Kruse Kronicle

Europe’s Philosophy of Failure

Foreign Policy: Europe’s Philosophy of Failure

In France and Germany, students are being forced to undergo a dangerous indoctrination. Taught that economic principles such as capitalism, free markets, and entrepreneurship are savage, unhealthy, and immoral, these children are raised on a diet of prejudice and bias. Rooting it out may determine whether Europe’s economies prosper or continue to be left behind.

Millions of children are being raised on prejudice and disinformation. Educated in schools that teach a skewed ideology, they are exposed to a dogma that runs counter to core beliefs shared by many other Western countries. They study from textbooks filled with a doctrine of dissent, which they learn to recite as they prepare to attend many of the better universities in the world. Extracting these children from the jaws of bias could mean the difference between world prosperity and menacing global rifts. And doing so will not be easy. But not because these children are found in the madrasas of Pakistan or the state-controlled schools of Saudi Arabia. They are not. Rather, they live in two of the world’s great democracies—France and Germany.

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“Economic growth imposes a hectic form of life, producing overwork, stress, nervous depression, cardiovascular disease and, according to some, even the development of cancer,” asserts the three-volume Histoire du XXe siècle, a set of texts memorized by countless French high school students as they prepare for entrance exams to Sciences Po and other prestigious French universities. The past 20 years have “doubled wealth, doubled unemployment, poverty, and exclusion, whose ill effects constitute the background for a profound social malaise,” the text continues. Because the 21st century begins with “an awareness of the limits to growth and the risks posed to humanity [by economic growth],” any future prosperity “depends on the regulation of capitalism on a planetary scale.” Capitalism itself is described at various points in the text as “brutal,” “savage,” “neoliberal,” and “American.” This agitprop was published in 2005, not in 1972.

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French students, on the other hand, do not learn economics so much as a very specific, highly biased discourse about economics. When they graduate, they may not know much about supply and demand, or about the workings of a corporation. Instead, they will likely know inside-out the evils of “la McDonaldisation du monde” and the benefits of a “Tobin tax” on the movement of global capital. This kind of anticapitalist, antiglobalization discourse isn’t just the product of a few aging 1968ers writing for Le Monde Diplomatique; it is required learning in today’s French schools.

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One might expect Europeans to view the world through a slightly left-of-center, social-democratic lens. The surprise is the intensity and depth of the anti-market bias being taught in Europe’s schools. Students learn that private companies destroy jobs while government policy creates them. Employers exploit while the state protects. Free markets offer chaos while government regulation brings order. Globalization is destructive, if not catastrophic. Business is a zero-sum game, the source of a litany of modern social problems. Some enterprising teachers and parents may try to teach an alternative view, and some books are less ideological than others. But given the biases inherent in the curricula, this background is unavoidable. It is the context within which most students develop intellectually. And it’s a belief system that must eventually appear to be the truth.

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Attitudes and mind-sets, it is increasingly being shown, are closely related to a country’s economic performance. Edmund Phelps, a Columbia University economist and Nobel laureate, contends that attitudes toward markets, work, and risk-taking are significantly more powerful in explaining the variation in countries’ actual economic performance than the traditional factors upon which economists focus, including social spending, tax rates, and labor-market regulation. The connection between capitalism and culture, once famously described by Max Weber, also helps explain continental Europe’s poor record in entrepreneurship and innovation. A study by the Massachusetts-based Monitor Group, the Entrepreneurship Benchmarking Index, looks at nine countries and finds a powerful correlation between attitudes about economics and actual corporate performance. The researchers find that attitudes explain 40 percent of the variation in start-up and company growth rates—by far the strongest correlation of any of the 31 indicators they tested. If countries such as France and Germany hope to boost entrepreneurship, innovation, and economic dynamism—as their leaders claim they do—the most effective way to make that happen may be to use education to boost the cultural legitimacy of going into business.

Living Simply in Abundance (16)

So far in this series we’ve explored the relationship between consumption, saving and giving; we’ve talked about the dynamics of generating economic abundance; we’ve looked at the economic differences between our world and the ancient world; we’ve done a quick survey of the biblical narrative concerning wealth and abundance; we’ve reflected on the impact Modernism, both good and bad; and we’ve deconstructed neo-Malthusian visions of “living simply” in order to halt resource depletion and to stop climate change. How can we apply all this to our lives as we seek to live simply in abundance? I have some preliminary thoughts. I’ll begin with two points in this post. The first will probably not be controversial to most Christians. The second may be controversial.

First, to live simply (with singularity of focus of God) requires that we begin with God and his narrative. God owns all that is. We are co-creative stewards meant for community with God and with each other. Nature is both our habitat and the object of our work. We are here neither to neither preserve nor destroy nature, but rather to bring creation to fullness. We live as sinful human beings in a time where God’s vision for creation has been corrupted. There are forces at work in the world that pressure us to find our identity in anything other than God. Only when the New Creation is finally consummated will complete shalom be restored, but as God’s people we’re called to give evidence of the coming shalom in the here and now. Part of shalom is communal prosperity and abundance.

As we engage God’s narrative we must do so in community with others. We need each other to give full witness to the coming Kingdom. We need to be in a community where we reflect God’s truth back and forth to each other. We do not wait until we feel spiritual or inspired before we act. Jesus said “For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.” (Matthew 6:21) Our heart will go to whatever we invest ourselves our in. Investing in God’s narrative, practicing spiritual disciplines, and being in community with fellow travelers will shape what we come to love. It will shape our very identity. God’s narrative must be the central theme in all we do.

My second observation is that our relationship to our wealth begins with self-interested stewardship. I suspect that for many that this is a controversial claim. Let me elaborate on what I mean.

“Self-interest” and “selfish” are not synonymous terms. One can’t be selfish without being self-interested but it is possible to be self-interested without being selfish. When raising children we teach them to look both ways when crossing the street. We teach them to eat vegetables so they will be healthy. We teach them to be responsible with their belongings. We are teaching them to be “self-interested.” We want them to grow up to be adults that can “take care of themselves.” Taking care of ourselves can’t be done without being self-interested. Our person is the most valuable “resource” God has given us for stewardship. Barring serious mental or moral deficiencies, we are usually the ones in the best position to assess what we need. Failure to act as good stewards of ourselves both deprives the world of the contributions we could make and draws resources from others toward us that could be put to other uses.

Jesus repeatedly appeals to our self-interest as the justification for many of his teachings. When James and John come asking to sit on the Jesus right and left hand when Jesus comes into power, Jesus does not discourage them from seeking those positions. Rather he explains how they might achieve this status:

"You know that those who are regarded as rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their high officials exercise authority over them. Not so with you. Instead, whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wants to be first must be slave of all. For even the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many." Mark 10:42b-45 (NIV)

Jesus explains that by becoming the best servant of others we achieve the highest status. In this one brief teaching, Jesus upends the disciples notion of what is in their self-interest and teaches them to accomplish what actually is in their self-interest.

In Matthew 7, Jesus said:

“Do not Judge …” Why? “… so that you may not be judged.  For with the judgment you make you will be judged, and the measure you give will be the measure you get.”

