness in hopes that everyone could get on with a casual recognition of them.   And it seemed that it works, as Dr. Carter (after raising the question) helpfully acknowledges that they are “sinful distortions of [economic growth and free enterprise].”  That is really all I meant to say, namely that the real vices of contemporary society can be decoupled from the economic structures that they currently exist in.  I’d co-opt Chesterton’s pithy line about Christianity being tried and found wanting, but I have overextended it already.

But Dr. Carter worries I’ve gone off the rails in this bit:  “But it does mean that we need to reflect deeply about the best ways to eliminate materialism and consumerism from our structures of thought and our habits of life.”

Dr. Carter suggests I’ve gone in for the Utopian fallacy, or the affirmation of a reality that is intrinsically impossible in our world.  He goes on to say:

Capitalism is an economic system designed for a fallen world in which Christianity has great influence and part of that influence in the cultivation of a healthy skepticism about the degree to which fallen human nature can be overcome in this age between the first and second comings of Christ. Capitalism can be viewed as a set of institutional arrangements designed to civilize greed in much the same way as marriage is designed to civilize lust. A system that understands that (1) humans are selfish and (2) humans are social and need each other to flourish and then comes up with a plan to make #1 contribute to #2 is ingenious. Admittedly, this is not a very Utopian view of the world; but that is not a bug, as they say, but a feature.

Dr. Carter grants that both capitalism and socialism are sub-Christian, but contends that socialism is more sub-Christian than capitalism.  I have no interest in the question. Instead, I am intrigued by attempting to formulate the outlines of an economic theory that isn’t grounded in the response to the fall, but rather the renewed structure of creation in Christ.

To that end, where Dr. Carter sees similarities between capitalism and marriage, I am interested in the dissimilarities. Marriage clearly reaches back behind the fall to the original creation (which I know for a fact Dr. Carter agrees with).  But economic arrangements do as well, which suggests that if something like capitalism is true, we should tie it to the order of creation rather than understanding it as the best alternative in a world marked by the libido dominandi. Rooting our economic theory as a response to the fallen world is to establish an economics of negation, rather than an economics that is itself tied to human flourishing.  And that strikes me as problematic.

To put the question more starkly, Dr. Carter grants that Christianity can make capitalism work.  But can capitalism make Christianity work?  My worry is that inasmuch as capitalism takes its anthropological cues from an unnatural order (namely, humans under the domain of sin), it will ultimately undermine and work against the witness of the gospel through the Church.

Lingering in my mind is Jay Budziszewski’s phrase:  if you use dragons to keep wolves under control, you eventually have to reward the dragons.  And then they do what they want.  As I wrote then, “As Augustine points out, by using bad motives we eventually destroy the vestiges of virtue that we attempted to preserve.”

Again, I am not equating capitalism and socialism.  I am more interested in the question of whether capitalism is commensurate with Christianity, and how.  Perhaps there’s a Barthian streak to my critique, but I want to maintain a healthy wariness of any system that ultimately comes in competition with an ethic that is grounded in the resurrection of Jesus Christ.   My sense–and I posit this all quite tentatively–is that our economics needs to be eschatalogically oriented without immanentizing the eschaton.  That probably opens me up to the Utopian critique, but it is a charge I might be willing to accept.  Jerusalem may be the pattern, but I make no claims about who constructs it or how it is built.

Capitalism may not have a soul, but working relations between Jim Wallis and Arthur Brooks might have a future.

The event last Thursday at Wheaton College turned more tea party (of the proper variety) than cage match.  Even when Jim Wallis announced that they had finally reached a point of disagreement, they weren’t allowed to linger long enough to engage in anything approaching a substantive debate.

That disagreement, though, is an important one.  Some brief summary, followed by analysis:

When asked whether and when income inequality is a problem, Arthur Brooks pointed out that when people get above the subsistence level, their happiness is more determined by whether they feel they have created their success than their actual level of income.  Income inequality, he contended, is largely treated as a problem because we feel as though it isn’t fair.

Wallis retorted that God cares about income inequality, and then pointed out from archeological evidence that prophets only arose in periods of extreme inequality.  He isn’t interested in total redistribution, but does want the prosperity of the society to be shared.

Two points about this:  first, I haven’t read all of Wallis’ works, so I can’t comment on whether he does this elsewhere.  But in the context of the debate, his decision to go outside the Biblical text itself to the archeology to make this point seems to presume that the correlation is actually one of causation (so the prophets arose because of income inequality, rather than some other sign of social decay or rebellion against God).

More importantly, as Brooks pointed out in his comments following, this emphasis on income inequality seems to reinforce the very materialism that is at the heart of our social problems.  Instead, Brooks emphasized throughout the night that the equality we need to strive for is the equality of opportunity to create value.  Brooks sounded variations on this theme throughout the night, underscoring that free enterprise isn’t about creating wealth (and often doesn’t lead to wealth for those entrepreneurs who most embrace it) but is about “productive flourishing.”

