When Fair is Foul: The Economy of Everything, Part One

This is the first of a four part series on the economy of everything. Part One below talks about the disastrous creed that is ‘growth for the sake of growth’. Part Two discusses how the resulting network of manipulatory power warps our souls. Part Three is a call to repentance and right worship. And Part Four puts forward a vision of a better way.

When Fair is Foul: The Economy of Everything, Part One

I am occasionally asked whether or not Christians should favor capitalism. I find that people have very different ideas about what this means. If by ‘capitalism’ one is referring to the manipulation of people and resources for one’s own gain, then the answer is emphatically ‘No.” But if by ‘capitalism’ we mean the free and responsible ownership of resources by whoever gives value for what they receive, then I generally support the idea.

I expect some will find this answer unsatisfactory. But I suggest we ask a more basic question. Instead of arguing over which economic system is best (which presumes a will to power), perhaps we need to consider what an economy is for. Because, like everything, our economic life must be rightly ordered towards a proper end if we hope to truly prosper.

The Utility of Markets

First, we should never take for granted the miracle of uncoordinated action. The fact that the world evolved into its current state is truly miraculous. And the fact that things don’t all just fall apart is equally miraculous. It’s an absolute marvel that coordination occurs across society in such an unplanned way.¹ We hardly notice when things are humming along. It’s only those occasions when the lights go out or the network drops that we even think about these systems that we rely so heavily on.

For those weary of free market capitalism, it is important to understand that the alternative to free exchange is not cooperation but coercion. When trade is free, transparent, and entirely voluntary both sides naturally benefit. Each is giving up something they value less for something they value more. The mutual benefits become distorted when information is obscured or when rules, regulations, and tax policies interfere. But even when exchange is completely transparent and voluntary this doesn’t mean both sides benefit equally. It is possible, perhaps likely, that one side benefits substantially more than the other. It’s important we to acknowledge that asymmetries exist.

Nonetheless, markets generally do a good job of allocating scarce resources to the most productive uses. Nothing beats the market at setting prices.² Communist central planners never came close to duplicating this function of the market. But markets have their limitations. Markets are easily gamed.³ Hence, the religious-like worship that many free marketeers espouse is unwarranted. But so is the disdain others have for profit. Profit is not inherently evil. Profits tell us which goods are most economical to make and what methods are most economical for producing them. This is information worth knowing. But the single-minded pursuit of profit also unleashes things that are incongruent with our nature like drug dealing and porn.

One issue with markets is that demand is weighted by one’s purchasing power. A key problem for the poor is their inability to express demand. When the market is denied this crucial information food gets allocated to wealthier Americans who are obese instead of starving Zambians. Food is obviously worth more to the starving person than to the overweight American. Someone who is starving and down to their last dime would give practically anything for a meal. But when everything you have still doesn’t amount to the cost of a Big Mac, you can guess who does not get the Big Mac.

There’s obviously a lot more to poverty than the inability to express demand. Wealthy countries are known to subsidize overproduction and then ‘charitably’ dump the surplus on poorer countries. Instead of helping, this effectively destroys the local markets for these goods putting local producers out of business. As Wendel Berry put it, “the ‘free market’ is freest to those who have the most money, and is not free at all to those with little or no money.”⁴ This is neither just nor sustainable.

Now there’s an argument to be made that market distortions like the dumping scheme are antithetical to free markets. One might rightly consider this an an intervention failure rather than a market failure. But this is largely a false distinction. States and industry partners coalesce into public-private partnerships that jointly handle governance. Most interventions are cooked up by industry groups using the levers of government to do their bidding. Western democracies go to great lengths to prevent the concentration of political power by separating legislative, executive, and judicial functions, but if we fail to account for the concentration of economic power then these political mechanizations are easily subverted. Corporations become extensions of the state apparatus. Power quickly replaces justice as the organizing principle.⁵ In practice, we find that both capitalism and socialism devolve into oligarchical systems where relatively few own practically everything and dictate how the rest of us are to live.⁶ It is unclear whether this is a feature or a bug.