It is not in our self-interest to judge others. In Matthew 16:25-26, Jesus teaches:

"For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it. For what will it profit them if they gain the whole world but forfeit their life? Or what will they give in return for their life?"

Jesus places this teaching in the form of an economic equation. He tells us to invest wisely.

To catalog all the instances of appeals to self-interest used by Jesus and New Testament writers is beyond our scope. What is pervasive in these teachings is that our understanding of our self-interest is completely shaped by what narrative we believe we are living in. A narrative that defines us as stewards of God, living in community with him and others as we seek to advance what God values, will lead us to one definition of self-interest. A narrative that defines us purely as material beings that receive our identity from our work or from the quantity of goods we can possess or consume, leads us to another definition. It leads us away from genuine self-interest into selfish delusion.

When a community consists of people who responsibly manage their own person, minimal resources are required to keep order. Economic efficiency emerges as people responsibly invest their energies in what they can most productively contribute to society. Then they openly trade with others who’ve done likewise. As we saw earlier, this trading game leads to enormous expansions of wealth even with zero innovation in production. This same advantage evidences itself in relational and spiritual facets of human existence as well. Paul captures this with his “one body, many parts” analogy. The body can’t be healthy without the individual parts being healthy but the parts can’t be healthy without being in relationship to the body. But I’m getting ahead of myself a little here.

From an eschatological perspective, God’s narrative creates two very important freedoms for us as we think about our self-interest and abundance. First, we are free from wealth. Wealth can’t define us. Wealth has zero claim on our identity and wealth can have no more control over us than we surrender to it. Second, precisely because wealth can’t define us, we are free to wealth. We can consume it or we can save it. We can hold it or we can let it go. Our identity is not riding on our choices. Wealth is something entrusted to us that we manage for the one who truly is the source of our identity. And this points us back to my first observation. What narrative are we in? Do we know who we are and whose we are? Without singleness of focus on these realities (i.e., simplicity), all other attempts to reflect on wealth and abundance are pointless.

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Actually, happiness isn't within

Christian Science Monitor: Actually, happiness isn't within

Some cultures are simply better at producing happy citizens than others.

A new year is upon us, and the self-help industrial complex is in full swing, pestering us to slim down, bulk up, become a new you, a better you, a happier you. Yes, it's all about you. The 1970s may have been the "Me Decade," but the naught years are shaping up to be the "You Decade."

There is, it turns out, little difference between You and Me. Both outlooks reflect a firmly held and particularly American belief that happiness lies deep inside the inner you, or me, or whatever. ....

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In fact, psychologists at the University of Leicester in Britain recently produced the world's first map of happiness. Using data from the emerging science of happiness, they created a color-coded atlas of bliss, a topography of the human spirit, from Algeria to Zimbabwe. It's not climate or topography or some mysterious "energy" that is at work here, but national culture. Some cultures are simply better at producing happy citizens than others.

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The emerging science of happiness has found that the single biggest determinant of our happiness is the quantity and the quality of our relationships.

AmEx gets CEO pay right

Fortune: AmEx gets CEO pay right

With its new incentive plan for Ken Chenault, the card giant has created a better model for executive comp.

Through a rare alignment of the planets, the subject of CEO pay may get extremely hot in a few months. If it does, I'd advise four key groups - CEOs, board members, government officials, and presidential candidates - to study the remarkable grant of stock options that American Express's (AXP, Fortune 500) board recently gave CEO Ken Chenault. Members of all those groups have made stupid pay-related moves in the past, and here's a lesson in how to avoid doing so again: Chenault's new pay package is a model for how to smartly incentivise a CEO.

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What's key is the way the grant is structured. The first surprise is that it's an options grant at all. Options were all the rage in the '90s as the market roared, but lost favor after the bust. They've been replaced in CEOs' hearts by restricted stock, which is worth money even if the stock price goes nowhere. Since options are worth money only if the stock rises, a big grant is notable at a time when the market looks expensive by many measures and the economy is weak.

Even more striking are the extraordinarily high hurdles the board requires Chenault to clear if he's to get any of those options. To receive the full grant, he must beat several goals over the next six years, an unusually distant time horizon. AmEx's earnings per share must grow at least 15% a year on average, revenues must grow at least 10% a year, return on equity must average at least 36% per year, and total return to shareholders must beat the S&P 500 average by at least 2.5% a year. Chenault can receive a fraction of the grant for lesser performance, but below certain limits, which are still quite high, he gets nothing.

Now consider a couple of scenarios. Chenault misses all the targets but the market booms, returning 10% a year, and AmEx stock matches it. After their full term of ten years, his options would be in the money by $258 million - but he wouldn't get any of that. Why? Well, AmEx's stock presumably rode a rising tide, and his shareholders could have done just as well with an index fund while exposed to less risk. Alternatively, the market returns just 6% a year, in line with what many experts predict, but under Chenault's leadership AmEx hits all the targets and the stock returns 9% a year. Chenault collects a pretax gain of $222 million after a decade - an awful lot, but his shareholders are $35 billion richer than if they had chosen an index fund, and he's a hero.

In either scenario, compensation lines up with performance. That's a goal that CEOs and boards should aim for, and that politicians should vow not to hinder as they try to feel voters' pain this spring.

Melinda Gates goes public

Fortune: Melinda Gates goes public

... about living with Bill, working with Warren Buffett, and giving away their billions.

Years before Melinda French met and married Bill Gates, she had a love affair - with an Apple computer. ¶ She was growing up in Dallas in a hard-working middle-class family. Ray French, Melinda's dad, stretched their budget to pay for all four children to go to college. An engineer, he started a family business on the side, operating rental properties. "That meant scrubbing floors and cleaning ovens and mowing the lawns," Melinda recalls. The whole family pitched in every weekend. When Ray brought home an Apple III computer one day when she was 16, she was captivated. "We would help him run the business and keep the books," she says. "We saw money coming in and money going out." ...

Living Simply in Abundance (15)

Is expansion of material abundance destroying environment? That is an extremely loaded question. By definition, accessing resources, processing resources, and human activity in general has an impact on the environment. Yet human beings are material beings (i.e., part of nature and the natural order) whose flourishing is a sign of a healthy environment. Nature isn’t just that which is non-human. Thus, an environment where humans flourish is a healthy environment. As I’ve noted before, the biblical narrative begins in a garden and ends in a garden-city. Human culture, government, art, and cities are a human contribution to the created order. They are part of the New Creation at the end of the narrative.

Darrel Cosden notes that the natural world is both our habitat and the object of our work (see the stewardship commission in Genesis 1 and 2.) Humans were not placed on the earth as preservationists. We are to be stewards, bringing the created order to fulfillment. But the created order isn’t mere fodder for our every whim and desire. God created the earth and it is good. It is worthy of our conservation. The problem is when human flourishing becomes destructive to the habitat God placed in our stewardship.

