The Free Thinker

Lately I'm torn about blogging.  I've started to feel it as more a vice than anything, at best a distraction, at worst a temptation to get angry and polemical.  And yet it's a social outlet of sorts, too, a way of being a presence, of keeping in touch with people... it's remarkable how easily one can publish online and be, in a way, everywhere: in every corner in the world one's thoughts are only a click away (albeit most people don't know it).  I hardly ever go back and read my old posts, though I like the fact that they're there, just in case I do think about one of them and want to read it.  Apparently a few other people do find them worth reading.  But writing is probably better when it follows the Golden Rule: write what you want to read.

The authors to whom I owe the most are intellectual apologists for Christianity: C.S. Lewis, G.K. Chesterton, Dostoyevsky.  It's partly in imitation of these intellectual heroes that I've begun to do more religious blogging lately, taking my cue from the Bible.  I would like to do more than that someday, to write religious novels or histories or a simple apologia for the faith...  I was in a conversation some time ago (about a year) in which I explained that I'd left the Mormon church because it wasn't rationally tenable, and this led to an exchange in which there was an element of mutual surprise that I've remembered ever since.  The surprise was evoked, on my interlocutor's side, by my evident belief that Orthodoxy was rationally defensible, and, on my side, by the fact that my interlocutor could have supposed, as her questions seemed to suggest, that it wasn't.  She is a devout believer herself, and from this exchange I got the feeling-- but I might have misunderstood her-- that she is one who has accepted that faith and reason are at odds (which I would deny).  Maybe I shouldn't have been surprised.  Lots of educated people think the same thing.  And of course it wouldn't have surprised me coming from an agnostic or atheist, but in that case I would have pigeonholed it as a function, ultimately, of some combination of ignorance and self-interest.  Christianity is full of things that are superficially paradoxical or absurd, and there are a thousand sophisms which can be used to dismiss it if one wishes to do so, e.g., if God is omnipotent, can He make a rocky so heavy that He cannot lift it?  Maybe the word "sophisms": that's what they look like, once one has seen through them, but they can look like serious questions to a novice in inquiry about God.  Certainly a person might honestly be turned aside from the faith by the problem of evil or the problem of how prayers can be efficacious.  But of course, Christians have answers to such objections.  I could certainly understand someone, at the end of an argument, remaining unconvinced by Christian claims, in the sense of withholding judgment, as opposed to regarding it as refuted.  And of course there are a lot of people who feel perfectly justified in dismissing Christianity for superficial reasons because they mistakenly believe they have some other firm ground to stand on which an intelligent Christian-- a C.S. Lewis, say-- can easily expose as hollow by a skeptical attack.  Since people with such prejudices and complacencies dominate many university faculties and to some extent mainstream liberal culture, I suppose I shouldn't have been surprised that a college-educated Christian might have picked up the idea that Christianity was at a disadvantage on the plane of argument.  But I was surprised.  It made me think, in a way, of how much work there is to do.

When one shifts from the negative defense of Christianity-- showing that arguments purporting to refute Christianity fail-- to the positive defense of Christianity, there's an element in Christian writing that I have sometimes wondered at myself, and about the psychological reaction to which, on the part of atheist readers, I am very curious.  That is the confidence of Christian writers.  How does C.S. Lewis, say, although in this case most other Christian writers, St. John of Kronstadt or Thomas a Kempis or John Chrysostom, exhibit the trait still more strongly, dare to write so boldly about God and virtue and salvation, and on the other hand about devils?  Even if one cannot disprove them, even if one finds oneself tentatively in sympathy with their claims, how do they know?  I think I've begun to understand this better with time.  If one begins seriously to approach God, one starts to understand a little of His nature and His plan; more than that, one starts to understand much more of oneself; and one starts to perceive the sources of resistance to our approach to God, both our own fear and frailty and attachment to earthly goods (which are good, please note, though they can become evil if we prefer them to higher things), but also something else, the tugging of other wills towards pride and discontent and darkness...

But here's where I come up short.  For as soon as I start to write about holy things, I immediately feel that I am such an unworthy messenger that I can achieve only the opposite of my intent.  No, I'm not a murderer, I don't plot seductions or go to prostitutes, I am not a rich miser or a thief or a corrupt politician, I am not insanely cruel or a compulsive liar or a drunkard.  But my life is a mess, and through my own fault, I relentlessly pursuit of obscure ambitions from pride and anxiety for the future, I lose my temper, I am prone to ennui and despondency, I'm addicted to petty pleasures, hot baths and chocolate and probably half again as much food as I need, and I have done so few good works...  If I were to stand up and preach the Gospel, a just rejoinder might be, "If you believe it, why don't you practice it?"  (To which my answer could only be: "Partly because I can't figure out how, and partly because even when I do realize something about how I ought to live, I forget all my resolutions within an hour...")  And: "Who are you to teach us?"  

The Double Standard and the Golden Rule Case for Free Love

In the exchange with Nato, MS, and Joyless Moralist in the comments of a recent post, I find myself reminded of why I feel impelled to insist on regarding gender roles as asymmetric, or as a critic might, tendentiously but not unreasonably, put it, on holding a "double standard" vis-a-vis men and women in sexual matters. It is not merely that I think that there is a basis for this double standard in human nature and in ethics (though I do). It is that the prohibition of premarital sex, which I think is correct, seems to me untenable unless combined with this kind of double standard.

The essence of the problem can be shown if we try to apply to sexual morality the Golden Rule, "do unto others as you would have them do unto you." At the risk of sounding flippant, but in fact the deduction is strictly logical if we accept symmetry between the genders, this implies: "if you wish a girl would try to seduce you, try to seduce her." Other ethical rules-- don't tell lies, be just and merciful, etc.-- are generally extensions of the Golden Rule: I don't want others to lie to me, or treat me unfairly, or cruelly, so I shouldn't do it to others. But if they are not careful, the churches can formulate their sexual rules in ways that make them seem directly contrary to it.