Free market purists, of which I am sympathetic, should realize that these so-called free markets depend on constant intervention to keep and sustain them. Patrick Deneen points out that laissez-faire takes considerable effort. The extension of markets requires an expansion of infrastructure which generally relies heavily on state interventions. For example, medieval guilds have to be dissolved and native Americans have to be removed.⁷ As the English writer Paul Kingsnorth says, “Machine capitalism did not ‘evolve’ from small-scale artisan or peasant societies: they had to be deliberately destroyed in order that it might replace them.”⁸ Capitalism, for all its merits, is not completely benign. There is a downside, Deneen points out. That is, it dissolves traditional relationships, cultural norms, generational thinking, and the practices that subordinate market considerations to those born of interpersonal bonds and charity.⁹ In fact, anything that stands in the path of commercial expansion is at risk — historical traditions, local economies, trade unions, indigenous cultures, religions, even nations themselves.

Another inherent problem is that markets exclude future generations. There is no way for our descendants to express their interests in today’s market. Critical capital like energy, water and ecosystems, for which there are limited substitutes, have inelastic demand. And the more we consume today the more scarce these become in the future. It’s taken on faith that technological advances will alleviate scarcity in the future. But common sense tells us we cannot deplete or destroy finite resources forever without suffering any ill effects. And biophysical thresholds, like the onset of physiological starvation, are not likely to change much.

Markets also tend to exploit short-term preferences. This is quite natural. We find selection for near-term advantages over long-term viability not only in market-based economies, but also in organisms and even across civilizations. This is because near-term benefits and harms are usually more apparent. Long-term harms are much less obvious. There is a willingness to accept harm in old age when the early benefits are so obvious and immediate. In their recent book, Heather Heying and Bret Weinstein talk about how our economic and political system, coupled with an obsession for growth, inflicts policies and behaviors that might seem reasonable in the moment, but in some cases turn out to be irreversibly bad for people and the planet.¹⁰

Proponents of the free market put their faith in the invisible hand of the market to restrain bad actors. They argue that the market disciplines anyone who puts out an inferior or defective product. There is truth to this. Matthew Crawford points out a problem though. “The time scale on which the market administers its omniscient justice may be quite a bit longer than crucial episodes in the working life of a mortal human being.”¹¹

This preference for near-term advantages leads to an evolved senescence. I can’t help but wonder if that’s what our society now faces as we start to notice illness bubbling up across practically every domain; we’re more psychologically vulnerable and socially atomized, families are increasingly fractured, our diet and devices are literally deforming our bodies and imposing a type of learned helplessness on us. Information replaces wisdom. Hookups and porn are substituted for meaningful relationships. This premium on instant gratification leads to the ‘junkification‘ of everything.¹² We end up with fast food, porn, and social media at the expense of proper nutrition and deep committed relationships. Few would go for such a trade if it were offered. And yet we are somehow unable stop all this from happening. These market forces are stronger than we realize.

The Illusion of Liberty

We’re not nearly as independent as we like to think. Other people’s private economic choices affect me. What my neighbors buy, sell, produce, and consume can make my own preferred way of life easier or harder to obtain. Not only can their taste and lifestyle influence mine, it can change the world around me in ways that I find quite troubling. Now consider that your interests are often in direct conflict with the companies that are trying to sell you something. For these companies to grow they have to manufacture needs and desires. And the less we’re able to do for ourselves the more we need from them. We become dependent on the corporate-state for even basic needs.

Let’s be clear, the purpose of marketing is manipulation. The goal is it to get you to buy something. Occasionally that might just mean making people aware of a product that could benefit them. But marketing is just as likely to conceal as it is to inform. It creates illusions we call brands and scientifically manipulates us. And in the age of surveillance capitalism this is far more sophisticated than we imagine. These companies argue that they’re just giving people what they want. Nobody is forcing anyone to buy anything. The crack dealer says the same thing.