Of course, the hot environmental topic today (pun intended) is anthropogenic (human caused) climate change. The leading theory is that CO2 emissions from burning fossil fuels are causing a greenhouse gas effect that is causing global warming. Those of you who read this blog know that I’m deeply skeptical about the degree of significance CO2 has on the warming trend we’ve been experiencing but I wish to set that aside for the moment. Along with environmentalist Bjorn Lomborg, we will assume that CO2 is the driving cause. CO2 emissions must be reduced. That leaves us with options of reducing our CO2 by switching to alternative power options and/or contracting the global economy.

The United Nations’ International Panel on Climate Control (IPCC) estimates that global temperatures will rise by about 4.7 degrees Fahrenheit by 2100. Lomborg has looked at the IPCC reports and other research to get some idea of the impact of such warming will have. There will be problems but nothing approaching the hyperbolic apocalypse portrayed in Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth and similar media. The following is just a sampling of the exaggerated problems placed in perspective by Lomborg. (I’m drawing heavily on Lomborg’s book Cool It with some supplemental additions. I highly recommend the book for the full story.)

Extreme Hurricanes and Cyclones

Al Gore claims that warming will lead to dramatic increases in hurricane activity. The UN World Meteorological Organization (parent organization to the IPCC) published a report in 2007 that says that no conclusion can be drawn from science that conclusively links hurricane activity and global warming. (Lomborg 73) The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association released an updated report of hurricane statistics last year that concluded that, “These records reflect the existence of cycles of hurricane activity, rather than trends toward more frequent or stronger hurricanes.” The reason the most recent cycle of hurricanes appears more intense is because so many more people now live in their potential path of these storms. Therefore, we take greater notice of the events. Had the Miami hurricane of 1926 occurred with today’s population where it is today it what have been twice as destructive as Katrina. The 1900 Galveston hurricane would have been greater than Katrina as well.

Heat Related Deaths

Al Gore gives us images of people dropping dead from extreme heat. The fact is that cold climates are much greater (by magnitudes) human killers than heat. Since the nature of the warming we are now experiencing is driven by more moderate temperatures in the winter, warming will lead to fewer net deaths. A 2006 survey of the world estimates that the net result of warming by 2050 would be 1.4 million lives saved each year. Only Africa showed a net loss per year of 50,000 people. The study further reported that this trend would continue until at least 2200. (Lomborg 38-39) Rising temperatures will create problems for some people in specific areas but those are problems that can be addressed on a localized basis.

Melting Ice Caps and Rising Sea Levels

In Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore shows what happens if the ice cover on Greenland or half the ice in Antarctic were to melt. Sea levels woud rise 20 feet. But no scientific body suggests that anything remotely near this level of melting will occur. Melting polar ice does not raise the sea level any more than ice cubes in your glass increases the liquid level in your glass of ice water. Sea level increase come from glacier’s melting and running to the sea, as well as rises in temperature that cause water to expand. The UN estimates a one foot increase over the next century. (Lomborg 60) How serious is that? The IPCC estimates that a three foot rise (triple the estimate) would cause less than $6 billion dollars damage over the century. Consider that sea levels have risen by about one foot over the previous 100-150 years. People gradually adapt to these changes. The fact that I had to inform you that we have just experienced the same level of change over the past century should tell you how threatening this is.

It is also worth noting that ice is forming in some places in the world while receding in others. For instance, much has been made of the melting of the Larsen B ice shelf of the Antarctic Peninsula in recent years. Yet ice core samples show that the area was likely open water 6,000 years ago and reached its maximum ice accumulation over the last two hundred years. It is now contracting from this maximum expansion. Ice accumulation and thawing is constantly in transition at the poles.

New Ice Age in Europe

A year or two ago you may have seen the movie The Day After Tomorrow, where climate change leads to a tipping point that results in a reversal the Gulf Stream ocean current, ushering in a cataclysmic ice age over most of North America and Europe. The Gulf Stream last shut down about 8,200 years. Yet scientists estimate that the resulting net temperature drop was about 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit. Virtually all of the ice on Greenland would need to melt to repeat the events of the 8,200 years ago. The IPCC expects the melting over the next century to achieve one one-thousandth of the effect necessary to cause such an event. (Lomborg 87-92.)

Polar Bears and Species Impact

One of Al Gore’s most heart tugging presentations is polar bears drowning to due to melting ice. Over the past forty years the population of polar bears has expanded from 5,000 to 25,000. Eighteen of the twenty or so subpopulations are stable are growing. Only two have experienced some decline and that is largely due to hunting. It is also the case that the two declining populations are located where the climate has been getting colder, while the two populations that are growing the fastest are in areas where the climate is getting warmer. (Lomborg 5-6) While warming well likely have a negative impact on some species it will cause others to flourish. The threat to various species is far more related to encroachments of humans on habitats rather than changes in climate.

Lomborg addresses a host of other cataclysmic claims (malaria, food production, water shortages) and the fact is that the impacts of global warming over the next century are mixed. The most problematic ones are not that challenging to address provided that people across the globe have the resources to address them. Still, if CO2 truly is the driver in warming the planet then we must eventually find a way to reverse the CO2 problem.

Strategies like the Kyoto Accord’s plan to reduce emissions back to 1990 levels will cost about $5 trillion over the next century. The net result will be that the warming will have been reduced by 0.3 degrees Fahrenheit for 4.7 degrees to 4.4 degrees. It would postpone the 4.7 degree rise five years from 2100 to 2105. (Lomborg 22. He insists that this is “scientifically entirely uncontroversial.”) The net savings from this $5 trillion investment? $2 trillion dollars. (Lomborg 33) Kyoto, and similar emission reduction strategies for existing technologies, are exorbitantly wasteful.

Lomborg argues (and I strongly concur) that the solution to reducing CO2 is implementation of new energy technologies. The money being poured into emission reduction would be far better spent in technology development. In the meantime, we should be taking some of the money wasted on Kyoto schemes and doing our best to expand material abundance around the globe. That will enable people to better address whatever future challenges they may encounter. We are better off investing our resources in preventing HIV/AIDS, addressing malnutrition, expanding free markets (particularly the elimination of trade barriers in Europe and the US), and in wiping out diseases like malaria. For relatively small investments we can make an enormous improvement in the lives of hundreds of millions of people around the globe.

As people become more economically prosperous, and as they experience greater economic and political freedom, they become more and more concerned about their environment. Pollution per capita, as well as CO2 per capita, has been dropping in the United States for years. According to an EPA as of 2001, between 1970 and 2001 the population grew 39%, energy consumption rose 42%, vehicle miles traveled rose 149% and GDP rose 161%, while pollution dropped 25%. While there was an overall increase in US CO2 emissions from 1997-2003 of 4.7%, there was a per capita reduction of 1.5% (better than most Western European nations.) The areas that have suffered the greatest pollution and environmental degradation are the former Soviet bloc nations and poor nations.

There are challenges to the expansion of material abundance around the world. But as we saw in the previous post, exhaustion of resources is not one of them. Furthermore, climate change, to the degree it is caused by human factors, can’t effectively be addressed by living more simply (read ascetically) or by buying carbon offsets. We need new technologies.