By the time I was 24, I had long felt a sense of bad faith about the proposition, in which I presumptively believed as a churchgoer and as a member of the family I was born into, that premarital sex was wrong. I don't think I was particularly weak-willed then. When there was a conflict between a principle and a passion, the principle generally won out. As an example of this, I didn't drink alcohol for four years after leaving the Mormon church, for the sole purpose of proving-- not even to anyone in particular, but as if to some abstract "impartial spectator"-- that my motive for leaving the Mormon church was that I believed it to be false, and not just because I wanted to be able to drink. This was in college, and I was constantly in environments where drinking was normal and expected. I didn't have any moral qualms about drinking (in moderation of course) but regarded it as innocent and enjoyable. Yet I abstained for four years, long after it was clear I'd made the point to the satisfaction of any hypothetical observer, postponing the transition to what I had always regarded as a more rational and healthy practice until an opportunity came to break the obsolete taboo in circumstances where social pressure was completely absent. If I had had a firm belief that premarital sex was wrong, I would have acted accordingly.

But the rule seemed arbitrary, senseless, unnatural, opposed to life. I had heard arguments for the proposition from the Mormons but they seemed not only unpersuasive but even insincere. For example, Mormons would wax eloquent about the satisfaction of "saving yourself" for your spouse, of how rewarding it is for one's wedding night to be one's first time. This is, strictly speaking, an appeal to self-interest: you will enjoy your wedding night more if it's your first time. It might be persuasive to women, and in fact, I think this does come near to expressing the heart of the matter when it comes to why women should be virgins at marriage, but for a man it is absurdly feeble. It is not in a man's nature to be convinced by this argument. The relative value it places on things is wrong. But the crucial point is that it is an appeal to self-interest, and that robs it of its moral force.

At best, this argument is an appeal to do something good for an unknown, perhaps non-existent person: one's future spouse. To make it compelling in those terms, one has to insist that the value that one's future spouse will place on one's virginity at marriage is extremely high. For a woman, again, this argument has some force. It is in a man's nature to value virginity highly and to feel intense jealousy of the past sexual partners of a woman he loves. Some men successfully suppress this feeling but it is a factor a woman should take into account ex ante. No doubt there are some women, too, who highly value the virginity of their husbands; but there are others, on the other hand, who value sexual experience. More subtly, I don't think the idea of being valued for his virginity at marriage by a woman can appeal to a man, even one who for whatever reason intends to be a virgin at marriage. Such an attitude belittles him, compromises his masculine independence. A man feels, as I think a woman might not, that a future spouse for whom his virginity would be a deal-breaker is a future spouse he can do without. Anyway, no woman who wants a virgin husband is obliged to marry him. And if he risks narrowing his selection, that is again a non-moral appeal to self-interest.

It seemed to me then, and I suppose I still suspect that it is the case, that many or most Mormons and other religious people were rationalizing a tenet that they actually held dogmatically on the basis of revelation. Also, I suspected (and still suspect) that in some cases it was a sour-grapes story to hide their envy for people who had sexual opportunities they had sacrificed or could never have had. But my principles forbade me-- they still do, though now I might qualify it somewhat-- to accept tenets held dogmatically on the basis of revelation. For once one relinquishes reason and admits the principle of authority, there are a thousand authorities clamoring to be submitted to; and unless one is to accept one's creed by the accident of birth, which as a statistical matter most people do but which can't be justified epistemically, one has no grounds to choose between them. To have accepted the prohibition of premarital sex on the basis of authority would have been the act of the woodcutter who cuts off the branch that he was sitting on; for it was only on the basis of a moral commitment to reason that I could justify having left the Mormon church.

Mormons endorse a degree of role differentiation between the genders that makes many liberal, secular people uncomfortable. Yet when it comes to inculcating sexual scruples in the young, Mormons are, I think, quite free from double standards. If I had to guess, I suspect the same is true of Protestants and most other Christians today, although of course Mormons are especially militant and efficient in their program of indoctrinating the young. Mormons do not treat promiscuous girls as having debased themselves while regarding promiscuous boys with indulgence. They insist on the absolute prohibition of premarital sex and apply it equally to boys and girls. As a result, I largely missed, or at least inadequately appreciated, the reason that the Golden Rule case for free love fails, which is that what a man wants to do will have a very different significance for her than it does for him, whether she knows it or not.

So by the time I was 24, I found myself increasingly unable to believe the proposition that premarital sex was wrong (except to some extent, and in most cases, by means of some makeshift arguments of a highly romantic character which, in retrospect, I find incomprehensible). Of course, not believing in it, I could have abided by it anyway, and might well have done so. I had two strong reasons to do so. The first was my family, with whom a premarital sexual relationship might cause a rift. The second was Christianity. I was a churchgoer, though not baptized into any particular denomination (other than Mormonism). The commonly-heard arguments that Jesus didn't really say much about sex and that the early Christians' acceptance of traditional sexual taboos might have reflected mere culture and the state of technology (no contraceptives) seemed like less of a travesty to me then that they do now, but still, I didn't believe them. It seemed to me that if I were to have an unmarried sexual relationship it would my churchgoing and avowal of Christianity would be marred by an element of hypocrisy. I valued Christianity more than sexual freedom. If it had just been a question of denying myself certain pleasures which were possibly innocent, that would have been easy-- like my four years' abstinence from alcohol, with my comically inadequate motive.

But the difference from alcohol was this: in abstaining from sex, I was hurting not only myself but others, or so it seemed at the time. Some girls were disappointed, two at least were perplexed, saddened, and humiliated by my refusal. The sexual scruples I adhered to without believing in seemed not merely to sacrifice pleasures but to make me heartless and cruel towards those to him I felt tenderness and wanted to satisfy.

