Tag: economics

Thanks, I hate it

Owing to an interchange with somebody on Twitter, I have felt inspired to read Marx’s Capital. I haven’t gotten through the introduction yet, and I’m already horrified.

The version of Capital that I’m reading is the Penguin Classics edition, © 2004, with an introduction by Ernest Mandel, which was apparently written in 1974. Mandel is definitely on the bandwagon, and he keeps going on about the Labor theory of Value, which is both the most insightful thing ever, and also completely misunderstood by anybody who disagrees with it in any way.

Capitalism, or maybe surplus value of labor, exists in a world where the owners of the land on which a factory exists are not the owners of the company that works the factory. Apparently land owners are titled lords who own vast estates and rent that land to the factory owners, rather than selling. Similarly factory owners are singular entities, rather than shareholders. The owners of factories do no work of any kind. The only work that is done is people with actual wrenches, who pull levers on machines.

Gold Standard Inflation and Deflation

Here’s an article from the Mises Institute on why Austrian economists don’t really care about a gold standard.  I know you were looking for that.

One of the cool things I learned reading The Wealth of Nations was how even a gold standard can inflate or deflate.  Gold is valuable, and so people go looking for it.  As more is dug up, the supply of gold increases, which means the stuff is worth less, overall.  The Spanish gold from South America comes to mind.  Gold inflated something like 40% across Europe – and since all that cash wasn’t invested in anything productive, Spain endured a 100 year depression that they still haven’t recovered from.  On the other hand, because gold is so soft, and people use it for industrial and decorative use as well as for cash, it eventually wears off and can’t be recovered.  Very slowly over time, the natural process for gold as a currency is a slow deflation, or at least it would be, if people wouldn’t keep digging it up.

“a system under which bad men can do least harm”

Don Boudreaux has a feature on the Cafe Hayek blog, where he presents a daily quote from an economics text.  Here’s one on individualism, which seems to predate and improve upon Ayn Rand a great deal.  I didn’t know there was a word for what Adam Smith  was into, other than “economics.”

Top 10 Books

I don’t know who asked me to jump on this top 10 books list, but I’ve finally gotten round to it.  Here goes:

  • Emma, by Jane Austin.  It’s a long story, but this is how I decided I was looking for love in all the wrong places.  I had a long discussion with the girl who became my wife, shortly after reading this book
  • The Way the World Works, by June Wannasiki.  I don’t know that this is the best economics book.  Wannasiki is kind of like Algernon – he doesn’t necessarily write accurately, but he writes with wonderful expression.   Anyway, this book opened my eyes to the sort of political shenanigans that are being done in the name of bad economics.
  • Nine Marks of a Healthy Church, by Mark DeverI had been looking for what exactly was going wrong in the sort of churches I was going to.  Even in the prosperous, well-populated churches, there was something rotten about their state.  9Marks pointed me in the right direction. Incidentally, I gave my copy to somebody, so if you’d like to help me replenish my library…
  • Humility: True Greatness, by CJ Mahaney.  It was a toss-up between this and The Cross-Centered Life.  Either way, what I really appreciate about Mahaney’s little books is their practicality: “XYZ is true.  Here are some habits you can build into your life so it will have an practical effect.”  Want to be humble?  Start by thanking God that you get tired at night.
  • The Bruised Reed, by Richard Sibbes.  Just… Wow.  I used to want to be Dennis Jernigan when I grew up.  Now I want to be Richard Sibbes.  So incredibly helpful to see how exactly the Spirit of God works in actual broken hearts.  As a happy side effect: the sweetest, most reassuring teaching of God’s selection in salvation you have ever heard.
  • Surprised by Joy, by CS Lewis.  This is a cheat.  It stands in for “The Complete Works of,” which I understand is against the rules.  I might have been CS Lewis, if my middle class lawyer dad had just sent me to a private tutor for my entire high school, where I studied classics in Latin and Greek for 12 hours a day.  Surprised by Joy is less biography and more a spiritual memoir in the style of Augustin’s Confession.  The picture he give of his conversion still sticks with me:  a lobster in a corset on a bus, I think.  Strangely, he falls on the side of free will in salvation, while describing a perfectly Calvinist conversion.
  • Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert.  I wrote a paper on Gustave Flaubert my junior year in college. It kind of revolutionized my view on the world.  I got an A-.  My hard drive crashed, and now I have only the vaguest recollection of what my conclusions were.  Flaubert was set to be a fantasy author.  He had this blockbuster story he wrote about Saint Anthony in the tombs.  It was a colossal flop.  His friends urged him to quit writing about “Chimeras,” that is fantastical ideas, and to focus on realism.  So he wrote a story about a girl who wanted to have a truly great romance and ruined her life chasing it while ignoring the perfectly good romance right in her lap.  I was totally unable to relate to this concept.
  • Institutes of Christianity, by John Calvin.  This is kind of a cheat, since I never actually finished the book.  But he really knew how to pack ‘em in there. The one that comes up the most is his explanation of faith – not just confidence, but confidence in a person’s word in the face of very good reasons to doubt. We’ll skip past how much Calvin talks about the Spirit, and how I totally avoided him the first time I heard of him, because I knew he had nothing to say to me due to his ignorance of the Holy Spirit.
  • Canterbury Tales, by Geoffrey Chaucer.  More specifically, The Franklin’s Tale, which taught me about the complex overlay of loyalties that we would now call “Biblical Manhood and Womanhood.”  As a bonus, reading journal articles on The Franklin’s Tale taught me that Feminism is bunk, specifically because it can’t see those loyalties as anything other than systematic oppression
  • On the Cessation of the Charismata, by John Ruthven.  Specifically, the footnotes to the first chapter, which gave me references to a whirlwind tour of early church thought on spiritual gifts, and the supernatural.  I used it as the bibliographical launching point for a church history paper, and it inspired me for the thesis for my PhD, which I will probably never get to write.
(Yes, Tolkien is lovely, but he didn’t change my life.  I’m very fond of Luther, but I haven’t actually read any books by him. Paradise lost did nothing for me, other than give me some perspective when reading Middlemarch. Inferno was extremely interesting, but Purgatorio was distressingly Catholic.  Robinson Crusoe was a waste of time.)
There’s a strange lack of fiction titles in this list.  I went through a major theological shift about 15 years ago, so my top 10 list changed accordingly.  The books above are the ones that got me going in my current direction.  It just so happened that when I was grasping, very few of the branches that held were fiction.