Therefore, while there may be sound reasons for living with material limits, preventing the exhaustion of resources or fighting climate change are not compelling reasons. Are there other reasons we should think about limits to our abundance? I think there are, as we will soon see.

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Jesus in Turkey

Christianity Today: Jesus in Turkey (HT: Michael Bird)

After 550 years of decline, a bloodied church is being reborn.

For the first time in 550 years, Christianity inside Turkey is growing in numbers and influence. But its recent growth comes at a high price: since February 2006, radicalized Muslims have killed five Christians—the kind of cold-blooded martyrdom not seen in decades. ...

Michael Bird highlighted this paragraph which I found intriguing as well.

Ucal's congregation moved toward a charismatic, Vineyard-style form of Christianity. Meanwhile, Ucal served in the army for eight months and received training in ministry in the Philippines and South Korea. After that, Ucal decided to plant a different kind of church based on systematic theological teaching. While in South Korea, he had noticed the parallels between systematic theology and the disciplined Islamic lifestyle and mindset. He wondered if other Muslim-background Turks might respond to a more structured approach than the informal evangelicalism of which he was a part. Ucal found that his Muslim neighbors are attracted to systematic approaches to religious instruction, and are also easily touched emotionally. So Ucal began approaching them with an "emotional Calvinism."

Hmmmm... emotional calvinism. Is that possible? :)

Stop the World (and Avoid Reality)

New York Times: Stop the World (and Avoid Reality) by Alan Blinder

Many Americans are justifiably distressed about rising income inequality, but foreign competition gets far too much of the blame. In fact, the best and most comprehensive studies of the inequality question assign international trade only a bit part in the drama. The main protagonists are all domestic, including changes in technology, the decline of unions, failures of public policy and changing social attitudes toward inequality.

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One part of the task involves using the presidential bully pulpit — not to bully, but to explain why globalization is both (a) inevitable and (b) more an opportunity than a threat. She or he must find the right language to explain, first, that the world will not stop to let us off and, second, why we should not want to disembark anyway.

Such hortatory language is important. But it must be backed up by actions that help the people hurt by globalization. What are some examples?

Economists have long recognized that increased trade creates both winners and losers. So the United States has a variety of Trade Adjustment Assistance programs that are intended, at least putatively, to cushion the blow for trade’s victims. Unfortunately, we have never taken the job seriously. T.A.A. has been around since “Stop the World” played on Broadway, but it has always been embarrassingly small and weak. It needs to be expanded, improved and, indeed, generalized so that workers who are displaced for any reason — not just trade — have a stronger safety net to catch them.

That, in turn, means expanding some existing programs, like making unemployment insurance more comprehensive, and vastly increasing — and improving — job retraining programs. It also means enacting new programs like universal health insurance, guaranteed pension portability and so-called “wage insurance.”

As present, most Americans who lose their jobs suffer a catastrophic loss of income. The minority of job losers who are fortunate enough to be covered by unemployment insurance see perhaps half of their lost wages replaced. But most job loss is not covered by unemployment insurance. That should change. In addition, wage insurance would replace a portion of the wages lost by workers who do find new jobs at lower rates of pay. While wage insurance has been criticized for encouraging employers to pay low wages, it would also encourage the unemployed to find and take jobs more quickly.

Americans who lose their jobs are also likely to lose their health insurance coverage. And some also lose their accumulated pension benefits. None of this should be allowed to happen in a civilized society. We cannot stop the world from spinning on its axis, but we can fix these problems.

On the trade front, a number of agreements, starting with Nafta but notably also those with Jordan and Peru, have demonstrated that it is possible to design reasonable safeguards for the environment and labor without interfering much with trade. These precedents point to what could become a bipartisan compromise on trade that would enable America to regain its accustomed leadership position.

Stepping off the treadmill

Free Exchange: Stepping off the treadmill

IN response to the question "What have you changed your mind about?", Princeton psychologist and economics Nobelist Daniel Kahneman mentions the "aspiration treadmill", the idea that we simply readjust our expectations upward once we have reached a certain level of success. This would help explain why people who have a lot of money, or have a lot of leisure time, do not say on surveys that they are much more satisfied than do people who have less.

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This is not to say that money really doesn't matter much, as the life satisfaction surveys seemed to say. How much money you have matters to how you use your time, and how you use your time really affects the quality of your experience. What Mr Kahneman and his colleagues found is that wealthier Americans spend more time than the less wealthy in pleasant activities, but also put in more unpleasant hours at the job. That's how they afford all the pleasant activities. When you average over the nice vacations and the stress at work, there's little hedonic advantage over a less wealthy life. ...

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My takeaway is that the tradeoffs involved in different kinds of lives within a certain income range leave people in that range with similar felt qualities of life. But the felt quality of lives within notably lower income ranges are notably worse. And this fact is reflected on life satisfaction surveys. That is, people don't simply adjust their expectations to their economic condition (at least not completely), leading everyone to be similarly satisfied with what they have. Money really matters.

Living Simply in Abundance (14)

“Material abundance is (A) rapidly depleting our resources and (B) destroying our environment.” This has become the refrain of a new generation neo-Malthusian environmentalists in our day. It’s widespread in Mainline (National Council of Churches denominations) and is the dominant view point among influential emerging church notables (Brian McLaren’s “Everything Must Change” being a prime example.”)

Thomas Malthus was an early nineteenth century British minister who analyzed parish records spanning many years. He published his research in An Essay on the Principle of Population, in 1798. At the core of Malthus’ observations was the relationship between population and resources. He observed that while resources tend to grow arithmetically (i.e., 1, 2, 3, 4, 5…), population tends to grow geometrically (i.e., 1, 2, 4, 8, 16…). Population always outgrows the ability of resources to support the population.

Aside from the normal causes of death like accidents and old age, factors like war, pestilence, and famine also served as a check. These would reduce the population to manageable levels. Population would increase again and repeat the cycle all over again. Being opposed to contraception and abortion, the only solution Malthus saw was late marriage and abstinence. (I suspect that Dicken’s Ebenezer Scrooge was a Malthusian because of his quip “If they [the poor] are to die, better that they do it and decrease the surplus population.”) His outlook for humanity in the century ahead was one of catastrophic economic disaster. He was wrong.

Malthus believed that increasing wages would lead to increasing birth-rates and declining death-rates, thus mushrooming the population into disaster. Instead, we experienced what has been called the Demographic Transition in the period from 1750 to 1950 in the Western world. Malthus was correct that death rates fell but not long after they began to fall birth-rates began to fall as well. For nearly 200 years birth-rates were always higher than death-rates but both were declining. Thus, the population grew. But by the middle of the twentieth century, death-rates leveled out and birth-rates followed suit shortly thereafter. Western nations leveled out at the replacement rate. In fact, the problem most Western nations are facing today is that they are slowly dying out because they are not replacing themselves.

The boom in post-World War II assistance to the developing world led to dramatic declines in the death-rates that took the West decades to experience. Birth-rates are more culturally sensitive and take longer to change. Consequently, for decades developing nations have been experiencing very high population growth. The decline toward replacement rates is well underway and it is expected that the world population will stabilize at around ten billion in the second half of the twenty-first century. Affluence leads to lower fertility, not more, as Malthus believed.