As far as the free market is concerned, freedom is generally conceived as the absence of interference. When we make freedom the highest good we make all other goods subordinate to it. William Cavenaugh explains that this particular conception of freedom doesn’t recognize any common ends to which our desires are directed. In the absence of such ends, what remains is merely the arbitrary power of one will against another. In other words, in a world where freedom is everything one is only free to the extent that one has power over others. Other people, as well as nature and society, represent limits. And so, “Freedom thus gives way to the aggrandizement of power and the manipulation of will and desire by the greater power. The liberation of desire from ends, on the one hand, and the domination of impersonal power, on the other, are two sides of the same coin.”¹³

Power disparity doesn’t lead to freedom, but to serfdom. For example, financial institutions and universities conspire with the Federal government to make student loans both readily available and impossible to discharge. This creates an insatiable demand for loans while eliminating any sort of fiscal discipline at these institutions. Tuition soars while the abundance of loans sustains a supply of graduates well in excess of the demand for young professionals. As Patrick Deneen says, we end up with “a new form of servant class” made up of heavily indebted hospitality workers, restaurant servers, nannies, “along with modern-day tutors (SAT prep courses) and wet nurses (day care).”¹⁴ Those of us college graduates fortunate enough to land a professional job have marginally better options. We become commuters who “have almost endless choices of the kind of car to drive but few options over whether we will spend large parts of our lives in soul-deadening boredom within them.”¹⁵ For many of us it’s the consumer debt and health insurance that keep us traveling these great distances everyday.

Pursuing economic growth just for the sake of growth requires us all to become economic migrants. As Paul Tyson says, we become “urban wage-earning consumers of goods, services, and entertainments provided by the global powers that we now simply serve.”¹⁶ Anthony Esolen puts this into perspective, “We are in debt over the eyeballs, we cannot make ends meet even on two incomes, and yet we hug ourselves for being ‘liberated,’ looking with pity on a grandmother who in a single day did fifty skillful things for people she loved, rather than spending eight hours fielding phone calls in an office or scraping plaque off the teeth of strangers.”¹⁷

The Disastrous Creed of Growth

It’s worth considering what an economy is actually for. We treat it as a given that the economy must grow. But growth for the sake of growth is a disastrous creed. Even our biology recognizes this. We don’t grow perpetually. Instead we reach a certain size and then stop. That’s because the costs to sustain us dramatically increase the more we increase in size. The same holds for an economy. Eventually growth runs up against planetary boundaries. The oceans and atmosphere are vast but finite. And these economic gains are often achieved at great social costs.¹⁸ What is the point of unprecedented growth if it means that the soil is denuded, the water polluted, and the food lacks nutrition all while life becomes sterile and communities are perishing?

Treating growth as the normal state and expecting it to go on forever is about as foolhardy as building a perpetual motion machine. Making growth the ultimate goal is dangerous in so far as it causes us to stop looking for other possibilities.¹⁹ This idea of a limitless economy subscribes to a doctrine of general human limitlessness. This war on limits, at its core, is an attempt to supplant God.

Even those who may not be fully on board with the idol of economic growth seem to posit that an economy is primarily for bringing about material prosperity. People like Bjorn Lomborg and Matt Ridley do an excellent job pointing out how the world continues to improve materially. And yet their prosperity gospel message faces stiff headwinds of pessimism. While I’m generally a fan of their work, I find the unqualified celebration of material prosperity lacking. Our materialist society falls flat on so many other dimensions. I write about that here. There must be something more, for what does it profit a man to gain the whole world only to lose his soul?²⁰

To Work is to Pray

The economy is not an impersonal force for efficiency or a lever of control. It’s communal. It’s relational. An economy, like everything else, is for the life of the world. It offers the “glorious opportunity to join with others, literally millions of others, in the divine project of a vast creativity, vast abundance, for the meeting of needs, for the flourishing of cities, for the life of the world.”²¹ Every product, every purchase is; “a touch point, a nexus of millions of relationships.”²²

Work is creative service. When we share the products of our work with others in free and open exchange we are participants in a grand collaboration. We blend the creativity of our mind with the creativity of others. And we blend the labor of our body with the labor of others. In other words, work is a gift:

