Christianity and economics

Namely, how does captialism jibe with Christianity?

In the early 1900's the downside of capitalism's impact on a free society became apparent. Large and powerful trusts had developed and had to be checked in the interest of maintaining a free society. However it wasn't just the goverment that did the checking, it was the captians of industry that began to check themselves and each other. Call it the first example of compassionite conservatism. The captians of industry appealed to the Christian principles of duty and obligation to their fellow Man.

A great example of this is Milton Hersey. Mr. Hersey built a town surrounding his plant that adress most of the needs of society, including school, college, and hospital. Another local example was the George Junior Republic near Freeville,NY. Mr. Junior develop a community for wayward youth to give them an education and develop chacterer. The school had its own beef farm, horse farm, dariy, monetary system and penal system. He took kids that were going to prison and turned them into happy, healthy and productive human beings.

Capitalism itself seems to be a sensible thing to do, moving financial resources to ventures that require funding. However, today there is such a disconnect between those supplying the capital and those using it that behavior contrary to Christian beliefs is bound to occur. Whether it is Union Retirment Funds or an individual 401K, the investor is simply motivated by what yields the highest return and doesn't even know what companies or coporations they are invested in. On the other end, a CEO only knows that if he/she can't elevate stock prices, he/she will be out of a job. There is no oppurtunity to consider trade-offs between doing the Christian thing and elevating stock prices.

Back on the investor end, do we as individual Christian really want to take personal responsibilty for investments or, do we just want act as if we have no choice in exchange for a higher rate of return? I can't believe God will accept a "higher rate of return" as a valid excuse.

This is a great topic, thanks for posting it. I'm dashing off to do some work on campus, but I'll be mulling it over in the back of my mind and (hopefully) have something halfway intelligible to post when I come home.

This is a great topic, stihl, and I read it twice yesterday knowing that I'd need more than a minute to formulate a response.

I loved this point: there is such a disconnect between those supplying the capital and those using it. Indeed. Capitalism of say a hundred years ago meant rich white male bankers in Manhattan funding rich white male entrepeneurs with an office in Manhattan. Today, it's middle-class me checking a box on a form that HR gives me that I am willing to take a "moderate risk" with the ten percent of my income that goes to TIAA-CREF. Surely somebody somewhere knows what they invest in and whether or not its ethical. Right? I mean, I tend to take it for granted that since it's the teachers' retirement fund, it's probably not building its returns on blood diamonds and child labor. But I don't know that.

Which then leads me to wonder, isn't it ideal for capitalism to have blind investors like me who don't ask questions about where the money goes? Don't they make MORE in returns because they don't have pesky investors saying "you can't invest there"? And don't I then get a bigger pile in my retirement fund by not asking questions?

Christian? Not much.

On the other hand, because my money is pooled with others, I have practically no say at all where it goes. Even if I asked, I'm one vote in millions. My only option would be to opt out of the retirement plan completely, and I don't know if that's even an option.

Another thing that occurs to me is that because so much of our money is pooled together, the only effective action is group action. Which is to say, ethical investing has moved into the political arena, where investors have to duke it out over the good old left/right political divide. I wouldn't, as a Catholic, want my mutual fund to invest in embryonic stem cell research, but that's also a "right wing" view, and liberal investors would balk at having the mutual fund divest of stock just because some "theocrat" like me has crazy, primitive views about the sanctity of human life. Conversely, I am in a teachers' group that I could seriously see divesting itself of any stock in companies in Israel, as a way of punishing Israel and taking a moral stand with our "brothers and sisters" in Hamas. Yikes.

I guess my point is that since so few people actually invest as individuals anymore, our power is practically nil and our decisions are often necessarily made as a group, which means politics.

That said, I think that when people put pressure on companies who did invest in South Africa, it precipitated the end of apartheid. So score one for investing with conscience.

This deviates from the religous aspect a bit but, it still illustrates the "disconnect".

Union retirement funds are pooled and invested the same way, the investment fund that gives a suitable balance of risk and return. The "XYZ" Corporation is doing well because it has outsourced its manufacturing to China. The investment broker in turn invests Union member money in that Coporation. What Union members have gained in their retirment accounts they have more than loss in a weaker American economy.

Turing this back into Christianity, would the Christian Union worker want to give up 30% of growth in the retirement fund in exchange for taking personal responsibilty for the impact of his investment contribution?

is that I can feel myself becoming panicky just trying to wrap my head around the whole thing. I have educated myself so little as to how all this stuff even works, that I'm not even sure I understand your last question, stihl.

...get befuddled with economics.

I have found it easier to think in terms of "standard of living" rather than money.

How do you like my new advatar. You already had St. Francis, I didn't want to be a copy cat(holic). I'm king of the world!