The other eventuality that Malthus did not see was the astounding contributions of the Industrial Revolution, communication, transportation, and market exchange. These developments improved productivity beyond what anyone in his day could hope to imagine. Everything from food, to clothing, to housing, to a host of basic goods became exponentially more abundant and less expensive in real terms. This process is still underway and bringing greater abundance to ever greater portions of the globe.

Malthus’ views had considerable influence in many circles throughout the nineteenth century but the astonishing abundance delivered over the many decades after his death in 1834, caused a general abandonment of his outlook. However, apocalyptic pessimists over the years have continued to latch onto the seemingly obvious formula that resources are limited and we will one day use them up. Every few decades this outlook reappears in some new version.

There really are only two solutions if you work from the Malthusian premise. One solution is population control, which in its soft form includes delayed marriage, contraception, education, and abstinence. In its hard form it leads to abortion, sterilization, and genocide. The other solution is reduced resource use, which in its soft form might include “simple living” movements, conservation, and recycling. The hard version is state control of markets to “fairly” ration the limited resources.

Those old enough to remember the 1960s and 1970s will remember the last full-blown neo-Malthusian wave with people like Paul Ehrlich, the Club of Rome, and Jimmy Carter and his Global 2000 Report. These folks predicted exhaustion of most major commodities, famines, and unprecedented global unrest from shortages and economic collapse by 2000. The very opposite has happened. In the past decade or so we’ve seen a neo-Malthusian resurgence that is married to apocalyptic climate change scenarios (which I will address next) and a deep suspicion of people acting with economic freedom (i.e, markets). This new wave is generally grouped under the moniker “sustainable growth” although not every expression of sustainable growth has to do with neo-Malthusian thinking.

How should we evaluate the claim that we are running out of resources? We can start by looking at commodity prices over an extended period to see what they tell us. If the supply of a commodity is becoming scarcer relative to the demand for the commodity, then the commodity’s price will climb. Commodity prices factor in anticipated growth in present and future demand, estimated quantities of natural resources, and the capacity to extract resources for productive use. What has happened to commodity prices over the years? A 2001 study that looked at commodity prices over the previous 140 years concluded:

“…while there has been a downward trend in real commodity prices of 1.3 percent per year over the last 140 years, little support is found for a break in the long-run trend decline in commodity prices. …”

When a commodity starts to become scarcer, several things happen. Suppliers are motivated to search harder for more of the commodity and ways to renew supplies of it (i.e. the lumber industry). Entrepreneurs enter the markets. They begin offering substitute commodities, they recycle the existing commodity, and they begin to find ways to use the commodity more efficiently. Users of the commodity will likely decrease use and look for alternatives as prices go higher. In other words, there is a dynamic feedback loop that prohibits an abrupt exhaustion resources. The market will inhibit the total depletion of resources because people will abandon the commodity when the price is too high, long before its exhaustion.

The reality is that we are not running out of resources. Resources are becoming more abundant! Based on estimates of population growth and what is know of existing resources the planet can sustain worldwide material abundance into the foreseeable future. Just as Malthus could not see the impact of the Industrial Revolution on resource availability, I think many neo-Malthusians are blind to the evolution of renewable, reusable, and synthetic fabrication (from renewable resources) that is taking place in our lifetimes. Had Malthus’ perspective won out in the early nineteenth century, it is hard to imagine the devastating impact it would had on generations down to this day. The same caution needs to be sounded about neo-Malthusians today.

Neo-Malthusians believe we should constrain economies until we can clearly see the way ahead and we have solutions for the future. I view this as an expression of Modernist hubris. It imagines that human beings, through rational analysis, are capable of ascertaining what all their options are much less able to have sufficient wisdom to choose among them. Highly decentralized actors and institutions, making daily decisions in an organic feedback loop, are far more likely to emerge solutions to pressing problems than an expertocracy planning the future.

Life is full of risks. We are to be prudent and weigh risks. But do we wed only when we can see the solution to every eventuality? Do we take a job only when we discern we will have no troubles? Do we wait for a guarantee of perfect safety before we get behind the wheel of a car? Of course not. Prudence is one thing but the argument that all challenges must be resolved in advance is deeply destructive to human flourishing and expression of hubris.

As I close out this installment, I want to be certain I’m not being misunderstood. I’ve not said that we should not be restrained in our personal consumption or that Christian simplicity (focusing solely on God) will not require us to limit our consumption. What I have said is that there is no shortage of material resources. I’m saying that our call to limit our consumption is not tied to a zero-sum game where our use of resources denies use to others. Our motivation for limits lies elsewhere. But before we get there, I want to quickly look at the second issue I mentioned at the beginning of the post. What about environmental degradation and climate change?

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Germany's Jews: Latkes and Vodka

The Economist: Germany's Jews: Latkes and Vodka

Immigrants from the former Soviet Union are transforming Jewish life in Germany.

IN 1938 Julius Schoeps's parents did what many German Jews who were prescient or lucky did at the time: they left. They went to Sweden, where Julius's father worked as an archivist. Julius was born there in 1942.

Then in 1947 Mr Schoeps did something few German Jews did at the time. He went back, followed by his wife seven years later, to join what for decades was a tiny, insular community. “These were years of silence. Everyone suffered because nobody would talk about the Nazi years. My father, who taught at university, often questioned his decision to return to Germany,” says Mr Schoeps. His father grieved for his own parents, Käthe and Julius Schoeps, who had stayed behind in Germany: his mother to die in Auschwitz, his father in Theresienstadt.

German Jews who survived in Germany, or in exile, had a deeply ambivalent relationship with their homeland. Apart from guilt—that they had survived, and even stayed in the killers' country—many felt an almost physical revulsion when they came into close contact with Germans. So they retreated to live in yet another form of ghetto.

By the time the Berlin Wall fell, Germany's Jewish community had only 30,000 ageing members and was dwindling rapidly. Today it is the third-largest, and the fastest-growing, Jewish population in western Europe, after France and Britain. ...

Living Simply in Abundance (13)

The recurring economic theme throughout the Bible is that God is owner of all that exists. We were created to be stewards (corporately and individually) of God’s resources and God intends for his stewards to live in community-wide abundance. Human rebellion entered the equation and that intention has been terribly marred. Part of the Good News of the coming shalom of the Kingdom of God is the realization community-wide abundance. It seems reasonable to conclude that the foreshadowing of the coming Kingdom in this age would also include improved material abundance in the world. 

Yet the scripture is very clear about the perils of wealth and abundance. There is the ever present danger of finding our identity in our wealth and placing our trust in our abundance instead being in relationship with God. Our simplicity of focus is lost and our priorities drift out of alignment. We begin to distort justice in favor of preserving our abundance and we become callous to the needs of the poor, when we should be seeking justice and looking for ways to expand abundant living to others.

