A Week to Reflect on the Economy

(Tuesday, March 3^rd)

Welcome!

I’ve put it off long enough.  Maybe a touch blog-phobic.  I remain a perpetual rookie at the computer.  But, as a “preacher without a pulpit,” I veritably brim with ideas.  As a progressive Christian (I don’t like labels) I am interested in the interface of faith and social reality – politics, economics, health care, education, governmental process, a broad geopolitical agenda.  As a seeker, a journeyer, a pilgrim I hold my convictions loosely, though may write at times with boldness and assurance.  I prefer pencil to pen, with a well-warn eraser.  I love dialogue, brisk and vigorous, stretching the spectrum of opinion as wide as possible. 

I suppose a very-first-blog ought to lighter, less lengthy and weighty, than the one I am about to launch – likely to spread itself across several days, even weeks.  This is a matter to which I have been giving broad and concerted attention.  Please respond as crisply and assertively as I have sought to be.  Again, welcome.

Howard Friend

 

ECONOMIC REALITY – A FRESH LOOK

The polling is informal, hardly comprehensive, so little more than tentative conclusions can be drawn.  A glance at the church notices in local papers offers an array of sermon titles.  None last week, at least explicitly, made any reference to the current economic situation.  My curiosity piqued, I called eight or ten friends, members of different nearby congregations, asking if their pastor had preached a sermon, or made significant reference to in a sermon, to the economy – over the last four months.  Of one hundred and fifty sermons nary a word, except perhaps a cursory or fleeting reference, to global economics, with either a pastoral or biblical emphasis.

                Yet glance up and down any pew in any of those churches and your eyes likely cannot fall on a person or family unaffected, and ours is a historically prosperous region.   I quietly glanced around my own congregation gathered in our modest sanctuary, though nestled in a high end zip code.  “No one here is untouched,” I quietly said.  “We are in this together.”  Retirees whose portfolios may no longer support their even frugal cost of living.  Sons and daughters who may be unable to return to college this fall.  Unmanageable mortgages on houses worth less than the balance due.  Those who have become unemployed, sharing that news or keeping it a secret.  I sensed a broad range of feelings, felt at varying depths – anxiety to fear to sheer panic.  Discomfort to sadness to depression.  Sleepless nights and days of agitation. 

And we, in my neck of the woods, are arguably the better off.  My sister-in-law directs a state welfare office in an always marginal, semi-rural part of my state.  Her office’s 300% increase in client cases runs ahead of a state-wide 150% increase.   Mabel, who runs a food bank for a cluster of nearby churches,  asks that volunteers, who usually bag the food and then greet the guests, leave before their assigned arrival, “because you might well encounter a neighbor, friend or fellow church member who’d be embarrassed seeing you.”  Tens of thousands of Mexicans, in and around where my son and family live and work, are falling monthly from marginal existence into desperation.  One hundred million more global citizens are at risk of falling into desperate poverty in the next year. 

Over the coming days I want to offer a different lens through which to look at what I have called the “economic situation,” consciously avoiding the word “crisis” – except to remember that the Chinese character for “crisis,” typical of the structure of that language, creates that word by the overlay of “danger” and “opportunity.”  The prefix “re” – recovery, rejuvenation, reconstruction, renewing – pick your favorite “re” word – suggests a going back, a reconstituting, a reestablishing.   If only we could return to October 2007, the Dow at its peak just above 13,000, we muse.  I propose that the movement and momentum profiled in scripture, though I will appeal to other than only biblically-based perspectives, involved going forward.

I hasten to add that we need strategies to establish financial stability, a functioning banking system, an appropriately dynamic economic apparatus to produce and distribute goods and services, increasing employment opportunities, the mandates that define any just and equitable economic system.

But, risking seeming flippant and simplistic, doesn’t “recovery” imply: (a) loosening the business-focused credit system so macro-loans are available again to the manufacturing sector, so (b) they can begin to produce more “stuff,” much or most of which we do not, in fact, need, so (c) the more brilliant psychological minds among us can jump start the advertizing enterprise geared to convince us we do, in fact, need more of that “stuff,” so (d) consumer-focused lenders can lure us into a fresh round of debt-generating credit, so (e) the consuming, accumulating, waste-generating cycle can begin all over again?  There has to be a better way!

