Dr. M. Elizabeth Thorpe and Rev. Deborah Duguid-May explore different perspectives on economics and their impacts.
Transcript
Transcript generated by automated process.
DDM [00:03] Hello and welcome to The Priest and the Prof. I am your host, the Rev. Deborah Duguid-May.
MET [00:09] And I’m Dr. M. Elizabeth Thorpe.
DDM [00:11] This podcast is a product of Trinity Episcopal Church in Greece, New York. I’m an Episcopal priest of 26 years, and Elizabeth has been a rhetoric professor since 2010. And so join us as we explore the intersections of faith, community, politics, philosophy, and action.
DDM [00:37] Morning, so today Elizabeth and I wanted to look at the subject of economics and when we first decided to do this it got me thinking about how as a child I loved the game of Monopoly. I love the challenge, I love the competitiveness. As a child I loved to win and honestly I wanted to own the entire board. And I was good at it because I was strategic and I was ruthless and I was prepared to cheat and lie and steal. But it was a game. And as I grew, I think I began to realize how, in a way, that game was how so much of society works. You know, if you own the crucial assets, it’s really just a matter of cycles around the board before everybody is in debt to you.
DDM [01:30] And once you own everything, and others by implication nothing, well, there’s really no more point for anybody else to play the game. It’s really just a matter of how long it’ll take for you to go bankrupt. And I think a lot of our current economics is kind of like the end stages of a Monopoly game. People are trying so hard going around that board month after month, but it’s impossible to get ahead and it’s really a matter of time before either families or individuals go bust or they just simply walk away from the game. I think what I also realized as I grew up is that the fun of competition, strategy, ruthlessness, they may be fine for a game, but they’re really not ethical values.
DDM [02:16] Certainly that I want to live by in the world, but ethical values that I would hope others wouldn’t want to live by, because there really is no space in a game like Monopoly for compassion. equality, justice. And so I think at some point, what does it mean to grow up and realize that life is not a game and has really serious consequences because economics shapes our lives. It shapes the opportunities we have. It eventually shapes our perceived worth. And I think we underestimate how crucial economics is to every facet of who we are and how we live.
MET [02:57] Just for the record, I have always hated Monopoly. Even as a child, I thought the game was entirely too long. And I thought the goal of just owning things was dumb. But my hatred of monopoly probably shaped more of my ideology of politics than I care to think about. But that’s just a personal aside. One of the classes, I promise this is going to connect in just a second. One of the classes I teach is actually a class in propaganda, which I know sounds so salacious. And for a while, one of the questions I always force my students to contend with is, is education propaganda?
MET [03:47] And it took some doing to get them to wrap their heads around this question. They could figure out whether there was propaganda in education, but asking whether education is propaganda was a much more nuanced question. Some of it was really easy, right? They could very clearly see how something like a history class or even a literature class could have an agenda. But because I enjoy ruining things, I pursued this further. So, I would ask them things like, did you take an economics class? And most of them would say yes. So I would ask them if they felt like they learned anything or if they knew anything about economics after that, and I would get very different answers for that one.
MET [04:35] Sadly, most people who take economics like in high school or even college come out and they’re like, well, okay, there’s something called economics. And most people I can’t really explain that. It’s not something that a lot of people feel like they learn a lot about. So I would ask them something like, did you learn Keynesian or Chicago school economics? And almost without fail, I get completely blank stares. So we’re like, so come on, what school of economics did you learn? And I have yet to have a student who knew there were different schools of economics.
DDM [05:08] That’s incredible.
MET [05:09] Didn’t even know that that was a thing. And so we talk about that. And I tell them Keynesian economics is what got us out of the Great Depression and the 2008 recession. But they probably learned something closer to the Chicago school. And very often they ask, well, why, if one is better than the other, do we only learn this one? I tell them, well, there’s debate on which one is better, right? Chicago is definitely better for the establishment and for rich people, and Keynesian is better in the short term and helps people at all levels instead of just the top tier.
MET [05:43] But, right, Keynesian has long-term pro – just like in any number of theoretical issues, there’s good and bad on all sides. But then I have to go one step further and I ask them if anyone learned about any economic systems other than capitalism while they were in school. And at this point, like everybody kind of goes pale, right? Like I asked them, can you think of any other systems outside of capitalism? And they get very wide-eyed or they avoid eye contact. And I say, in case you need help, there are a few Marxist systems, just as examples.