Exactly how this temptation to idolize wealth evidences itself has varied across time and culture. Throughout most of history, only a small minority of human people could expect to amass much wealth. The events of the last 300 years have led to an unprecedented expansion in both the quantity and distribution of wealth in the world. I noted in an earlier post the worldwide real per capita annual income doubled between 12,000 BCE and 1750 CE, from $90 to $180. Since then it has risen to more than $6,600. The percentage of people living on $1 a day has shrunk from about 84% in 1820 to about 15% today and is still falling. This expansion in material abundance is a good thing but how it has come about has sown some problems. A brief history review.

Some will argue that technological innovation (particularly the harnessing of steam, petroleum, and electrical power) were key to the rise of Western capitalism. There can be little doubt that such innovations were essential but they were not sufficient in themselves. In retrospect we can see that two profound cultural changes were necessary for modern capitalism to emerge from Medieval Europe: The flattening of hierarchies and moves away from notions of fate and providence.

Medieval European society had a highly stratified and rigidly maintaine hierarchy. God was at the top of the hierarchy with everything neatly arranged in a status pyramid down to the peasant. It was very similar to the highly stratified Greco-Roman world. Each person had a responsibility to care for those under him in the pyramid and total allegiance was expected to those above him. This arrangement effectively dampened the development of horizontally oriented relationships like voluntary associations and economic trade.

The notion of fate and providence also presented a barrier. The modern idea of risk and risk management really did not begin to emerge until around the fifteenth century. Until that time, good or bad “fortune” encountered on a trade journey would simply be attributed to fate, the will of the god’s, the work of sorcerers, or providence. In one sense of the word “risk,” you could say that risk has always been around because people have always known the travel involves uncertainties. This is not what I’m referring to.

By risk I’m referring to making studious evaluations of trade journey’s that have been taken. We learn that merchants traveling route A often far exceed what merchants on route B and C earn but merchants traveling route A are more frequently robbed. We learn merchants with certain types of character and track records perform better than others. We learn that traveling at certain times of the year has greater trade advantages but a higher likelihood of weather related problems. We take all of these considerations (and more) into account and assign a statistical probability of success for any given trade adventure. Then we set about finding ways to allocate our resources to maximize return while minimizing loses.

As long as events are in the hands of fate and providence, our experience is one of things happening to us that we can not control. What emerged in the Middle Ages was the idea of a rational God who created an orderly universe. By discerning the order God had created we could effectively manage future outcomes. This simple concept that is so ubiquitous to us today is really only a few centuries old. It has its roots in the Judeo-Christian heritage.

I maintain that this leveling of hierarchies into more horizontally based orientations and the abandonment of excessive ideas of fate and providence in favor of reasoned risk assessment, were good and needed developments. The rigid status hierarchies of the Greco-Roman world and Medieval Europe were contrary to the fictive-family notion of being brothers and sisters in Christ. The growing realization about the orderliness of the universe, and the attempts to learn about God and his world through applications of reason and observation, seem to me to be wonderful expressions of the image of God at work in humanity. However, the emerging forces that brought about these changes, from the Renaissance on through the Enlightenment and Modernist eras, ushered in new set problems concerning economic life.

By the time of the Enlightenment, the agenda had become one of creating human autonomy over the created order through application of reason. Progress via reason would render God useless and material abundance (among other things) would be the reward for shaking off past religious superstitions. An equality of humanity as God’s image bearers, lovingly seeking to understand the world in faithful response to our mission as household managers over the earth, was supplanted by a vision that cast God out of the picture and elevated humanity as masters of their own destiny. Reason and science (of which the modern academic field of economics is just one expression) would save us.

The Enlightenment and Modernism, with much of the Judeo-Christian heritage employed by them, have had great success in achieving material abundance. But in doing so, they have made materialism and consumerism idols. With God effectively (even if not formally) removed from the equation, Westerners have been taught to define themselves by their material progress; to find their very identity in their material quality of life. We have exchanged falsely finding our identity within a rigid hierarchy of Medieval social order with falsely finding it our material status.

Unfortunately, many who correctly sense the idolatry at work here, have mistakenly turned against the economic freedom that creates the abundance at precisely the time when billions around the world could most benefit from experiencing economic freedom and exchange for themselves. The challenge is not to halt the production of abundance. The challenge is to involve everyone possible in the abundance while reorienting the values we feed into the economic system by simplifying our focus to be totally upon God.

But what about the environmental impact of pursing abundance?

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What accounts for the clean-up of US manufacturing: technology or international trade?

Vox: What accounts for the clean-up of US manufacturing: technology or international trade?

Conclusion

What is the bottom line? Increased net imports of polluting goods account for about 70 percent of the composition-related decline in US manufacturing pollution. The composition effect in turn explains about 40 percent of the overall decline in pollution from US manufacturing. Putting these two findings together, international trade can explain at most 28 percent of the clean-up of US manufacturing.

Why should we care?

If the 75% reduction in pollution from US manufacturing resulted from increased international trade, the pundits and protestors might have a case. Environmental improvements might be said to have imposed large, unmeasured environmental costs on the countries from which those goods are imported. And more importantly, the improvements in the US would not be replicable by all countries indefinitely, because the poorest countries in the world will never have even poorer countries from which to import their pollution-intensive goods. The US clean-up would simply have been the result of the US coming out ahead in an environmental zero-sum game, merely shifting pollution to different locations. However, if the US pollution reductions come from technology, nothing suggests those improvements cannot continue indefinitely and be repeated around the world. The analyses here suggest that most the pollution reductions have come from improved technology, that the environmental concerns of antiglobalization protesters have been overblown, and that the pollution reduction achieved by US manufacturing will replicable by other countries in the future.

The Pre-Election Paradox

Wall Street Journal: The Pre-Election Paradox

While 70% say U.S. is a mess, 84% say they're happy. Is progress possible?

On New Year's Eve, Gallup's poll delivered unto us the good news that 84% of Americans say they are satisfied with how things are going for them personally. What Woody Allen might say about that phenomenal datum of good cheer one can only guess. One then has to account for the darker data Gallup released two weeks earlier: Some 70% of those responding believe the nation is headed in the wrong direction. ...

Next week I'm going to be updating my series on social indicators for 2007. The disconnect between the feeling things are going in the wrong direction while so many trends show two or three decades of significant improvement in quality of life is fascinating to me.

It's the "Wolf" and the Lamb

I recently read Brian McLaren’s Secret Message of Jesus. On page 23 he writes:

The prophets used many images to convey this new world order. They spoke of new heavens, a new earth, and a new heart. They spoke of a day when lions would lie down with lambs (an image not of literal biological upheaval but of social transformation – so that violent, lionlike people with power would no longer oppress the vulnerable ones: the poor, elderly, orphans, and widows).

There is just one problem with this passage: The Bible does not speak of lions lying down with lambs. The Bible twice speaks of the wolf and the lamb together, but not the lion and the lamb.

Isaiah 11:6

6 The wolf shall live with the lamb,
the leopard shall lie down with the kid,
the calf and the lion and the fatling together,
and a little child shall lead them.

And ….