In days ahead we’ll explore what was not so golden about those not-so-far-back golden days, what was not so successful by any holistic definition of success, how much was untenable, unsustainable and, most important, was leaving us less and less happy, with ever diminishing feelings of well-being, and an increasing sense of isolation and loneliness.

 

(Thursday, March 5^th)

FORWARD, NOT BACKWARD

Economic recovery . . . the debate rages about how, amidst philosophical and ideological collisions, what basic approach is most consistent with perceived principles and advocated basic strategies . . . about how much, how much money to commit and where and how to commit it . . . projections of how long it will take differ radically.  When will we be “back to normal”?  When will the Dow return to levels of eighteen months ago?  When will the credit markets loosen?  When will employment rise?  When will the crisis pass?

                The principle metaphor of Christianity is resurrection, not resuscitation.  The challenge of the prophets is to “not dwell on what happened long ago” but to “watch for the new thing God is doing” (Isaiah 43.18, 19).  Paul vows to “forget what is behind me and do my best to reach what is ahead” (Philippians 3.13b).  Jesus states it succinctly, “Behold, I come to make all things new.”  How lovely that Lincoln’s call to a “still more perfect union” has such currency just now.  How does the best of yesterday yoke with history’s unrealized possibilities to form the “better yet,” only to yield to a next generation’s “still better yet”?

                In the days ahead, Iwill profile elements in a “more just, equitable and faithful economy,” instructed by guidelines for economics coaxed from scripture.  For now, some days to unmask an economic reality that was, in my mind, unworthy of recovery (reconstruction, reconstituting, re-establishing).  These themes will likely include: (a) the growth trajectory of October 2007 was environmentally unsustainable, (b) the rapidly broadening  gap between rich and non-rich was socially unjust, and (c) the documented and frankly embarrassing fact that the U.S. population, in general, names itself as less happy, decreasing in its felt sense of well-being, most distinctly among those of increasing personal wealth, a trend across now twenty-five years, an economic system psychologically and spiritually unfulfilling.  The work of the Pachamama Alliance, http://www.pachamama.org/ and their Awakening the Dreamer/Changing the Dream symposium, http://awakeningthedreamer.org/ have influenced my framing of this portion of this critique.  These are sites well worth exploring and the symposium an event well worth attending.

1.

Environmentally Unsustainable

The global environment is like a bank account – deposits and withdrawals must be balanced to maintain viability and longevity.  Sustainability requires a rate of global depletion balanced by the rate of global replenishment, and, a rate of toxic waste production is balanced by the earth’s capacity to absorb it.  An overwhelming consensus of environmental scientists concur that the planet is in peril.  Seventy percent of the earth’s forests have been eliminated, 30% of arable land lost in the last 40 years, over one hundred “dead zones” clog the mouths of rivers or float like gigantic toxic islands in the world’s oceans, oceans where overfishing have depleted the large fish population by an estimated 90%.

                Mathis Wackernagel, a Swiss- born sustainability advocate and Executive Director for Global Footprint Network, offers a simple, if troubling model for assessing what he calls “global overshoot.”  At the outer limit of sustainability the human population would use “one earth” annually – a balance of acceptable depletion/replenishment and waste production/absorption.  In the early 80’s we began using more than one earth’s capacity, by 2020 reaching 1.5 earths, and by 2050 two earths.  If the entire global population consumed at the U.S. rate, we would require six earths annually; Western Europe just under three.  Only India and China, with half the planet’s population and the fastest growing economies, and Africa consume less than one earth.  Check http://www.footprintnetwork.org/en/index.php/GFN/ to investigate the global impact of your personal lifestyle as well as that of regions, countries, and continents.

                The planet’s capacity to support and sustain life, into even the near future, cannot be taken for granted.  Unfettered globalization, the growth trajectory that would issue from a return to October 2007, would arguably accelerate that momentum toward global environmental collapse.

2.