Now suppose, for the sake of argument, we accept the double standard. We accept that a man may, if anything, distinguish himself by conquests, liaisons, and intrigues, but that a woman who succumbs is a "fallen" woman, a "lost" woman, a slut, that she debases herself, and makes any man who marries her a fool. In that case the Golden Rule case for free love vanishes like smoke. The symmetry of "I'd like her to seduce me, so I should seduce her" becomes invalid. Instead, the question is: "Would I like to be ruined, lost, fallen, disgraced, degraded? If not, I shouldn't ruin and disgrace her." Just because a woman is willing doesn't change anything. She may be misguided or weak enough to be ready to ruin herself, but one still ought not to be her accomplice in self-destruction, just as one should not give a drink to a drunkard or a pistol to a suicide. The prohibition of premarital sex becomes, on these assumptions, quite rational.

Of course all that is rather harsh, perhaps even un-Christian, recalling that Jesus forgave the woman taken in adultery. Better to say that an unchaste woman can and ought to be forgiven, but that the loss is real; that it is a woman's nature-- a woman's nature, please note; it is important not to make this gender-neutral, which signals to a man to look for the same thing in his own nature, and he will not find it and will therefore disbelieve your whole argument-- for sexual desire to lead to fulfillment only in marriage and childrearing; that a young woman may not know this about herself (how could she, except by hearsay, not having lived through it?) and that she may mistakenly believe that a casual, "free love" relationship will give her satisfaction, but that despite her consent you will still (or at least, that you are very likely to) wound her in the end by taking advantage of her error; and that a young woman who pretends to desire only free love may even know already that marriage and childrearing are what she wants, but feel compelled to hide this from a man for fear of scaring him away, or even-- sadder still-- admire a man so much that she would not presume to ask for them, though she is fully within her rights to demand these things in return for offering herself to him. To this it must be added that there are women who are really willing to engage in no-strings-attached sex, and whom a man, by using her, will not wrong any more than a thief wrongs another thief when they collaborate in a crime. And we should be careful in judging such women or generalizing about them; they are individuals, they often have virtues, they vary in their interests and tastes, and so on... and yet a certain shallowness, a certain emptiness, a certain cruelty is inescapably attached to the path they have chosen. The simple fact of the imbalance in the desire for commitment between men and women gives those women who are willing to do without it a large selection and therefore a high degree of power. And power corrupts. At the same time, sexual desire detached from its natural goal of marriage and family becomes a function of mere whim, caprice, fancy. If a man is not a candidate for husband, what is he?  He may be a "toy boy," a source of momentary delight for some trivial reason, a good workout or a good joke or a good party, soon put down. Emotions will come into play, yet without justice or logic to them, since the shared plans that could give them logic is absent. Why, after all, should a current lover's yearning for her count more than the yearning of the next man, whom she hasn't tried yet? If we do not want to revive the scornful condemnation that the words "fallen woman" carry, let us remember the phrase's connotation of danger. A man might become obsessed with such a woman, might be driven to suicide for her sake, he might waste years of his life in pursuit of such women, generally in vain but disappointing even when occasionally successful. Most importantly-- and here the Golden Rule comes in again-- he will waste energies on them which could be put to a thousand better uses. Better, for one's own safety and that of others, to stay out of that rat race. Look for the signs of such women, and walk away.

I don't mean to say that the double standard is the only reason to avoid premarital sex. From a higher point of view, the greatest happiness comes from union with God, and this is available to all of us, even to all of us all the time, but only inasmuch as we are pure in heart. "Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God." A sexual indiscretion darkens our eyes to the glorious innocent pleasures with which God surrounds us: a sunrise, the song of a bird, the branches of trees swaying against the sky, a blade of grass, the smile of a friend, the sunlight of an October day. The purer one's heart is, the more one rejoices in all these simple things, the more one sees God in them. A sexual affair, the suspense that leads up to it, the memories it leaves behind, what toil and tedium they all are, how they burden the mind, heart, soul, how they obscure better things, so much better things! However, this argument would be opaque to most people most of the time. The double standard argument is stronger, more elemental. It is based on attitudes, norms, judgments, values that bubble up naturally generation after generation, for they are rooted in instinct. Teenagers coin slang that expresses it more aptly than any learned explanation could. A Christian should try to soften its hard edges, should comfort those whom it teaches men to scorn; but it is legitimate, it is fundamental, it has wisdom in it, it must be given its due. To be too enlightened to acknowledge it is to cut oneself off from the gritty realism that is needed to exorcise the Golden Rule case for free love.

Monasticism

My article, "The Economics of Monasticism," was just published at the ARDA Working Paper Series, see here: http://www.thearda.com/workingpapers/monasticism.asp.  Here's the abstract:

Since their emergence in ancient times, Christian monasteries have proven to be among the most durable of all human institutions, and in the medieval centuries made enormous contributions to the emergence of Western civilization. They are organized internally on socialist lines: monks own no property and owe total obedience to the abbot, making the monastery a miniature ‘centrally planned economy.’ A puzzling contrast exists between the longevity of monasteries and the transience of secular socialist communes. This paper presents a theoretical model which shows why voluntary socialist communes might be viable despite ‘shirking’ problems, yet fail due to turnover, and how worship, which induces people with high ‘spiritual capital’ to self-select into the monastery and then grows that spiritual capital through ‘learning-by-doing,’ can solve the turnover problem and make a worship-based socialist commune—a monastery—stable. Monasticism, like the market, is a form of ‘spontaneous order,’ but unlike the market, it does not depend on third-party enforcement (e.g., by a state) to function: this explains why monasticism (unlike capitalism) was able to thrive in the anarchic Dark Ages. Monasteries, in principle and largely in practice, are a form of society based on consent of the governed, unlike liberal states which preach but do not practice consensual governance, and it is interesting to juxtapose the real, live ‘social contracts’ of the monasteries with the notional social contracts of liberal political theory.