Isaiah 65:25

The wolf and the lamb shall feed together,
the lion shall eat straw like the ox;
but the serpent -- its food shall be dust!
They shall not hurt or destroy
on all my holy mountain,
says the LORD.

I don’t know where this false imagery began but if you do a google search you’ll see it's everywhere, including in the lyrics of praise songs like How Great is Our God.

Living Simply in Abundance (12)

The apostle Paul gives an interesting discourse about giving in 2 Corinthians 8 and 9. The church at Corinth had committed themselves to raising an offering for the church at Jerusalem (1 Corinthians 16:1-4). The collection of this offering was apparently jeopardized by divisions that had arisen at Corinth. Paul was exhorting the Corinthians to follow through on their original commitment. I won’t post the whole passage here but I did want to reflect on a few portions of this passage.

First, we need to recognize that there were more than financial issues at stake here. Paul wants the various churches to see themselves as integrally connected to each other. Even more likely, Paul intends to unite Jew and Gentile together. This passage is not primarily about poverty and wealth distribution. If it were, then why was no appeal made to relieve the poverty of the Macedonians who he also mentions in this passage? Why not a gift to poor people living in Corinth? This gift was apparently made for a very specific purpose.

Second, in the first few verses of Chapter 8 Paul reports the sacrificial gift of the poor Macedonians to spur the Corinthians on in their giving. Then Paul writes:

2 Corinthians 8:7-9

7 Now as you excel in everything -- in faith, in speech, in knowledge, in utmost eagerness, and in our love for you -- so we want you to excel also in this generous undertaking. 8 I do not say this as a command, but I am testing the genuineness of your love against the earnestness of others. 9 For you know the generous act of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sakes he became poor, so that by his poverty you might become rich. (NRSV)

Paul makes clear that he is not commanding an offering. Rather than seeing the offering as a tax or duty, Paul wants the Corinthians to see the connection between financial giving in this matter and the gift Christ has poured out to them. Also notice that in verse 8 Paul explicitly says this offering is a test of their love, which would seem to indicate that this offering was something out of the ordinary.

Third, Paul continues:

2 Corinthians 8:13-15

13 I do not mean that there should be relief for others and pressure on you, but it is a question of a fair balance between 14 your present abundance and their need, so that their abundance may be for your need, in order that there may be a fair balance. 15 As it is written, "The one who had much did not have too much, and the one who had little did not have too little."

Paul is not asking the Corinthians to euphemistically “give a kidney” here. The church in Jerusalem is in need and by “need” we are not talking about being a little short on expenses. We are talking about people in destitution that need to get back on their feet so they can care for themselves.

Verse 15 is a reference to Exodus 16:18 when manna was sent to the Israelites as they wondered in the wilderness. The people went out to collect the manna. People collected varying amounts but the manna was to be shared in such a way that everyone had enough to eat. It is important to remember that the daily collection of manna was a provisional, not normative, expression of God's provision. It was to test the Israelites faithfulness in a unique circumstance. Later the Israelites were brought into "a land flowing with milk and honey" where abundance was to be the reality. As God was testing the faithfulness of the Israelites, so was Paul testing the faithfulness of the Corinthians with this offering.

Moving into chapter 9, Paul reminds the Corinthians that he has been bragging about them. Should they falter now, they will bring shame upon Paul and upon themselves. Then Paul writes:

2 Corinthians 9:6-9

6 The point is this: the one who sows sparingly will also reap sparingly, and the one who sows bountifully will also reap bountifully. 7 Each of you must give as you have made up your mind, not reluctantly or under compulsion, for God loves a cheerful giver. 8 And God is able to provide you with every blessing in abundance, so that by always having enough of everything, you may share abundantly in every good work. 9 As it is written, "He scatters abroad, he gives to the poor; his righteousness endures forever."

Again, we have an emphasis on the voluntary nature of the gift the Corinthians are giving. They are to weigh what their gift will mean versus what benefit they will have by keeping resources for themselves. Do they want to reap much? Then they must sow much. Paul reminds them that God has provided abundance to them so that they may be able to share in the work God is doing.

Finally, there is something missional in Paul’s teaching here. He is not teaching about a need for general wealth redistribution in society. I mentioned 1 John 3:17. John talks of seeing another “brother” in need. From what I’ve been able to learn, fictive family always referred to fellow Christians and was not used in the sense of general fraternity that we might use it today. Other New Testament passages (not all necessarily) seem to be targeted toward wealth issues within the church community. In fact, caring for those within the community seems to be the main theme.

I've already noted that no fund-raising was done on behalf of the poor Macedonians of the poor in general. Nor do we see evidence of this kind of offering as normative among the first century churches. But there is further evidence that Paul was not teaching about normative economic redistribution.

It is widely noted that Luke tended to highlight the issues of the poor in his works. Paul notes in Galatians 2:10 that  the Council at Jerusalem (Acts 15) had asked Paul and Barnabas to keep the poor in mind in their missionary efforts. This appears to be a driving force in Paul's attempts to collect this offering, which he mentions in multiple letters. Why does Luke make no mention of this aspect of the sharing with regard to the Council at Jerusalem or to this practice occurring between various churches in his Acts of the Apostles? This seems like precisely the sort of thing Luke would have seized upon, much like is reference to "holding things in common" in Acts 2 through 5.

While there are some important principles in these two chapters I would be cautious about building an economic ethic based primarily on this text.

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7 technologies that will save the Earth in 2008

Yahoo! Green: 7 technologies that will save the Earth in 2008

EcoGeek is here to keep you informed of the latest technologies that make our lives better while ensuring that we don't spoil the Earth at the same time. Here are 10 technologies that I can't wait for, and that I think we'll see to varying degrees in 2008. ...

A better way to pay CEOs

Christian Science Monitor: A better way to pay CEOs

... No, I'm not calling for limits on CEO pay. Capitalism thrives on incentives, and compensation ceilings distort those incentives. But there is a better way to pay CEOs, by using incentives to refocus them on building longer-term, sustainable company value. ...

.......

Since the mid-1990s, American CEOs have been paid primarily in megagrants of stock and stock options – especially high-octane options – on the theory that having lots of "skin" in the game better aligns CEO interests with those of the firm's shareholders than would a large base salary. As is well known by now, these high-powered incentives have, in recent years, prompted a small minority of corporate CEOs to cheat by falsifying their accounting. But far more broadly, they have enticed honest CEOs to gamble imprudently with (mostly) other people's money, because it makes sense within these pay structures to play for unlimited upside while – at least in terms of compensation – there is a floor to downside risk.

Investing huge sums in subprime mortgage securities held out the prospect of massive returns if CEOs bet right. True, as Morgan's Mack and many of his peers have learned the hard way, betting wrong isn't cost-free. But with sky-high upside if the gamble pays off, and downside risk limited to a foregone bonus – or even, in extreme cases, a firing softened by the lucrative exit packages now taken for granted – there isn't enough deterrent to reckless investments.