Consider the lilies and and how they grow. They labor not. Neither do they spin. But I say to you, not even Solomon in all his glory was clothed like one of these.²³ Jesus commands us not to be anxious about our needs. So why then do we toil? Not merely to tend our bodies, but also to shape our souls. In giving us work, God invites us to blend the creativity of our minds with the labor of our bodies, and then to share the products of this work with others in free exchange to make real our communal nature, our gift nature through personal callings. We must never see our work as simply a way to gain. We must never see our labor as an impersonal force of efficiency. We must never see our work as a mechanism that we might control with levers and switches and power. And all our work together, that’s not a machine either. Work is always personal because working is always relational. Whether you are a janitor, a CEO, or a programmer, work is creative service so let us cherish our work as the glorious gift that it is.²⁴

Value exists in the relationship of exchange. The fruit of our work is borne in relationship with countless others. Work is a reminder that we are not alone and were never intended to be. As the great sage Wendell Berry puts it, “It is by way of the practice of vocation that sanctity and reverence enter into the human economy. It was thus possible for traditional cultures to conceive that ‘to work is to pray.’”²⁵

But now the work done by the vast majority of modern people is illegible. Alasdair MacIntyre explains the erosion of the intrinsic value of work. Work was once seen as sustaining the community of the household and thus the wider forms of community which the household supports. For most of us, production has now moved outside the household. Our work is put to the service of impersonal capital.²⁶ Thus, work tends to be separated from everything but our biological survival and the accumulation of possessions. Work is just a means to an end. It no longer has any intrinsic value. Practices are moved to the margins of social and cultural life. We enjoy art, science, and sport as mere spectators or consumers. We once engaged in these practices. Now we merely engage in aesthetic consumption.²⁷ This leads to an abandonment of the real economy.

The Abandonment of the Real Economy

The global economy is now built on a vast network of deficit economies untethered from the constraints of the real economy of scarcity. This decoupling from the real economy causes us confuse money with wealth. So we naively think we can print wealth. Gimmicks like minting a trillion dollar coin as a solution to runaway debt gain traction.²⁸ But increasing the supply of money doesn’t increase the amount of goods and services available for purchase. In other words, you cannot buy twice as many goods unless twice as many goods are produced. Credit does not supplant real savings. Infusions of credit merely create an illusion of more capital much like adding water creates the illusion of more milk.²⁹

Such illusions are all too common. Corporations grow artificial wealth by extracting the real wealth of the planet. For many of us, our employers no longer produce actual goods. That’s increasingly done someplace else. If a company does produce goods, the goods are usually secondary. The main focus is on projecting a brand. In other words, selective symbolic distinctions engineered to produce a particular state of mind in the consumer. It’s an attention economy that manufactures desire and dissatisfaction.

Customers are no longer seen as people to serve, but as consumers to manipulate. Companies market the same products under different labels over a range of prices to capture as much market share as possible. They stop trying to create anything of real value. Rather than creating more robust and durable products, engineering departments devote resources to concepts like “planned obsolescence” to ensure future demand. They employ addiction specialists who coach them on how to dribble out new features to stimulate unarticulated desires that ensure sales of next year’s model. Marketing departments employ state-of-the-art mind hacks just slightly more subtle than mass hypnosis. It’s all smoke and mirrors.

Ignorance is a key feature of this system. Wendell Berry introduces the concepts of ‘for-profit ignorance’ and ‘for-power ignorance.’ Both are maintained by withholding knowledge. Public relations firms and advertising agencies specialize in for-profit ignorance. This engineered ignorance makes it impossible to choose products that were produced with any degree of kindness toward people and respect for nature. Whereas for-power ignorance is propagated by government secrecy and public lies.³⁰ People aren’t educated. Instead they are groomed to be highly suggestible. They lack any real will-power “in the sense of self-control and self-motivation, but not of will in the sense of acquisitive greed and desire to manipulate.”³¹ The most successful businesses and governments effectively become deceit mills.³² The most talented scam architects find jobs within financial institutions and marketing agencies.

The workplace gets dumbed down too. What most workers do on a daily basis today has almost no value apart from the work of everyone else. Their work has no obvious effect. Managers simply manage appearances. There are no objective standards by which to measure such performance. Judgment and intuition are stripped away. Work is reduced to following procedures and checking boxes. Conscientiousness becomes a liability in such a system that rewards irresponsibility and ignorance. This degradation of work damages the best parts of us.