At the heart of the paper is a fairly simple economic model of monasticism.  It starts from individual utility maximization, and builds up to show (on certain assumptions) why monasteries can "compete" for members with "the world," and why only voluntary socialist communities with a religious basis are likely to prove stable, which is consistent with the facts.  And yet the paper is very ambitious in a vague and somewhat noncommittal way.  If you wanted to take a maximalist interpretation of its message it suggests that everything that sets the West apart from the rest, technology and economic growth and political freedom, is an effect of Christianity in general and in particular the nexus of monasticism that lay at the heart of it for over a thousand years.  Though I don't use the phrase, it expresses an idea that has haunted me for a long time, the Christian republic, an entity that is even in a sense political-- it has laws, loyalties, and leaders-- yet wholly, or if not wholly then at least typically and characteristically, noncoercive, and prophecied in various sayings of Our Lord: "My kingdom is not of this world"; "Upon this rock I will build My church, and the gates of hell will not prevail against it"; "Heaven and earth shall not pass away, but My words will not pass away."  And indeed, so it has turned out.  Yet it is in the nature of monasticism to flee from the world, and if the Church doesn't exactly do that, nonetheless if one looks at it from the point of view of secular history, it never has as high a profile as the conquerors who have come and gone while the Church remains.  And it is in the monastic rules that order without coercion is embodied par excellence.  I think one could read my article and even agree with my hypothesis without accepting either the truth or the importance of Christianity... but I think the paper just my shake an agnostic's faith slightly.  However, at this point it's at the level of theory.  How I would like to use the theory as a means of writing a history of monasticism!  Someday...

Publicity for "Economic Contractions in the United States: A Failure of Government"

From my co-author Charles Rowley, in the Daily Telegraph: "Adam Smith would not be optimistic in today's economic world: Adam Smith once commented that "there is a great deal of ruin in a nation". He meant that bungling governments imposed only a limited check on the economic performance of a Great Nation."  This article accompanies the launch of Economic Contractions in the United States.  For regular readers of this blog I'll stop to point out my... differences of emphasis... as appropriate:

As Nathanael Smith and I show in our study of US economic contractions, Adam Smith would be much less sanguine were he confronted by today's financial crisis and the US government's response. Indeed, it is not impossible that the US will experience the kind of economic collapse from first- to third-world status experienced by Argentina under the national socialist governance of Juan Peron.

"Not impossible" is so weak that it makes the claim innocuous, I suppose, but this seems like an exaggeration, and it seems to conflict with the 7th chapter of Economic Contractions, where we predict that "profligate deficit-spending and interventionism" will produce disillusionment and a conservative revival (p. 97)-- a prediction that events seem to be bearing out.

The US economy suffers from a growing culture of indebtedness that has increasingly contaminated the federal government since 2001 and has spilled over dramatically into private household behaviour. The combination of the ill-conceived fiscal-furnace fired by President Bush and the US Congress and the reckless monetary-furnace fired by Alan Greenspan and Ben Bernanke throughout the period 2001-2007, created unsustainable housing market and stock market bubbles whose collapse brought on the financial crisis and economic contraction of 2008-2009.

I would put the charge in more measured terms.  Fiscal policy under George W. Bush was less expansionary (smaller deficits as a share of GDP) than under Ronald Reagan, even though the US was at war in the Bush years and not in the Reagan years.  (At a time when Obama and the Democratic Congress are redefining "reckless" in the upward direction at a rate of $100 billion a month or so, it seems strange to use the term for the Bush administration, though the Bush administration should certainly have known better.)   And while interest rates stayed low in 2003-04 for too long after recovery had begun, they then rose steeply, so "throughout the period 2001-2007" seems to make the charge too broad.  Even the low interest rates of 2003-04 seem more like a serious technical mistake combined with having the wrong Fed policy rules-- housing should have been included in the CPI-- than "reckless."  And dating the problems to 2003-04 would seem to absolve Bernanke and concentrate responsibility on Greenspan. 

What led to the bubble was that (a) fiscal and monetary policy were expansionary at the same time for the first time since the 1970s, and (b) house prices were-- we argue, mistakenly-- excluded from the price index, causing the Fed to see "low" inflation at a time when house prices were rising at well over 5% per year.  What I find ironic is that, in a sense, the crisis is Osama bin Laden's revenge.  Bin Laden wanted to deal a devastating blow to the US economy.  Determined to deprive him of this victory, Bush and Greenspan adopted expansionary fiscal and monetary policies that lifted the economy out of what could, and maybe should, have been a deep recession in 2001.  As a result, they inflated a debt bubble and made the next crisis sooner and deeper.  Fortunately, al Qaeda was ruined by the war in Iraq, so bin Laden's victory is Pyrrhic.  But if the government had let the 2001 recession play itself out naturally, there might not have been any 2008 crisis.

The policy responses to the debt bubble demonstrate crude political consideration rather than economic understanding. If excessive government indebtedness is a major source of the problem, why increase the government debt? Why encourage households to go yet further into debt?

The prognosis is catastrophic if projected government policies are not cut back. According to the White House's own estimates, the federal budget deficit in 2009 will be $1.6 trillion, approximately 11.2pc of the overall economy, the highest on record since the end of the Second World War. In 2019, the national debt will represent 76.5pc of the US national economy, the highest proportion since just after the Second World War. In such circumstances, the international reserve status of the US dollar will not survive. As it fades, so interest rates on government securities will rise and the real burden of servicing the debt will increase. In such circumstances, the US economy will teeter on the edge of a black hole.

Hmm... why bring in "the international reserve status of the US dollar?"  I don't remember anything about that in the monograph.  Do we have-- does anyone have-- a theory relating government debt to the viability of a reserve currency?  Personally, if there were some way to transition out of a dollar regime without global chaos, I think it might be nice not to own the world's reserve currency: I think being able to print the world's reserve currency causes a form of "Dutch disease," undermining the competitiveness of our industries and fueling excessive growth of government.  Also, why would more debt cause the US economy to "teeter on the edge of a black hole," rather than, say, acting as a drag on growth and depressing living standards for decades-- as it has arguably done in Japan?  Government debt in Japan and Italy is way above 76.5% of GDP; both countries have suffered malaise rather than crisis.