MET [06:20] Did anybody learn about these? And I have had one student in 15 years say that they had.
DDM [06:25] And would you say that’s pretty normative for American
MET [06:28] education? Oh yeah, 100%. That’s why I can have these conversations. Why do you think that is, we ask. So if you take a class in economics but you don’t actually learn economics, you learn one school of one system of economics without even learning their other ideas out there, and then most people can’t even remember what you learned, what do you call that? And that’s a pretty intense question. It is generally a profoundly uncomfortable situation for my students because there’s this room full of young adults who are suddenly confronted with the realization that propaganda doesn’t just happen in Southern history classrooms, that our whole system is designed to create good little Americans.
MET [07:07] Now, what we have to acknowledge is that’s not specific to America. Education in all places does the same thing. And it’s not particular to history classes, though that is often the battleground for culture wars. The economics classrooms are a place where we hardly ever think about it. Most American students take some kind of economics class, and most of them are really bad. I would wager that most American adults can’t even define opportunity cost, and if you can’t tell me what that is, then you don’t know how an economy works, though it is the most basic thing about supply and demand.
MET [07:45] Economics classrooms are really just places where we emphasize that you are a capitalist, and that is a good thing, and our whole system is designed to do that. And, just so I don’t leave you hanging, let me explain what opportunity cost is. Because if I’m going to claim that we don’t understand economics, I need to start with that fundamental concept that I just said most people don’t understand. Okay. Opportunity cost is the cost of something not based on its price tag, but based on the opportunity you lose if you spend resources on it. So what can you not do or buy if you allocate resources to a thing?
MET [08:25] What does it cost you in opportunity that is different than what a thing costs and varies depending on context? So I’ll give you an example. Let’s say two people are invited out for a casual dinner. One of those people has $100 to spend. One of those people has $1,000. A casual meal might cost $25. Both of these invitees can afford this meal. Costs the same for both of them. But it is way more expensive to the first invitee, though the price tag is the same. That is because the opportunity cost is so much higher for the person who has $100.
MET [09:09] For the first person, that meal costs one quarter of their money. They are giving up a lot to go out to eat. The second person isn’t losing that much at all. This is important. They both have money to spend on a meal. The meal costs the same dollar amount for both people, but the meal is actually way more expensive for one of them because the opportunity cost is much higher.
DDM [09:34] Kind of like the cost of bacon to a pig versus the cost of an egg to a chicken.
MET [09:39] Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. This is why anyone who tries to argue for a flat tax is telling on themselves. They either do not understand economics or they think poor people should be punished for being poor. If there is a flat tax implemented on all people, usually the argument is for something like 17%, that hits very differently depending on your income. If you make $50,000 a year, you will pay $8,500 in taxes. If you make $100,000 a year, you will pay $17,000 in taxes. A superficial analysis may lead you to say, well sure, that’s fair, they’re both paying the same percentage, but that is a completely sophomoric approach to understanding money and the economy.
MET [10:20] Once again, the question is not how much something costs or how much a person pays, but what is the opportunity cost. The person who makes 50K will have $41,500 left to pay for everything in their lives. So that 17% is pretty steep. The person making $100,000 will have $83,000 to pay for all the things they need in their life. Now, proportionally, these are the same, but in terms of how much they cost, they absolutely are not. That 17% is way more expensive for the person who makes less. It may take the same chunk out of their income, but because their income was so much less to begin with, it costs about twice what it costs the richer person in opportunity.
MET [11:13] It is a completely different situation if your 83% of income left over is 41K or 83K. And because we fail to teach this very basic, very fundamental concept to people, we tend to have an economy set up to punish the poor because we base our economy of supply and demand around dollar amount, which is not what drives purchasing. So yeah, I’d say we’ve set up a system pretty much designed not only to make sure people stay in their place, but to make sure people don’t understand why people are where they are, or why movement from one place to another is so hard.
DDM [11:52] Right, absolutely. And I think when you’re speaking about different, you know, schools of economics, I’m sure that most people aren’t even aware of biblical economics. You know, it’s something that I would say almost is virtually not preached about. You often don’t find it being taught in local churches. And yet the biblical view of economics is about how individuals and communities manage the resources of God in a way that reflects our faith values and our relationship with God. The word economy comes from that Greek word oikonomia, which means the rules or the laws managing a household.