Socially Unjust

From the end of WWII to the mid-seventies a “rising tide did lift all boats” – or at least the vast majority.  A line graph of wealth generation across each demographic, from the very rich to lower end earners, reveals all lines steadily rising, new wealth widely if not evenly spread.  Those lines began to diverge dramatically in the 80’s then more precipitously in the 90’s and into the new century, where the gap between rich and poor has widened precipitously and the gap between the upper class and middle class accelerates steadily.  The planet’s richest 2% control 50% of all wealth, with the lower 50% controlling collectively 1%.  Over the last three decades per capita income has fallen in eighty countries.  Our own middle class has barely held its own in the last quarter century, the lower 20% losing ground.  Until three years ago U.S. households had an average level of savings, a positive, if shrinking net worth; now there is aggregate, average debt.  A few shared substantially in an era of prosperity; some realized increasing, if more modest net financial worth; many lost ground.  Open http://www.globalrichlist.com/ to determine where you rank nationally and globally in terms of annual income.

3.

Psychologically and Spiritually Unfulfilling

I have tried not to cherry-pick information, but the statistics are discouraging at the least.  We have the highest rate of mental illness in the world with 27% of us suffering from a significant mental disorder; 700,000 receive treatment for alcoholism in any given day; the American Psychological Association reports that between 75 and 90% of physician appointments  are for stress-related conditions, insurance companies noting that stress, depression and job burnout are the US’s fastest growing disability category.  (I appreciate Tracy Apple and the Symposium Presenter’s Manual, Pachamama Alliance, for providing or guiding me to this data and more).

                There is disturbing evidence that loneliness and isolation are becoming epidemic.  Twenty-five percent of Americans confess they have no one they trust enough to talk intimately with, and a second 25% have only one person.  Virtually every category of social organizations – from fraternal orders to professional organizations, from sports leagues to service clubs, from professional associations to protestant denominations – have experienced a dramatic decrease in membership since 1965.  During the second half of the last century surveys indicate a steady rise in the incidence of headaches, indigestion and sleeplessness, what researchers term “symptoms of malaise” as well as, even more distressing steadily increasing suicides in the age 15-35 demographic.  A drug war is being fought as I write fired by the highest per capita drug consumption on the planet.  (see Bowling Alone, Robert Putnam, Simon and Schuster, 2000 for detailed treatment of these and other facts).

                YES Magazine (one of two publications to which I subscribe and read cover to cover, Bainbridge Island, WA 98110), apologizing initially for an issue about happiness in the midst of economic strife, discovered, as they crafted that Winter 2009 issue, that the theme was most apt and urgent.  As noted above, prosperity was hardly a source of increasing happiness and well-being, all statistical evidence concurring.  Check page 20 in this current issue of YES.   Any nation’s per capita GDP is hard data.  The Happy Planet Index (HPI) http://www.happyplanetindex.org/map.htm has developed a rather sophisticated process to determine a country’s level of happiness, of felt well-being.  Typically, wealth levels tend to exceed felt happiness, Italy the exception in Western Europe, Russia noteworthy in its well below average ranking on both scales.  The U.S. ranks first in per capita GDP, but well below Western Europe on the HPI, with Indonesia with the highest HPI, even with among the lowest GDP, followed by Mexico with a HPI twice as high as the U.S. with a GDP four times lower.  Explore http://www.neweconomics.org/gen/well-being_hpi.aspx  for additional fascinating, if challenging data.

 

(Saturday, March 7^th)

TOWARD A BIBLICALLY-BASED ECONOMICS

Happily, much is being written about a more principle-based, values-driven, people- and environment- not merely money-focused economy.  I set out to investigate resources in the biblical tradition that might offer foundational themes, core elements in a more environmentally sustainable, socially just and spiritually fulfilling economics.  I find myself delighted, somewhat surprised and animated by this investigation.  I am not prepared to be exhaustive – either in terms of biblical scholarship or economic theory – but want to suggest some contours, some broad-brush components, some research worthy of more extensive pursuit.  This will build on what I began in the last essay of my book, Gifts of an Uncommon Life: The Practice of Contemplative Activism.  I will briefly profile: (1) Creation Economics – Bounty and Abundance, (2) Manna Economics – Enough, (3) Promised Land Economics – Equity and Justice, (4) Sabbath and Jubilee economics – Redistribution, (5) Nazareth Economics – Redistribution Reclaimed, (6) Barnabas Economics – Radical Commonality, (7) Corinthians Economics – Justice, not Charity.