Prosperity and full employment in the US will only be restored by a return to laissez-faire capitalism. Our study outlines a radical, but politically feasible, approach. Monetary policy should be expansionary. But, on the micro-economic side, tariffs and other trade barriers should be repealed unilaterally; a "Right-to-Work" Act should reduce the minimum wage and curtail the powers of unions; and business regulation should be reduced. Individual banks and their counterparties should not be bailed out, although the system should be protected by ensuring that failing banks are wound up in an orderly fashion – this is the only way to restore market discipline.

A little late not to bail out individual banks, no?  Rather say that laws and policies should be rewritten so as to prevent future bailouts (except of insured deposits through the FDIC).  And is it really "politically feasible" for "tariffs and other trade barriers [to] be repealed unilaterally?"  Maybe!  I wouldn't rule out the possibility that bold, visionary political leadership can make the politically impossible possible -- after all, Obama seems to have made people dislike unions and appreciate the health care status quo! -- but that is as much as to say that the range of the "politically feasible" is very broad.

Rowley and I found enough to agree on to put a book together, but he might have a tendency to overclaim. 

MORE: "Barack Obama accused of making 'Depression' mistakes: Barack Obama is committing the same mistakes made by policymakers during the Great Depression, according to a new study endorsed by Nobel laureate James Buchanan." (Daily Telegraph):

"Endorsed by Nobel laureate James Buchanan."  That's brilliant marketing.  But it's not false advertising, for here is Buchanan's Frontispiece:

A comprehensive and coherent assessment of the current economic contraction, one that largely rebuts attribution of failure to capitalism or the market. The targets become practicing politicians of all parties, whose cumulative mistakes have now hurt us all. We have learned some things to reduce the severity of the current contraction. But we have made no progress toward putting limits on political leaders, who act out their natural proclivities without any basic understand of what makes capitalism work.

Anyway, here's what Edmund Conway of the Telegraph has to say:

His policies even have the potential to consign the US to a similar fate as Argentina, which suffered a painful and humiliating slide from first to Third World status last century, the paper says.

There are "troubling similarities" between the US President's actions since taking office and those which in the 1930s sent the US and much of the world spiralling into the worst economic collapse in recorded history, says the new pamphlet, published by the Institute of Economic Affairs.

In particular, the authors, economists Charles Rowley of George Mason University and Nathanael Smith of the Locke Institute, claim that the White House's plans to pour hundreds of billions of dollars of cash into the economy will undermine it in the long run. They say that by employing deficit spending and increased state intervention President Obama will ultimately hamper the long-term growth potential of the US economy and may risk delaying full economic recovery by several years.

Excellent.  The title of the Telegraph piece may slightly overplay the 'Depression' analogy -- while we do identify some similarities with policies from the Depression era, monetary policy is (no thanks to Obama) just the opposite, and we haven't seen anything like the crazy tax hikes of Hoover and FDR yet though there are some ominous signs -- but this last paragraph nicely captures a central argument of the book.  Conway continues:

The study represents a challenge to the widely held view that Keynesian fiscal policies helped the US recover from the Depression which started in the early 1930s. The authors say: "[Franklin D Roosevelt's] interventionist policies and draconian tax increases delayed full economic recovery by several years by exacerbating a climate of pessimistic expectations that drove down private capital formation and household consumption to unprecedented lows."

Heh.  If Rowley and I get credit for debunking the myth that FDR's Keynesian New Deal got us out of the Great Depression, that would be as unfair as Columbus getting credit for debunking the myth that the world is flat.  To our cost, this myth remains potent at the popular level, but among economists I don't think even Paul Krugman would defend it.  Rather, Keynesians claim that WWII got us out of the Great Depression.  This is also debatable -- "GDP" grew, but should bombs and guns and tanks count as GDP, when they don't contribute to human happiness; or if they do count as GDP, don't we need some more appropriate way of measuring the economy's contribution to human well-being, which would likely put paid to the odd notion that WWII was an economic golden age? -- but it has no bearing on the episode Rowley and I deal with, namely the 1930s.  It's rather odd that at this late date anyone can make headlines with what ought to be a truism, namely that the New Deal exacerbated, rather than "got us out of," the Great Depression, but if that's still news to a lot of people, then those headlines need to be made.  Conway continues:

Although the authors support the Federal Reserve's moves to slash interest rates to just above zero and embark on quantitative easing, pumping cash directly into the system, they warn that greater intervention could set the US back further...

And then proceeds with quotes from Rowley and Buchanan, already quoted above in this post.  I'm glad that the message is clear that we support quantitative easing.  On that point we're basically Milton Friedman-type monetarists.  Too bad our advocacy of immigration reform and Social Security reform doesn't seem to be making it into the reviews so far!

New Book

Just published my first book-- co-authored with Dr. Charles Rowley.  Well, I guess it's not my first: I also co-authored this one back in 2004.  The title: Economic Contractions in the United States: A Failure of Government.  Here's the summary from the back of the book:

Seeking "not to let a crisis go to waste," left-leaning politicians and old-style Keynesian economists want to remedy the alleged failure of capitalism with a rising tide of big government. Let the budget deficits rip, empower the unions, socialize healthcare, increase trade protection, go green, and socialize the financial and industrial base. The irony, as Charles Rowley and Nathanael Smith show in this timely monograph, is that the Keynesian policy prescriptions that are serving as the pretext for this program have already been tried. Expansionary fiscal and monetary policies by the Bush administration and the Greenspan Fed were implemented to deal with the recession of 2001, and are precisely what caused the current crisis.