DDM [12:34] Oikos meaning house or household and nomos meaning law or rule. So economy is simply what rules or laws we will use to run our household, whether that’s our individual household or our household as a state. Biblically, the world, however, is our home. It is our house. But what is important, and I think what’s a huge differential in biblical economics, is that we don’t own the world or the world’s resources. In biblical economics, the world and all that is in it belongs to God. Now, that’s fundamentally different from economic views where individuals or companies may own the world and its resources.
DDM [13:24] Biblically, everything belongs to God. It is simply our task to manage or to steward the earth and its resources, but always on behalf of God. So, biblical stewardship always teaches that whatever you think you have, it actually belongs to God. And your task is to use what has been entrusted to you in ways that God would. And that ultimately, we will be judged on how we have used the resources of God.
MET [13:56] And that is completely different.
DDM [13:57] Completely different, completely different. I mean, I remember during South Africa, when there was all the issues around land ownership, particularly under apartheid. And I remember all these banners on the streets where the slogan was, the land belongs to God. Meaning actually, we’re fighting about who owns the land, but in reality, none of us own it. It all belongs to God. Fascinating. It is. So, if in some economic theories, you know, there is this belief in individual ownership of assets, like capitalism, and in others there’s the communal or state ownership, like in socialism or communism, Scripture believes that all assets belong to God.
DDM [14:39] And how we as communities use them is both a sacred trust and responsibility. So, if in Genesis we see how God creates this world with this incredible abundance, more than enough for anyone and everything, with everything being able to be used in that creation by anyone or anything, after the fall of humankind, which is when we see sin entering into the world, we begin to see in the biblical text how There’s almost like a mindset of scarcity, of competition, and of separation, even ending in murder, starting pretty quickly to emerge. So, as a result of sin in Scriptures, we see the belief emerging that there is not enough for everyone, which we know even today is not true.
DDM [15:34] There’s plenty for everyone, but as they say, not enough for some people’s greed. And so, people and communities, pretty quickly on, we see begin to start competing in the biblical story for resources, begin to hoard resources. That obviously fuels their separation from one another, and they begin to see each other now as competitors or as an enemy. And that very quickly leads to wars over resources and violence. But this greed, which in the Bible is clearly sinful, it’s fuelled by the belief that you never have enough. And so we will mine and rob and strip the earth in incredibly violent ways simply to have more.
DDM [16:21] And if you think about it, that really is the basis of capitalism and advertising. You know, that constant appeal of, well, you don’t have enough. You must keep consuming. We’ve got to keep growing the economy, even if that means we will destroy the planet and most human beings in the process.
MET [16:37] Can I say, like, related? So one of the most influential teachers I ever had in my life was actually my economics teacher in high school, which is crazy because that has nothing to do with what I do now, but this dude change my life. In Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, who kind of invented capitalism, he talks about the invisible hand that moves the market. And that’s this famous part of like capitalist theory, the invisible hand. And my economics teacher talked about the invisible hand of greed. Like he was very clear about, it’s not just this thing that happens.
MET [17:20] My economics teacher was very clear, it’s greed that moves the market, not just self-interest, it’s greed.
DDM [17:28] Absolutely, absolutely.
MET [17:28] Which I have not heard too many economists
DDM [17:32] Yeah, yeah.
MET [17:35] Yeah. Shout out to Mr. Franks.
DDM [17:37] Absolutely. I mean, the entire economy is founded on that, what the Bible would call a sin, the sin of greed, you know? So I think that for me, if we’re starting to look at economics and biblical economics, the huge difference with biblical economics from other contemporary theories is that of non-ownership. So, where everybody has access to everything, but it is not a right, it’s a gift from God. And so, it really is much more of, in some ways, we’re starting to hear this term almost coming a little bit back into vogue now, but it really is much more of a gift-based economy.
DDM [18:13] You know, people, they fished as they needed to, they hunted as they needed to, they foraged for food as they traveled from one land to another. You know, you cut down a tree if you needed to build a house. What people used was pretty much free. It was a gift from the earth and a gift from God. It was that sense of common land, common water, common knowledge and culture. And it’s interesting, I mean, if you study kind of social movements, Especially, I can’t speak for the USA, but in England, you know, the sense of common land and the commons, right?
DDM [18:50] I mean, right up until fairly recently, that was something that was still very visible in local villages and communities. But we see the shift today where it’s almost like everything has now become owned and then monetized. Even water has to be bought. There’s virtually no public land and if there is, people aren’t allowed to just set up camp there. I mean, look even here at Rochester, how you know, any of the poorer communities living in tents get bulldozed on a fairly frequent basis. You know, if you don’t own or rent, you have nowhere on this earth to live.