1.

Creation Economics – Bounty and Abundance

The first creation story is punctuated by what might seem, at first glance, a rather simple phrase, “and God saw that it was good.”  Simple until one unpacks the word “good” – a rather exuberant, scintillating, pulsating word it turns out, better translated bountiful, overflowing, lavish, veritably “bursting at the seams.”  A cornucopia.  A cascade.  Outrageous abundance.  And, to top it off, God declares it “very good” after the sixth day.  Like an Italian mother, heaven forbid there is not more than enough for everyone.

                The planet, at present levels of food production, can feed seven times it population.  No nation, the Hunger Project http://www.thp.org/ insists, lacks the potential to be food self-sufficient.  Worldwide hunger of such a profound degree is thoroughly unnecessary, no less than a travesty and embarrassment.  On a given day, in an average American city, more food is scraped from plates into garbage cans than it would take to feed that city’s hungry.  The earth can produce abundance for all, scarcity a contrived not intrinsic issue, fair distribution the issue. 

2.

Manna Economics – Enough

All twenty generations of Hebrews in captivity in Egypt had known was imperial economics, wealth highly concentrated in the hands of the few, privilege for an elite minority, an “economics of accumulation,” resting on the backs of an enslaved people.  The “two weeks walk that took forty years,” that, save Joshua and Caleb, buried and birthed an entire generation during the wilderness sojourn, trained a people for an “ethic of sufficiency.”  The daily food called manna, thin and flakey, nourishing and evidently tasty, was plentiful, but could not be hoarded, even saved. 

                John Bogle, founder of the investment giant Vanguard, recognized as among this generation’s financial geniuses, opens his recently published book simply titled Enough, open with a conversation between writers Kurt Vonnegut and Joseph Heller.  Sipping cocktails on the terrace of an immense estate, Vonnegut asks Heller what it feels like to know that their host likely made more that day than he made on the total sales of Catch-22.  Heller quietly replies, “But I have what he may not.”  “Which is?” Vonnegut replies.  “Enough!”  My wife Betsy, when she leads pre-marital workshops, knowing that attitudes toward money are an inordinate factor in healthy relationships, inquires, “When you were growing up, thinking financially, did you have more than enough, just enough, or less than enough.”  Curiosity piques about what “enough” means.  How did someone put it, “May I learn to want what I have, rather than have what I want.”

 

(Monday, March 9^th)

3.

Promised Land Economics – Equity and Justice

The Book of Numbers is hardly captivating reading, though its stories of intrigue and frustration seem formational for a people being prepared for freedom.  Soon they would catch a first glimpse of what they had only seen in their imagination – though a vision engaging enough to keep them going – a “land flowing with milk and honey,” not the sparse diet and cramped quarters of Egypt or the nomadic austerity of the wilderness, but a land expansive and verdant.  The book ends with an assignment of land made with precision and clear intent.  Each tribe would have an allotment based on their tribal population, and each tribe would divide the land along its families with fairness the core criteria.  (I will leave the tragically genocidal conquest of that land, a fact that has for too long eluded adequate reflection, for another day).

4.

Sabbath and Jubilee Economics – Redistribution

Inequality, over time, seems inevitable.  Contributing dynamics are endless – good or misfortune, unevenness in any generation’s ingenuity and hard work, healthiness and heartiness or not, favorable weather or not – but a second generation, then a third will inherit the legacy of gain or less of those who went before.  Yahweh, a rather practical and earthy deity, anticipated such realities and proposed a set of correctives, to re-level the playing field, provide fresh starts, yes “strategies of redistribution,” a most inflammatory word these days.  An every seventh year strategy was called the Sabbath year, the fiftieth year, a more sweeping agenda, called the Jubilee Year.  To assure that the yield of the land was made available to the poor; that accumulated land returned to original owners; that debt be forgiven; that any enslaved be set free. 