Applying sound economic reasoning and cutting-edge public choice theory, Rowley and Smith show that both the Great Depression and the current economic contraction were caused by failures not of capitalism, but of government. While monetary policy was the primary culprit in the 1930s, the interventionist policies of the Hoover and Roosevelt administrations exacerbated the downturn and stifled recovery. Fortunately, the monetary policy of the independent Fed is much better now (though the Fed has unduly widened its role), but elected politicians are pursuing policies of intervention and re-regulation similar to those pursued in the 1930s. If these adverse trends are not reversed, the dynamic laissez-faire capitalism of the United States will be assimilated to the state capitalism and economic stagnation of Western Europe.

By ending an era of big government, America in the late 1990s achieved the longest economic boom in its history, with unemployment falling lower than economists had thought possible, and an acceleration in the growth of productivity. Prosperity and full employment can only be restored by the same means. The authors outline a radical free-market approach to policy reform designed to restore the United States economy to its stellar performance during the final fifteen years of the 20th century.

We actually put a lot of the blame for the crisis on Bush and his Keynesian policies.  And even more on the Greenspan Fed, although the sharpest rhetoric is directed at Democratic politicians.  We go back to the Great Depression and castigate FDR, too.  Nobody comes out looking particularly good.  Well, I guess Reagan and Clinton do. 

Also available on Amazon for $12.

The Economics of Monasticism

Just turned this in...

Why are there monks and nuns?  Why do some men and women under the influence of this motive take vows of poverty, chastity (celibacy) and obedience?  Why do communities of such people adopt peculiar economic arrangements which prohibit individual private property?  And why have such institutions been so successful historically, lasting for generations, sometimes under such adverse circumstances that few or no other institutions have been able to survive, and made wide-ranging contributions to learning and law, agriculture and architecture, and technology?  Clearly, the quintessential motive for a monk or nun is to worship God.  But simply to say monks and nuns exist because people want to worship God is an incomplete explanation, for two reasons. 

First, that human beings desire to worship is not a phenomenon that can be readily explained in terms of biological motives, as for example, human desires for food, sex, or shelter, can be.  So one might ask: Why do humans want to worship God?  That, however, is not a question for an economist.  Economists generally treat what people want as an exogenous factor.  Since the desire to worship God, or some other supernatural entity or entities, is not limited to monks and nuns but is felt (applying the method of “revealed preference”) by most human beings, we may take it as a given part of the human “utility function.”  Following Becker and Stigler (1977), differences in taste for worship can be accounted for in terms of different endowments of a special kind of “capital,” which can be called “spiritual capital.” 

The second problem is that, granting that people want to worship God, it is far from obvious what connection there might be between the worship motive and the monastic lifestyle.  Why do some adopt celibacy for God’s sake, while other people, in some cases probably just as devout, choose to marry instead?  Why is celibacy correlated with the practice of eschewing worldly occupations, even as devout religious householders pursue them?  And why do celibate religious communities adopt economic constitutions which internally abolish private property?  Questions like these deal with the links between “micro-motives and macro-behavior,” and thus seem especially suited to economic analysis.

Some readers may think there is an obvious non-economic explanation of monasticism: religious authority.  People adopt the monastic lifestyle because the Church tells them that God wants them to.  By this account, monasticism would have its origins in the religious doctrines and hierarchies that tell the faithful what God wants, and the individual’s role would consist not so much of choice but obedience.  The appropriate mode of explanation would consist of an examination of the theology and doctrine of the Church to see why the monastic lifestyle was adopted as an ideal, and/or a psychological study of why people believe in and submit to religious authority.  By this account, to treat monks and nuns as rational agents, faced with choices, maximizing utility, subject to cost and opportunity constraints, like consumers in a market, would be to misconceive the problem.

There are (at least) two problems with a theory of this kind.  First, religious people often fail to do what the Church tells them, and they (say they) believe, is God’s will, when faced with incentives to do otherwise.  There are Mormons who drink alcohol, Amish who drive cars, Hindus who eat beef, Muslims who eat pork, and Catholics who divorce or abort babies.  Given the infinite promises (Heaven) and threats (Hell) that religions offer to motivate believers, one might expect believers to have what economists call ‘alphabetic preferences’ for doing God’s will, but it appears that at least many of them do not.  And given that religious people sometimes break the rules, it seems legitimate to take into account normal economic factors of cost and benefit as potential influences on whether and when they do so.  A man who believes God forbids him to hire a prostitute may still be more likely to hire her if her price is low than otherwise.  Likewise, a man who believes that entering a monastery is his surest way to salvation may still be more likely to do so if by doing so he gets some of the things that ordinary men value in life: adequate food, music, study, sleep, economic security, and easy labor. 

Second, at least if we focus on the Christian case, the monastic way of life was not originally imposed by Church authorities or present ab initio in sacred scripture.  Nothing like a plan for a monastery appears in the Bible, although monasticism did emerge from the efforts of devout people to live by Gospel teachings.  Nor did popes or bishops invent the monastic life and prescribe it to their flock.  Odd as it may sound, given monks’ reputation for hierarchical organization and rigid discipline, monasticism is a case of what the Austrian school of economics calls spontaneous order.  It emerged in Egypt in the 3^rd century B.C. when hermits like St. Anthony fled to the desert and attracted followers, then it evolved and spread throughout the Christian world and beyond.  Monasticism was first lived, then codified, most famously but not only in the Rule of St. Benedict, and thereafter remained dynamic, with new monastic orders appearing and competing with each other.  No one planned monasticism.  It was a pattern emerging without design from individual choices, as a price emerges in the marketplace.

Some features of monastic life, especially the absence of internal private property, resemble the ideas of modern socialism.  That is not to say that monasteries resemble Communist states like the Soviet Union, but rather that they bear some resemblance to small, voluntary socialist communes, like the utopian experiments at Brook Farm and New Harmony in the United States, or the Israeli kibbutzim.  This similarity is puzzling, because secular socialist communal experiments have generally been transient, dissolving within a few years or at most after a generation.  Monasteries, by contrast, have exhibited a durability which virtually no other human institution, apart from the Christian Church itself, can match, often lasting for centuries, with some stretching back more than a millennium. 