DDM [19:28] And that’s how far we’ve shifted from biblical economics.
MET [19:35] Yeah, all of that. All of that is true. I, of course, think about things in terms of words and language. One of the things I have written about in my other life as a researcher and will continue to write about is the inescapability of the marketplace metaphor in our lives. So think about the episode we did on immigration a while back. And I went on quite a wild ride with you about what it means that a state insists on licensing people. And that leads to questions of ownership. Why are we licensed? Who affirms our licensure?
MET [20:23] And we don’t necessarily think in terms of ownership all the time when we’re talking about immigration. But at the same time, we kind of do, because there is a sense of ownership about our borders. And much of the time, the reason we argue so vociferously about those borders is for economic reasons, right? Who’s paying to be here? Who’s supporting our state with their tax money? And these are ridiculous questions. Of course, because migrants and immigrants, regardless of their legal status, pour tons of tax money into the system every year, right? That’s why literally right now the administration is pushing the IRS to turn over information, right?
MET [21:00] If immigrants didn’t pay taxes, the IRS wouldn’t have their information. The effect of migrants on the economy is also why the administration is kind of backtracking on some of his deportation positions and now claiming that employed immigrants will be allowed to work or return if they self-deport if their employers vouch for them, but at the same time, we’re deporting, like, or thousands of people to death camps, so there’s no consistency here. Whatever, that’s kind of tangential. But as we know, my real area of expertise is the law and free speech. And in this arena, the metaphor of the marketplace and economic thinking is unavoidable.
MET [21:46] In free speech orthodoxy, American jurisprudence has long believed in the notion of a marketplace of ideas. And this means… I’ve heard that, yes. Yes, it’s very common. Yes. Yeah. This means what we believe is that there is a public arena where we all bring our ideas together, and then they are shared and tested, and the public gets to choose which ideas are the best. And in this marketplace, which is a proxy for democracy, the people deliberate, and then the best ideas kind of rise to the top, and the bad ideas are left to the trash heap of history.
MET [22:24] The marketplace metaphor has guided legal thinking about speech for over 100 years. I have serious problems with this metaphor. One, it commodifies speech. It makes speech into something that is bought and sold, and I think that is something that is particularly harmful. I think you can see speech as constitutive, as deliberative, as epidectic, as any number of things, but it is not an item to be bought and sold. If you do think of it as an item to be bought and sold, you automatically privilege some people over others. The problem with thinking of things through a metaphor of a marketplace is that in a marketplace, some people are inevitably more powerful than others.
MET [23:05] because they come to the market with more resources. In a marketplace of ideas, those resources are things like social capital, the things that make a person seem more believable or authoritative, I’m putting these, like if you could see me, I’m using air quotes, right, yeah. Believable or authoritative, whatever, that makes their ideas seem better. So people like men or white people’s ideas carry more weight in a marketplace setting because they come to a marketplace with more of these resources. Two, secondly, it sets up a paradigm where democracy is replaced with the mechanism of the marketplace.
MET [23:42] Now, there is a long tradition of connecting the two. In America, we have both a liberal market and a liberal democracy. And I mean liberal in the sense of the classical sense and not how it is used in like modern political parlance. Also, it is highly questionable as to whether we actually have either one of those things anymore, but we like to think we do. But we always have had a very laissez-faire attitude towards markets and governing, officially anyway. Once again, in practice, these things might look very different. But when you have a metaphor like the marketplace of ideas, you are replacing democratic functions, like regulating speech, with economic functions, like regulating the markets.
MET [24:26] And this conflation of economy and democracy opens up avenues for things like Citizens United or other means for corporate interests to have an outside influence on public discourse. because we don’t separate the economy or our markets from our democracy. So we use things like the marketplace metaphor to guide our democracy building, which means the economy becomes a substitute for public discourse and nation building.
DDM [24:53] Yeah, we see that in so much of the narrative.
MET [24:56] Yes, absolutely. So once again, this means if you come to the public sphere with fewer resources, you’re devalued as a citizen. Understanding democracy through the lens of the marketplace or the economy devalues those who aren’t secure economically or who don’t have a lot of social capital. And the economy as metaphor democracy inherently devalues people.