Alienation is another feature of the system. The worker is no longer directly connected with the object of one’s efforts. Producers and consumers are so far removed from one another that there is no perceivable relationship between them. Any relationship that exists is purely transactional. Even the beneficiaries of the globalized economy are physically separated from those it leaves behind. Wendell Berry observes that the system works best when the relatively affluent are made dependent on purchased goods while the markets for labor and raw materials remain perpetually depressed. To maintain these conditions the supply of workers should always exceed demand and the land must always be made to overproduce.³³ And so relatively affluent countries shift the production of goods elsewhere.

It’s a system that treats corporations like people and increasingly treats people like machines. For all it offers, the corporation lacks a certain humanity. As Wendell Berry points out, “a corporation is not a person. A corporation, essentially, is a pile of money to which a number of persons have sold their moral allegiance. Unlike a person, a corporation does not age. It does not arrive, as most persons finally do, at a realization of the shortness and smallness of human lives; it does not come to see the future as the lifetime of the children and grandchildren of anybody in particular. It can experience no personal hope or remorse, no change of heart. It cannot humble itself. It goes about its business as if it were immortal, with the single purpose of becoming a bigger pile of money.”³⁴

Economic Utopianism

Sometimes even the best intentions can be corrupting. For example eliminating poverty is a worthy goal. But it’s a utopian dream and, like other forms of utopianism, its single-minded pursuit warps our souls. The dominant modern belief assumes that universal prosperity leads to peace and happiness. So we set off to solve the economic problem believing the ends justify the means. We throw away ancient wisdom to pursue growth at any cost. By adopting this mindset society flirts with the devil himself. As Paul Kingsnorth points out, we now live in a culture that sees hardly anything troubling about the Seven Deadly Sins identified in the Western Christian tradition: gluttony, lust, pride, wrath, greed, sloth, and envy. Today, society actively encourages most of these. Pursuing them is “no longer something to be confessed or repented: it is the very thing which drives our notion of Progress forward.”³⁵

The economic theorist John Maynard Keynes saw this in his day. He viewed it as a temporary arrangement necessary to get us where we needed to be. Keynes recognized that “avarice is a vice, that the exaction of usury is a misdemeanour, and the love of money is detestable.”³⁶ But he had this notion that we could somehow discard the ancient wisdom for a time in order to usher in a universal prosperity. He wrote, “For at least another hundred years we must pretend to ourselves and to everyone that fair is foul and foul is fair; for foul is useful and fair is not. Avarice and usury and precaution must be our gods for a little longer still. For only they can lead us out of the tunnel of economic necessity into daylight.”³⁷ Once this utopian dream was realized Keynes imagined that we could then return to the principles of traditional virtue. Then we shall again “honour those who can teach us how to pluck the hour and the day virtuously and well, the delightful people who are capable of taking direct enjoyment in things, the lilies of the field who toil not, neither do they spin.”³⁸

Kingsnorth exposes the folly in thinking we can pretend fair is foul and foul is fair. “When we look around us we can see that Keynes’s naive notion — that a society which cores itself around ‘avarice and usury’ can suddenly drop those vices when some undefined plateau of perfection is reached — is ludicrous. Once you adopt these values, they will make and remake you. The world they have built will depend upon them being pursued forever.”³⁹ This is precisely where we find ourselves today. Kingsnorth continues, “a value system which glorifies wealth and accumulation, which builds itself on a platform of want, which inflames and creates more of it daily through a marketing machine which colonises the human mind — this is what every spiritual tradition in history has warned against, and with good reason.⁴⁰

This “Machine” that Kingsnorth rails against is real. Call it what you will — a system of oppression; a collective delusion; demonic possession; the Antichrist. Whatever it is, it’s turning the world into one big “global Gomorrah.” We are its inhabitants. Like it or not, we are shaped by it. The Machine makes servants of us all. That is the subject of Part Two.

^{Photo Credit: “NYC – Bowling Green: Charging Bull” by wallyg is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0}

When Fair is Foul: The Economy of Everything, Part One

The Utility of Markets

The Illusion of Liberty

The Disastrous Creed of Growth

To Work is to Pray

The Abandonment of the Real Economy

Economic Utopianism

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