The perennial irony of monasticism is that monks are always fleeing the world, while the world is always following them.  Or, to state the point more tendentiously, monasticism is frequently corrupted by the prosperity which its piety creates, and then reformed from within by zealots who want to recover pristine ideals.  For example, the late medieval Cistercians, who sought agricultural self-sufficiency by fleeing ‘the world’ into the uncultivated wilderness, ended by acquiring large holdings of land, and became some of Europe’s leading sheep farmers, viticulturalists, and builders and operators of water-mills, the great power source of that time.  They engaged in international trade and even developed a reputation for wealth and greed.  To an economist, this is a record to inspire admiration.  To historians sympathetic to the pristine ideals to which the early Cistercians aspired, as well as to some later monastics in the Cistercian and other orders, the same process may seem like a sad story of decline.  However it is evaluated, monasticism’s capacity both to endure, to achieve success in almost every field of human endeavor, to preserve and advance civilization in manifold ways, calls for explanation.

A further characteristic of monasticism is of special interest.  Political philosophers for centuries, especially John Locke, Thomas Jefferson, and James Buchanan, have imagined a “social contract” as the basis for the legitimacy of government, and the virtue of “consensual” government is habitually acknowledged by modern liberalism.  Yet no modern democracy actually asks the consent of its subjects (individually, that is) to govern them; no one really signs a social contract.  Citizenship in a modern democracy, and subordination to its laws, is not based on consent; but membership in a monastery, and subordination to its rules, is, being a result of an explicit vow made by a consenting adult.  It is interesting, therefore, to contrast the real social contracts of monasticism with the fanciful ones of the philosophers.

That's the intro...

So Why am I Unemployed?

For Economists, a Moment in the Sun" (US News and World Report, 4/22/2009):

Economics has long been called the dismal science. The general economic outlook today is indeed dismal, but that doesn't mean job prospects in the field are. "There is no unemployment among Ph.D.'s in economics," declares John Siegfried, a Vanderbilt University professor. Just do the math, and you'll see why: In the current academic year, the American Economics Association has listed approximately 2,200 job openings worldwide—but U.S. universities will grant only 950 Ph.D.'s in economics.

Universities themselves may cut back, but economists remain in demand in government, business, and nonprofits and as consultants or policy analysts. "Depending on the program, about half the graduates stay in academics, and the other half go into the private sector, government, or places like the World Bank or International Monetary Fund," says William Collins, director of graduate studies in economics at Vanderbilt. Some of the most famous economics Ph.D.'s straddle both worlds; think of Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke, New York Times columnist and Nobel Prize winner Paul Krugman, and Obama advisers Christina Romer (who will chair the White House Council of Economic Advisers) and Laura D'Andrea Tyson.

2,200 job openings vs. 950 PhD's sounds good, except that the 2,200 figure is worldwide and the 950 figure is for the US. That makes a big difference, no?

There was a service called "Unction" last Sunday, dedicated to Biblical stories of healing and to the healing of soul and body through annointing with holy oil.  It moved me and I came away feeling as if some inner wounds had been healed...  Of course, it couldn't wipe away my debts.  But the next morning I woke up with, briefly, a feeling as if I had been dropped into the world just that moment, "born again" as the saying goes, or like a video-game character at the start.  As if I could pull down a menu explaining what I had to do: "Your mission is to earn $150,000 in excess of income.  Your assets are a Masters degree from Harvard, a B.A. from Notre Dame, skills with Stata... these contacts... etc." 

That made me feel a little better somehow.  It made it seem like an adventure, more interesting because the task seems impossibly difficult.  Why?  It occurred to me later: if I had simply appeared in the world as a 31-year-old unemployed divorcee half-finished with a second graduate degree and in vast amounts of debt in the midst of a collapsing economy with a tomfool president who seems determined to thwart recovery for the foreseeable future with lunatic spending unrelated to real-world needs, I would not be responsible for my plight.  I would do my best, and if I failed, I'd take the consequences, but I'd have no reason to blame myself.  The reality is worse because it is more shameful.  I got myself into this-- somehow.  I torment myself trying to remember how.  What decisions did I make that led to this state of affairs?  What were my options at each point in the chain of events, and why did I make the choices I did?  What did I know at each point along the way?  Had I known it would end like this I would, presumably, have done almost anything to avoid it.  What was it that I didn't know-- or that I didn't know I didn't know?

I keep thinking of the scene in War and Peace where Nikolai Rostov loses 40,000 rubles at cards as an analogy for what I've done with my life.  The difference, though, is that it seems like the ways a Russian nobleman of the early 19th century could ruin himself are relatively easy to classify and warn against.  Mainly gambling, expensive parties, "riotous living."  Parents and elders could foresee these kinds of problems and warn their children against them.  But I have cheap rent, I don't eat out, don't go to parties, don't wear expensive clothes or drive expensive cars.  Career was my downfall: the quest to build credentials, to gain experience, to find my niche in the world, the determination to win an interesting, important job, combined with a lack of aptitude/taste for the networking that matters so much.  This was a place where parents and elders and folk wisdom are of little use: one is in uncharted waters.  Uncharted waters, full of reefs and shoals and undertoes.

"It is Hard for Thee to Kick Against the Pricks"

When Jesus appeared to Paul on the road to Damascus, the words he used were rather metaphor than parable, but exhibit the same genius for using simple physical imagery to convey truths that go deep into the heart.  Like a ripple that spreads out to the very edges of a lake, the phrase fills the mind with more wisdom and wonder the more one thinks about it.  Here is the story, from Acts chapter 9:

 ¹And Saul, yet breathing out threatenings and slaughter against the disciples of the Lord, went unto the high priest,

 ²And desired of him letters to Damascus to the synagogues, that if he found any of this way, whether they were men or women, he might bring them bound unto Jerusalem.