                Biblical archeology suggests that these provisions were followed by several generations, excavated home sites from the 10^th century BC of similar size, but digs unearthing 8^th century homes showing substantial differential in size, hinting that the practice may have been abandoned.  Some argue that those who had accumulated land, having more political clout, managed to veto further implementation of both Sabbath and Jubilee years.

It is worth noting the choice of words, “jubilee” suggesting this redistribution and equalization was cause for celebration, perhaps because God promised blessing as the fruit of faithfulness to these clear and implicit instructions.  The Jubilee, it is instructive to note, was announced by a blast of the chofar, the prerogative of the priests, so there appears to have been a cultic as well as socio-political and economic implication.

 

(Wednesday, March 11^th)

5.

Nazareth Economics – Jubilee Reaffirmed

 There is division among scholars as to the intent of Jesus’ quoting Isaiah 61 in his inaugural sermon in the synagogue in Nazareth.  Some view it as merely the text for the day about which he offered commentary, a significant event, but not linked to an elaborate OT-based economic agenda.  Others argue he was proclaiming a renewal of the Sabbath and Jubilee years, his itemizing of the focus of his ministry echoing, at the least, relevant passages from Leviticus 25 and Deuteronomy 15.  Exploration at greater depth is for another time, but I would argue that Jesus’ decisive declaration, having quoted Isaiah 61 – “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing” – supports the claim of a focused and sweeping allusion, via Isaiah 61, to what one commentator calls the “jubilee legislation.”  I would further contend that is a first sounding of a foundational, indeed core theme of Jesus’ mission and ministry, echoes throughout Luke’s gospel – the political, economic and social thrust of Luke’s version of the Beatitudes, the “evidence” offered in response to the query of John the Baptist’s disciples, Luke’s fragment of the Lord’s Prayer, and the twin feast stories that end with invitation to and the best seats reserved for the poor and disabled.  It is unclear just what it was Jesus said that so incensed his listeners that day, the suggestion that his gospel was open to even hated enemies, or, the renewal of a commitment to a radical re-ordering of kingdom economics.  Enough to note that this declaration of an essential element of his emerging sense of mission was, and likely would not be today, well received.

6.

Barnabas Economics – Radical Commonality

Dismiss it as unrealistic in a larger and more complicated world, as an option only open to an era when the infant church was a neighborhood affair, or an easier choice among those already marginal and poor, might our resistance mask embarrassment at the massive and all-inclusive level of sharing in the early church.  The evidence is unassailable and unambiguous:  the economic sharing advocated and practiced by Jesus became normative in the early church.  Resources were held in common, even capital reserves liquidated.  No one was in need.  And, evidently there were richer and poorer among them.  This sharing was practiced with exuberance, a source of communal deepening and shared joy.  An extraordinary sense of oneness blossomed.   And the spirit seemed contagious as the community grew dramatically.   Barnabas is an apt poster child for this spirit, having sold a property to add to the common fund.  The story of Ananias and Sapphira is awkward and harsh, but the twin themes of blessing and curse, the life-giving fruits of generosity and death-dealing  inevitability of greed, thread themselves though both Old and New Testaments.

7.

Corinthians Economics – Justice, not Charity

It is not uncommon for Paul to send or carry himself funds made available for one church to support the work of another, but he nowhere provides his personal theology of giving, writing with compactness and precision, as in 2 Corinthians 8 and 9, what one might interpret, though he does not use this language or reference the texts, as his “Jubilee Economics.”  He decisively defines giving as a matter justice, not charity.  He offers an odd but compelling formula for generosity, and a model to emulate, as he speaks of the Macedonian church:  affliction + poverty + joy yields a wealth of generosity.  He speaks of a “fair balance” to strike between one person’s abundance and another person’s need, quoting Exodus 16.18, a reference to God’s provision of manna, “The one who had much did not have too much, and the one who had little did not have too little.”  It is fascinating to ponder Paul’s creatively ambiguous, or perhaps multi-leveled use of the word “abundance” – seeming to argue that the “abundance of the rich” he urges may be met by the “abundance of the poor,” a rich and real reciprocity, an “exchange of abundances” leaving all “richer” for the exchange.