DDM [25:18] Right. 100%. You know, I think that’s so powerful. And, you know, it’s so true that the world in some ways has become one large marketplace. I mean, especially with the globalized economy and the way it is now. And so, I mean, even democracy, justice, human life itself just seems to be for sale, you know, which is nothing in Scripture but slavery. You know, in biblical economics, if we are to remember, firstly, that we are entrusted with God’s resources, then it’s interesting that the very next issue is that we are only to use what is necessary.
DDM [25:56] So it’s very interesting that like, for instance, when the Hebrew people were leaving Egypt and moving in that journey through the wilderness, they were given manna. or quail, but it was enough for every single day, so that they were to only use what they needed for that day to eat. And obviously human nature, some people decided to try and keep some for the next day, but whatever they hoarded or retained for the next day went off. And so the understanding with scripturally was that, you know, we are to use what is needed, but not to be hoarding.
DDM [26:35] And that simplicity of life is kind of a very crucial kind of theological principle right throughout scripture. You know, there’s that little cliched saying, live simply in order that others may simply live. But I think there’s a lot of truth in that, to never take more than our fair share. Unfortunately, in the world in which we live, if you have the money, you can buy as much as you want and take far more than your fair share. But in the case, scripturally, of some becoming wealthier than others, there were biblical laws and practices put into place so that every seven years, almost the playing field was leveled again.
DDM [27:16] So, for instance, every seven years the land was not to be cultivated, so that even the land itself could rest. Sabbath wasn’t just a lifestyle commandment, but was an economic mandate for human beings, for other species, even for the land itself. If you found you had more than somebody else in Scripture, you were mandated by God’s law to care for the stranger, the poor, the marginalized, which again, we looked at in our immigration podcast. Compassion and generosity is literally embedded into biblical economic ethics and law. And so one of the interesting laws is the commandment in Scripture against usury.
DDM [28:01] It’s not something we actually, funny enough, here preach much about at all today, but it’s a commandment within Judaism, within Christianity, and it’s also a commandment within Islam. Have you ever heard a sermon on usury?
MET [28:16] So, this is funny. I remember when I was really young, being in Sunday school, This is another one of those stories where I was like, I just had no hope as a child. I remember being really young and it was like, it was some of those verses that they read and just tried to like skip through and they were like, yeah, and there’s these verses about usury and I was like, what’s usury? And they tried to explain it and I was like, well, wait, don’t we do that like, all the time?
DDM [28:49] Everybody?
MET [28:50] Isn’t that how we buy houses? And they were just shh, shh.
DDM [28:52] There we go. There we go. So yeah, and it was actually a huge scriptural injunction, both within Judaic tradition, within Christian tradition, and within Islamic tradition, which is why we have Islamic banking, right? Was this commandment against usury, which is charging interest on a loan. So money was something in biblical economics that was always to be in circulation, never to be hoarded. And so, to take advantage of another person’s economic need by charging interest was seen as absolutely horrendous and unethical in the eyes of God. So, I always think it’s interesting that, you know, we all simply put our money in the bank and, you know, we’re always looking at, you know, what interest our investments are making, and this is one of the direct commandments in biblical economics that we’re to have no part in.
DDM [29:50] So, embedded in biblical theology is always also this call to support one another, especially those who are marginalized or weaker in society. To always make sure that we’re acting with justice, and that’s economic justice, and the scripture spells this out very clearly, which means that economic preferential treatment for the poor or the foreigner. To always act ethically and to remember that life is sacred and must always be more valued than money or wealth. And I think sometimes we’ve just forgotten that things have not always been the way they are today, that there are other ways that are possible.
DDM [30:30] And unfortunately, like you began with, Elizabeth, I think, you know, sometimes we’re not even giving people the opportunity to think of other models or other ways that have been tried in the past, which may provide a springboard for us to think of some new ways as we move forward into the future. But I think It’s becoming increasingly urgent if we really are to survive in the future. And I think our faith asks us to ask, what would it look like to create a society that reflects these kind of biblical values in economic, tangible ways?
MET [31:13] Thank you for listening to the Priest and the Prof. Find us at our website, https://priestandprof.org. If you have any questions or concerns, feel free to contact us at podcast@priestandprof.org. Make sure to subscribe, and if you feel led, please leave a donation at https://priestandprof.org/donate. That will help cover the costs of this podcast and support the ministries of Trinity Episcopal Church. Thank you, and we hope you have enjoyed our time together today.
DDM [31:42] Music by Audionautix.com
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