 ³And as he journeyed, he came near Damascus: and suddenly there shined round about him a light from heaven:

 ⁴And he fell to the earth, and heard a voice saying unto him, Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me?

 ⁵And he said, Who art thou, Lord? And the Lord said, I am Jesus whom thou persecutest: it is hard for thee to kick against the pricks.

 ⁶And he trembling and astonished said, Lord, what wilt thou have me to do? And the Lord said unto him, Arise, and go into the city, and it shall be told thee what thou must do.

 ⁷And the men which journeyed with him stood speechless, hearing a voice, but seeing no man.

 ⁸And Saul arose from the earth; and when his eyes were opened, he saw no man: but they led him by the hand, and brought him into Damascus.

 ⁹And he was three days without sight, and neither did eat nor drink.

 ¹⁰And there was a certain disciple at Damascus, named Ananias; and to him said the Lord in a vision, Ananias. And he said, Behold, I am here, Lord.

 ¹¹And the Lord said unto him, Arise, and go into the street which is called Straight, and enquire in the house of Judas for one called Saul, of Tarsus: for, behold, he prayeth,

 ¹²And hath seen in a vision a man named Ananias coming in, and putting his hand on him, that he might receive his sight.

 ¹³Then Ananias answered, Lord, I have heard by many of this man, how much evil he hath done to thy saints at Jerusalem:

 ¹⁴And here he hath authority from the chief priests to bind all that call on thy name.

 ¹⁵But the Lord said unto him, Go thy way: for he is a chosen vessel unto me, to bear my name before the Gentiles, and kings, and the children of Israel:

 ¹⁶For I will shew him how great things he must suffer for my name's sake.

 ¹⁷And Ananias went his way, and entered into the house; and putting his hands on him said, Brother Saul, the Lord, even Jesus, that appeared unto thee in the way as thou camest, hath sent me, that thou mightest receive thy sight, and be filled with the Holy Ghost.

 ¹⁸And immediately there fell from his eyes as it had been scales: and he received sight forthwith, and arose, and was baptized.

 ¹⁹And when he had received meat, he was strengthened. Then was Saul certain days with the disciples which were at Damascus.

 ²⁰And straightway he preached Christ in the synagogues, that he is the Son of God.

The narrator here is Luke, and the style informative but rather artless.  Certainly the prose does not distract the reader from the events described with its own eloquence of poetry.  Of course, these events and the whole of Paul's life reflect the meaning of the vision in a way that invites the reader to think about it more deeply.  Jesus apparently says nothing by way of persuasion other than that phrase: "It is hard for thee to kick against the pricks." 

Perhaps Jesus said more and it did not make its way into the account.  If Acts was really written by Luke, the author would have known Paul first-hand, but Paul himself may not have remembered everything.  Certainly, at key moments in my own life, when crucial conversations took place, my memory never suffices to reproduce whole conversations.  Generally only the key phrases linger in my mind, and those are probably edited to be more apt than they really were, with the stumblings of human thinking and mis-speaking smoothed away and the situation rendered more ideal than it was.  Of course, many Christian faithful believe that the writing and compilation of the Bible was a historical process protected by the Holy Spirit, which might imply that the text should be more accurate than my recollection of scenes from, say, my own casual memories.  Even without appeal to any supernatural intervention after the vision itself, it seems likely that Jesus spoke those words to Paul, but it would not reduce the accuracy of the text-- which describes the lives of many people over many years in a few dozen pages and so is necessarily condensed to the point of telegraphic-- to suggest that Jesus may have said more than was written, which might help to account for the transformative effect of the vision on Paul.  In any case, that phrase-- "It is hard for thee to kick against the pricks"-- seems to be what Paul remembered.

It is a violent metaphor.  To think about it is painful.  And yet it is not even a reproach.  It is for Paul's own sake, not for that of Jesus Himself nor for that of the persecuted believers, that Jesus asks him to change.  If we unpack the metaphor a bit more, the "kicking" seems to mean persecution but what is meant by the "pricks?"  If the "pricks" are the church, it is significant that they are iron: hence the futility of kicking them.  Neither Saul (who became Paul) nor Nero and Diocletian nor Muhammad nor Stalin could destroy the church.  But it seems to me that Paul came later to see the Jewish law as "the pricks," and his youthful pharisaism a futile kicking against them, from which the Lord's call freed him.  All his writings are infused with a sense of joy and liberation in Christ to which the phrase by which Jesus called him seems to be the key.

Since Paul understood Jesus, one wants to ask Did Paul feel what he was doing to be "kicking against the pricks?"  Did he feel the pain and perversity of it?  If so, why was he doing it?  And yet we see all around us careerists or addicts in pursuit of obsessions that are both wicked and futile.  The drunk knows that the next drink, the politician knows that the next office, the conqueror knows that the next city stormed, will not quell the demon within that drives him to pursue it.  How many of us kick against the pricks, and in how many different ways?  I cannot seem to do justice even to the thoughts in my own mind about the phrase, let alone to the phrase itself, but I find it to be a marvelous expression of divine wisdom and love.

Something in the Night  by Bruce Springsteen  (good song)

I'm riding down Kingsley,
figuring I'll get a drink
Turn the radio up loud,
so I don't have to think,
I take her to the floor,
looking for a moment when the world seems right,
And I tear into the guts,
of something in the night.

You're born with nothing,
and better off that way,
Soon as you've got something they send
someone to try and take it away,
You can ride this road 'till dawn,
without another human being in sight,
Just kids wasted on
something in the night.

Nothing is forgotten or forgiven,
when it's your last time around,
I got stuff running 'round my head
That I just can't live down.

When we found the things we loved,
They were crushed and dying in the dirt.
We tried to pick up the pieces,
And get away without getting hurt,
But they caught us at the state line,
And burned our cars in one last fight,
And left us running burned and blind,
Chasing something in the night.

Sometimes Springsteen has a gift for expressing the vanity of this world...