First, I like your avatar, though I'm sure there's room for more than one St. Francis. I chose him because he's my patron saint, and I got big props back in seventh grade when I wrote an essay on him, and I've never forgotten it.

Anywho, it's taken me forever, but I'm still thinking about this topic. I realized that for me, I think about it less in terms of capitalism than in terms of consumerism. I've become very conscious of what it means to be a consumer in America. This first started to happen when I was interested in environmentalism and engaged in many discussions about what to buy, who to buy from, how not to buy stuff, etc.. I noticed two things: one, that many of my friends were former Protestant Christians, who seemd to have turned their evangelical zeal towards "the earth," and two, that like Chritianity before it, the environmental movement seemed to breed Puritans. So I would be sitting around the campfire with people who would tick off the kinds of products they bought with a great sense of virtue. Like all Puritans, they were a tad annoying.

But this did get me thinking, nonetheless. And what I realized was that, first, one can never be clean. Buying involves a lot of moral amnbiguity. Do I not buy goods from a country that uses child labor, or do I accept that child labor helps some families get by in places I will never live? I still don't know. I also realized that buying is never really amoral--we can't just close our eyes and hope for the best. Neither can we become holier than thou. In fact, the marketplace seems to bring into relief issues of vice and virtue that we might otherwise believe were extinct in the secular modern world.

Which brings me to the final point, of how I negotiate this, to which the answer is, not really so well, frankly. I probably tend to fall far too often on the side of smug superiority, where I mistake my innate frugality for goodness and others' profligacy as badness. But I do try to think about where my money goes. Though I hate to quote bumper stickers, I do try to live more simply so that others may simply live, and I try to establish a connection between having me and my family do with a little less so that we can channel more resources to those who really have less. I try to support local small stores, both for the purely selfish reasons that I like them, but also because I think they're good for communities. I don't think it's good for people to feel mass-marketed and produced by some conglomerate, and I don't think this is just a surface thing. I have a list of places I try to hit up regularly--a local pet store, a produce place, an independent coffee shop--to help show my support (alas, I have no independent bookstore to frequent, they have all been driven out).

At the same time, to repeat an earlier point, I try not to get too smug about it. Big companies emply a lot of people, and I shop at Target just as much as the next person.

I'm like Hamlet in the paper products aisle, trying to figure out if I want to buy the recycled paper towels because I care about the earth or because I want to feel like I care about the earth, and it only costs ten cents more to give myself a little frisson of virtue. And sometimes I don't buy the recycled because I question my motives for buying it, thus letting my own disgust at my own selfish motives keep me from doing something that may in fact be the right thing to do.

In a way it comes back to that great old argument--Friends did this so well in an episode where Joey tormented Phoebe--that if I feel good doing the right thing, I am really doing it for selfish reasons and it's not big of me or virtuous at all, which in turn becomes the rationale for not doing the right thing.

This is actually my profession so I have spent the last 20 years managing land in an attempt to sustain production.

We know how to do it. The science is there but, our cultural and society doesn't match up with sustainable natural resources. This whole issue is what brought me back to my Fatih. After 20 years of taking sustainablity as a personal challenge, I finally realize the issue is Man and his Fallen nature. That is something I can not change.

Sustainability is a simple matter of input and output. Natural systems grow and regenerate at their own pace, that is the input side of the equation. The output side is the human demand which, at this time, we have no control over. Isn't that ironic.

Tying this back into your comments Craddle, the conclusion I have reached after 20 years is that we must be tied in locally to our resources so that the individual can appreciate the limitations of the natural systems (and un-natural systems like farming).

Years ago I didn't think much of recycling. Natural resources, as a land use, competes with other land use (such as housing). To keep land producing natural resources, it has to compete with other land uses. It can only do so if the products coming from that land have value.

Ultimately it does come down to human population and its demand for resources.

that farming is unnatural. I was listening to Michael Pollan yesterday who write In Defense of Food (a book that wasn't nearly as interesting ot me as I had thought it would be based on the hype--do I need that many pages to realize I shouldn't eat processed food?) and he made the point that when humans switched from huntinng and gathering to agriculture it took a long time for our bodies to catch up. And that our primary relationship with the land has to do with food.

It made me pause and think what an extraordinary place this is, where we have to eat up what is around us to survive. It made me think of the Eucharist, actually--how amazing that God would choose eating as a core part of his persence in our lives. Recently, my daughter was making her first communion, and the parents all had to attend a refresher on the Mass. The priest pointed out that the bread and the wine remain separate until they are ingested--our bodies are the key to their coming together. How wonderful but also kind of funny and weird and earthy.

by a Catholic mother and writer who's interested in applying her faith to her consumerism:

http://takethepoorwithyou.blogspot.com/