Yet ironically, it was on this very point that Brooks was also at his weakest. At a previous point in the debate, he affirmed that capitalism would encourage materialism and individualism only if we didn’t have a strong underlying culture.  He was asked directly again by Michael Gerson whether materialism is inherent to capitalism, to which he responded that “materialism is human tyranny” that isn’t the province of capitalism alone.  Whether the structures designed to promote free enterprise inherently promote materialism, however, are crucial questions that we needed much, much more clarity on. A strong does of Acton-style anthropology would have been helpful.

The real story of the evening, though, was how similar Wallis and Brooks sounded throughout the night. Wallis was clear he did not want to destroy capitalism, but called it a “tool” that should be evaluated by its fruits.   He spoke positively of the importance of trade at lifting countries out of poverty, and suggested he wanted a multi-faceted approach to solving income inequality.   Throughout the evening, he positioned himself as a pragmatist who simply wanted to do what works.  If he is opposed to capitalism, it is entirely on those grounds.

At the same time, Brooks was able to affirm that equal opportunity sometimes required intervention by the government in order to level the playing field, particularly (and maybe exclusively) in the realm of education.  At that point, he took over the pragmatic mantle and suggested that government simply hasn’t done a good job in that sector.  The clearest moment of agreement came when Brooks hammered subsidies for the way they give America and Europe an unfair advantage in sectors like cotton, a critique that Wallis gave full-throated affirmation to.

In conclusion, let me offer a few very tentative reflections prompted by the evening.

Wallis was at his best telling stories, and substantively most effective when discussing the role of profits for Christian businesses.  The reality is that profit for Christian companies should serve a very different end than secular companies, a point that Christians of every economic position need to affirm without reservation (even while disagreeing over the extent of taxation).

I have reservations that beneath Wallis’ positions lie an anthropology that treats humans as primarily consumers, rather than creators and producers.  I haven’t read enough (though I’m changing that) to know that for sure, so I register it simply as a worry.   Either way, it would have been interesting for the conversation to move into those deeper questions.  The question “what “works?” begs a gigantic “for what?” and that latter question is not properly the realm of economics, but is rather the sphere of theological anthropology.

At the same time, the left and right have competing stories about what “works.”  The left emphasizes those areas where government works and free enterprise fails, while the right emphasizes those areas where free enterprise works and government fails.  This isn’t to equate those two narratives for their accuracy, but the comparison should give us pause.  The neat symmetry suggests there are deeper unities than anyone would want to admit.

Finally, I have become increasingly convinced that the central problems of our global society are not tied to whether our society is capitalist or socialist, but whether it is consumerist and materialist–which everyone seems to be.  I am not suggesting that capitalism and socialism are equally productive of human flourishing.  I happen to think they are not.  But capitalism tied to materialism and consumerism may be far more destructive to society than when socialism is so tied.  That doesn’t mean that we should solve the problem by substituting socialism instead.  That would be simply to try to remove the symptom without curing the disease.  But it does mean that we need to reflect deeply about the best ways to eliminate materialism and consumerism from our structures of thought and our habits of life.

Over at his blog, Denny Burk highlights a brief video detailing why he does not care for Glenn Beck’s politics, even though Beck, like Burk presumably, is an economic conservative. And on this issue, Burk is absolutely correct in denouncing the myopic agenda of “rodeo-clowns” like Beck (as he calls himself). For Burk and similarly like-minded evangelicals (like yours truly), Beck’s dismissal on the importance of issues such as gay marriage and abortion signal a troubling shift in pop-conservatism.

Whereas the polymathic genius of William F. Buckley was capable of merging three conservative strands (social conservatism, anti-communism, and libertarianism) in the 1950′s, called “fusionism,” Beck is perhaps intentionally unraveling the bond of conservatism which has been an intellectual mainstay for 50+ years. Beck, it appears, is loath to engage debate on these issues simply due to the mistaken belief that abortion and gay marriage do not directly affect him.

For some strange reason, Beck believes the iconic and nostalgic vision of America he longs for can somehow be separated from its sexual and marital ethics. For Beck, I assume, the apparent loss of principled, Constitutional, self-government is seen in contradistinction from the ravaging cost that sexual libertinism has produced in this county. Nevermind that the introduction of the sexual revolution also saw a direct rise in Statism (which Beck detests). Beck overlooks that an upsurge in sexually transmitted diseases, drive-through divorce, and abortion portended drastic economic effects in America.

Beck assumes that gay marriage is an isolated issue. Yet, he overlooks how the subtle effect of multi-definitional views of marriage downplay the significance of opposite-sex marriage. And where marriage ethics are devalued, economic downturn is sure to follow. Nevermind that the self-styled libertarianism Beck popularizes countenances the fraudulant “rights” culture which undermines the sanctity of life and public decency.

I’m a conservative that has much in common with Beck, but as Robert George has so eloquently noted, the supposed separation of a full-orbed economic conservatism from a full-orbed social conservatism ultimately ends up undermining one another.