scope creep

One of the honors my church has given me in the last few months is the privilege of writing study notes to go along with the Sunday Sermon. These notes are then available for use by home groups that meet throughout the week. We’ve been working through 1 Corinthians, and today I’m supposed to be working on the “how do you build on Paul’s foundation” part of chapter 3, but I’m stymied because of how hard this section pulls on my heartstrings. Build the church, man. That is what I am about.

Let me explain. No, there is too much. Let me sum up.

The second time I went to school to learn to be a minister was much better than the first. It was thicker, richer. And one of the first things that I realized was that my charismatic, independent, localized vision for the church was just too small. It didn’t even cover richness and breadth of the interconnected networks of secular society, and the church is greater than that.

Look, Nebuchadnezzar saw it. Daniel tells us his vision about the layered statue, with the golden head and clayey feet. The statue represented the governments of nations, and the stone which destroyed that statue was Jesus Christ. But what is the mountain that came from that stone, if it isn’t the church?

The shape of that mountain is important. It’s a single mountain that covers the entire earth. As I realized once in a conversation with some Mormon missionaries, it’s a single mountain, not a mountain range. So Daniel 2:” the God of heaven will set up a kingdom that shall never be destroyed, nor shall the kingdom be left to another people. It shall break in pieces all these kingdoms and bring them to an end, and it shall stand forever.” No interruptions. That casts down any assertions that there was a true church, which stopped, and then an intermediate period with no church, or a false church, followed by a restored true church.

At the same time, the mountain is a good deal bigger than the statue. It’s a mountain, not a hill, so it’s taller than the statue, and it clearly covers more ground. I take that to mean that it lasts longer through the generations (hello? forever?), and that it touches more of society. Local congregations, private associations, friendships, national governments… all of these things, inasmuch as they are real and valid ways for people to relate to each other and work together and form a society, will be subsumed in the world-mountain that is the church.

All of it. I can’t read the news without my vision of the church getting bigger. I can’t read about economics without my vision of the church getting better. I can’t think about business, or logistics, or farming, without my vision of the church getting bigger.

And here’s Paul talking about building the church, like it’s all okay. Now, it’s not enough to be a component of God’s active retrofit of all of human civilization, he wants me (us) to build it. That’s exciting. It’s astounding. And it’s not too daunting, because as best I can tell, the church universal is still only made up of the church local. I build up the church by building up my church.

And, hey, look. I get to help build the church by writing review questions for a sermon about building the church. The challenge is following the sermon, and not the pictures in my head. (And the first voice, which I had heard speaking to me like a trumpet, said, “Come up here…”) Talk about scope creep!

Analytical Envy

Great quote here about Economists trying to be cool like physicists:

The success of mathematical physics led the social scientist to be jealous of its power without quite understanding the intellectual attitudes that had contributed to this power.  The use of mathematical formulae had accompanied the development of the natural sciences….Very few econometricians are aware that if they are to imitate the procedure of modern physics and not its mere appearance, a mathematical economist must begin with a critical account of these quantitative notions and the means adopted for collecting and measuring them.

Apparently, the hard sciences were a real kick in the gut to every major branch of study – from economics to literature to psychology to art.  It’s as though math was so impressive that they all developed inferiority complexes and went off on quests to prove they were just as good.  So economics went all Keynesian and literature went all deconstruction and reader response.  But across the board, every major field of study that didn’t have something hard to measure either faked it, fudged it, or abandoned all pretense of logic.  What I don’t get is how people forgot that numbers aren’t the only way of thinking.  Rhetoric and inductive logic predate calculus by thousands of years.  These things don’t wear out with time; they just go out of fashion.