A better compensation system would set CEO pay based on current-year company performance, but would hold back the bulk of it (in a good year) on paper as only a tentative payable. That credit balance would be subject to meaningful reduction in the event of a subsequent poor year. The Harvard Management Company, which has had enormous success investing a university endowment that has now grown to $35 billion, has compensated its executives in this manner for many years.

Bloomberg Seeks New Way to Decide Who Is Poor

New York Times: Bloomberg Seeks New Way to Decide Who Is Poor

The Bloomberg administration, frustrated by the federal government’s Great Society method of determining who is poor, is developing its own measure, which city officials say will offer a more modern and accurate picture of poverty.

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg wants to adopt the new measure in part so he can better assess whether the tens of millions of dollars the city plans to spend on new anti-poverty programs will improve poor people’s standard of living.

But officials also hope the new measure will set off a nationwide re-examination of the current federal standard, and prompt other cities and states to adopt the city’s method.

The 42-year-old federal poverty standard, which is pegged to the annual cost of buying basic groceries, is widely viewed as outdated and off-target. The city’s formula would take into account the money families must spend annually on necessities including rent, utilities and child care. But it would also factor in the value of financial assistance received, like housing vouchers or food stamps.

The city’s efforts are already attracting attention. “There is widespread dissatisfaction with the current standard,” said Jack Tweedie, the director of the children and families program at the National Conference of State Legislators, which provides research to state legislators and policy makers.

“Because it is New York City adopting it, it could be a big step forward,” he said. “As it starts generating reports and data, others will be interested and you will get more momentum.” ...

Jesus as a Metaphorical Theologian (Kenneth Bailey)

I recently finished listening to Kenneth Bailey’s lecture series Jesus Interprets His Own Cross. In the opening lecture he makes some great comments about Jesus as a metaphorical theologian. Here is a transcription of some of his remarks. (I’m looking forward to his new book Jesus Through Middle Eastern Eyes: Cultural Studies in the Gospels.)

Now to understand Jesus as someone who is explaining his own cross, quite naturally we have to ask about Jesus as a theologian. The phrase itself may be new to you. Perhaps you have really never thought of Jesus as a theologian. You see, quite often what happens, almost unconsciously in our minds, is when we say “theologian” we think of Paul … Luke? Sure. John? No doubt? Peter? Why not? … we think of them as theologians and when we look at the person of our Lord what sort of comes on to the screen of our memory is “Aha! This is the Son of God. This is perfect man and perfect God. This is the one who dies for our sins and rises again victorious over sin and death, and he is the perfect example of love.” In short, we admire everything about him except his brains. Perhaps it really doesn’t occur to us that he has any. “Brains? Well… yes… he was a smart enough man but the things he had to say, well, we sort of learned those back in Sunday School. And they’re nice stories and, well, they’re kind of stories that kind of give us guidance as to how to live the Christian life, you know, the story of the Good Samaritan… how we’re supposed to help other people even though they’re not part of our community … yes... the stories of Jesus do have what we call ethics. They do have instructions as to how we should live. They are interesting stories. They’re fine to get us started in the Sunday School.” But they are also profound insights into the secrets of the Kingdom of God and often they are profound insights into the nature of the person of our Lord himself.

When we think of Jesus as a theologian, we have to consider metaphorical theology. In our Western tradition, generally we have done our theology out of a structure of philosophy. In the early centuries of the Christian Church, the dominant philosophy, that is the structure of the way people did their thinking, was Platonism, following the ideas of the great philosopher of Greece, Plato. In the middle ages, they did their theology and their philosophy in Aristotelian terms. During the Reformation it was Scholasticism. After the Reformation comes the age of Rationalism; comes then the Hegelianism of the nineteenth century; the existentialism of the early twentieth century; now people are talking about process philosophy, and thereby process theology, and thereby exegesis, interpretation of the Bible in the light of this philosophy. This is fine. If there are brilliant men and women who can structure Christian thinking in the sort of the wave lengths of the philosophical mood of the day, that’s fine. May God’s spirit bless them. They render all of us a great service. But there is another way of doing theology.

It has been my privilege to spend my life ever since I was four and half years old in the Middle East, and in the Middle East serious thinkers do their thinking in pictures; in concrete images. They don’t do it structured around a philosophical mood, but they do it in terms of those pictures. I’m sure you’ve all heard of the great English writer George Orwell who produced Animal Farm and 1984. In one of his essays about the nature of language, he takes a couple of verses from Ecclesiastes in the Old Testament and then he translates them into philosophical, conceptual, theological language, of the kind that we use in our Western tradition. Listen carefully to the two of these and try and hear and feel and perceive the different ways by which the biblical author and then George Orwell, in his translation, are trying to communicate with you. First of all, Ecclesiastes:

“I returned and saw under the sun
that the race is not to the swift,
nor the battle to the strong,
neither yet bread to the wise,
nor yet riches to men of understanding,
nor yet favor to men of skill,
but time and chance happeneth to them all.”

Alright. Now here is George Orwell’s translation:

“Objective considerations of contemporary phenomena compels the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity. But that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account.”

Now the contrasts are so sharp it’s, you know, it’s almost funny. Here is the biblical author speaking with these rich colorful pictures. Then we have taken these as abstract ideas and put them into this almost mumbo-jumbo language of philosophy and of theology and … alright … it says a part of it, but it doesn’t say all of it. Why? Because someone who talks in pictures … we’re going to call them metaphors or parables, and we’re going to put together the simile, the metaphor, the proverb, the parable, and the dramatic action. Because all five of them are of a class. They are a class in which the author is making his point by reference to something concrete.

Now mind you the author is not giving you an idea and then explaining that idea with an illustration. No. No. The author is giving you the meaning with the metaphor. The two are wedded together. The cross is not just an example of how God loves, and so thereby we could say “Well, yes, this is a biblically approved illustration but, Ah!, for the Greeks we could talk about Thermopolis, and for the Americans we can talk about George Washington crossing the Delaware; here is a great historical act in which a great figure is willing to suffer in order to save his people, and so thereby the theology is an idea. This idea then has certain illustrations.” No. No.

In biblical theology the meaning and the way by which that meaning is expressed in the biblical metaphor or the dramatic action are a single unit. You can not separate them out and say “Here’s the idea and then here’s the illustration of it, and we could find other illustrations that might be just as good.” Part of why that’s true is that the center of Jesus as a metaphorical theologian is his own person. And we will find that his own person occurs in some of these great teachings. We are not comparing Jesus to a Hans Christian Anderson; somebody who can express wonderful ideas through pictures and through stories, and so thereby we can take the parables of Jesus and the stories of Hans Christian Anderson and maybe we could find similar themes and say that they are in some sense equal. No. Because the person of Hans Christian Anderson is not at the heart of the ideas he’s trying to get across as he tells his stories. But the person of Jesus is at the heart of what he is proclaiming; the heart of the Kingdom which he comes to inaugurate; the entering of God into history through his life and his cross and his death and his resurrection. Thereby, when we look at Jesus as a metaphorical theologian, we’re dealing with great theology. We’re dealing with theology at its most weighty levels. Not at simply stories for children in the Sunday School.