Gaining the Whole World
posted by Frank Pasquale
I want to respond to Ilya Somin’s claim that religious leaders need to learn (some version of) economics before opining on social justice. A curious editorial by Arthur Brooks provides a nice entree into the topic.
Mr. Brooks writes frequently on the WSJ editorial page on charity and religion. He lauds the charitable sector as superior to government-funded services, and offers survey evidence to demonstrate that religious people are both more charitable and happier than their secular peers. Brooks found the revelation of Mother Teresa’s profound and persistent sorrow a reason to re-emphasize that fact that, on average, the religious are statistically more likely to be happier than others:
The happiness gap between religious and secular people is not because of money or other personal characteristics. Imagine two people who are identical in every important way — income, education, age, sex, family status, race and political views. The only difference is that the first person is religious; the second is secular. The religious person will still be 21 percentage points more likely than the secular person to say that he or she is very happy.
On one level, I think this is important data: a classic premise of natural law is that submission to right belief and right action makes for genuine happiness. You only need to watch a few episodes of “Behind the Music” to get a sense of where untrammeled hedonism will lead.
However, the failthful also embrace the negative emotions associated with religious experience. A religious person may feel guilt or self-reproach at how little he’s done to relieve the world’s suffering. Penance is not a fun experience. Perhaps the Book of Ecclesiastes put it best: “in much wisdom is much grief: and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow.” As Kierkegaard critiqued a complacent Christendom, so too should the modern believer question any effort to facilely align personal/national prosperity and Christian teaching.
I thus question Brooks’s “validation” of religious faith by its statistical correlation to “happiness”–particularly the crude measures of that state common to survey instruments. Much of religious thought refuses to be contained in our ordinary notions of well-being or success, a point eloquently made in the series of paradoxes posed in the prayer of St. Francis.
These paradoxes also render suspect the many suggestions of market-oriented thinkers that church leaders need to conform social teaching to particular economic models.
First, there are separate economic and cultural spheres, and churches are often more interested in how the former affects the latter than on the growth of the economy as such. For example, Daniel Finn’s The Moral Ecology of Markets makes the following observation:
Economists focus on small, ‘marginal’ changes, investigating the effects caused elsewhere when any one piece of the system changes. But this approach in any discipline tends to ignore the larger institutional framework within which these changes occur and thus often ignores the cumulative change that a long series of marginal changes will cause. Broad cultural shifts can occur, undermining fundamental moral values. (4)
For example, a series of Pareto-optimal, mutually beneficial exchanges may well lead workers to embrace 7-day workweeks, and self-interested votes may lead a majority to end the taxation that currently pays for health care for the disabled and elderly. Such a situation may well maximize GDP. But as George Garvey says in his Catholic critique of law and economics, “The principle of solidarity [evident in Papal encyclicals on social justice] does not permit indifference to the impact of growth-promoting policies on any individual or class of individuals. An economic ‘underclass’ cannot be tolerated as a prices for the growth of aggregate wealth.” (in Christian Perspectives on Legal Thought, 240, emphasis added).
Why, then, are so many market-oriented thinkers so eager to constrain religious teachings on social justice? In his book A Secular Age, Charles Taylor notes a curious turn in modern thinking that occurred a few centuries ago:
[The economy] came to be seen more and more as the dominant end of society. . . . Instead of being merely the management, by those in authority, of the resources we collectively need, in household or state, the ‘economic’ now defines a way in which we are linked together, a sphere of coexistence which could in principle suffice to itself, if only disorder and conflict didn’t threaten. (178, 181)
This line of thought culminates in Hayek’s description of the market as a “complex order structured by a spontaneous process” (in Finn’s words). Economic thought breaks free of a moral order, and is increasingly seen as autonomous of accountability to moral traditions or democratic will. Taylor notes a fundamental split in response to that unmooring of economic from moral thought: “What for one school falls into the domain of an objective take on unavoidable reality, may seem to another to be a surrender of the human capacity to design our world before a false ‘positivity’” (184). Somin’s rhetoric is essentially an extension of the former position–the idea that certain economic realities are so unalterable that is inevitably foolhardy to try to counter them.
I’m deeply troubled by that development, but I see why it’s so tempting. Modern life is ruthlessly competitive, both personally and internationally. It would be nice to think that the kind of economic dynamism necessary to support, say, big cars (for highway arms races) or big bombs (for the projection of force in international arms races) is perfectly congruent with the teaching of a sacred text. But I find it hard to square that self-assertion with my own tradition, which urges its followers to “turn the other cheek,” declares “the last shall be first,” and blesses the meek and poor.
September 25, 2007 at 1:42 pm
Posted in: Religion
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Responses (1)
anon - September 26, 2007 at 1:44 pm
Isn’t this post obscuring the proper role of economic analysis? Economic analysis (properly understood0 does not dictate proper ends or “just” results; it provides a mechanism for evaluating and comparing results. In other words, asking religious leaders to use economic analysis when making claims regarding social justice is merely asking them to use an evaluative tool – a mechanism by which they can better evaluate who “wins” and who “loses.” In my view, this is a very good idea.
Economic models do not dictate that building bigger cars is necessarily better than financing soup kitchens. Certainly, they may indicate that building cars increases social welfare more than a given charitable activity, and they could tell us about the distributive consequences of each activity. The model, however, properly understood, would leave it to us to judge whether such a result is “good” or “bad” in a normative sense. This is why I am confused by your apparent belief that there is something incompatible between economic modeling and religious (or other) morals.
Perhaps the point of your post is that other people (mistakenly) equate increasing social welfare as a better end than some religious social justice views. That’s certainly a good point, but I think its worth making it more precisely.
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