Christian radical reflections 54, October 13, 2005 AD
A Christian
Economics?
Bob Goudzwaard & Harry de Lange
Beyond Poverty and Affluence : Toward an Economy of Care With a Twelve-Step Program for Economic Recovery
(Translated and edited by Mark R Vander Vennen)
1995 Eerdmans & WCC,
Grand Rapids and Geneva. ISBN 2-8254-1138-8
This review was previously published as "Bob Goudzwaard's Reforming economics: Close Engagement and Vision for Accountable Stewardship" in Journal of the Association of Christian Economists ISSN 0956-3067 23 Aug 97 26-32 and also in Zadok Perspectives. No 58 Spring 1997 22-25.
Bob Goudzwaard is a former member of the Dutch Parliament, and well known outside of the Netherlands as a creative thinker prodding reflection on Christian economics. He helped formulate the Basis and Principles of the Manifesto of the Dutch Christian Democratic Appeal Party and has been involved in the Dutch Council of Churches in welfare related issues. This latest book explains and elaborates his Christian economic perspective, and with Harry de Lange argues a case which is profound though not too difficult. It demonstrates a grasp for the intricacies of economics and econometrics and is a theoretical challenge to the discipline of economics.
Our practical decision-making at all levels, public and private, national and international, needs renewal. Close engagement is called for and Beyond Poverty and Affluence takes seriously the crisis economists face. According to the authors we can no longer afford the abstractions of economic theory, with the dominant Enlightenment worship of human reason and ingenuity. The Enlightenment world-view, with all of its laissez-faire and socialist denominations, has run aground upon its own post-modern dilemmas, and yet economic science as such still has a part to play. Goudzwaard and de Lange do not appeal to any economic ir-rationalism as antidote to pervasive economic rationalism. The argument is confessedly Christian but is no attempt to ameliorate or sanitise an autonomous and self-sufficient rationality.
Their theoretical approach respects the fact that all schools of economics will give some account of the ultimate structure of human accountability in their theories. They may adopt the conventional Christian view that economics is a normative science, a study of the God-order structure for buying and selling, but economics must be based in a normative framework which approaches economics as the study of creation.
The reform proposed for economic theory starts with the writers’ diagnosis of the failures of 20th century economic theory. To put it briefly: the diagnoses of economic theory have been part of the disease economics has been trying to cure. Economic behaviourism (whether in socialist, Keynesian or free market varieties) has so shaped the civic mentality of the Welfare State, and those who seek to dismantle it, that it has become politically hazardous to speak about human responsibility. Asserting that humans are responsible seems too close to the neo-right agenda and shifts blame onto victims. Goudzwaard and deLange clear the ground theoretically and historically to discuss responsibility and accountability without giving any conceptual ammunition to new rightist ideology [for further discussion see Goudzwaard 1996].
But Goudzwaard and de Lange also believe that Christian social-economic-political thinking needs to be developed in close dialogue with the misleading ideologies it rejects. As theorists they want to learn to see their program also as others are prone to view it and to formulate their alternative aware that the fallacies of idealism and materialism perennially capture and bend innovative ideas away from renewal to a deepening of the crisis [For a more recent contribution see Bob Goudzwaard 1996].
Goudzwaard and de Lange re-define economics in terms of normative criteria which are large as life itself - care, nurture, frugality, stewardship. At base the economic theorist is also arguing a case with him/herself about the application of these norms. This raises a philosophical problem. If our entire social life Coram Deo is indeed stewardship, does this mean that sacred theology, ethics and law are now to be understood as subsidiary parts of the new Christian economic theory? Not exactly. Whilst it is true that the various special sciences should not be nurtured and cultivated as if they are somehow in totally separate and different paddocks, yet each special science does have a distinct focus. It is indeed the fullness of our living and breathing life, Coram deo, which the specialist in economic theory investigates when deriving economic concepts and analysing economic structures. Each of the special sciences studies our integral human experience from the standpoint of one or other aspect. But even though creation is to be viewed theoretically from one or other aspect it is still the full reality of God’s creation order, and the awesome responsibility of the human agent, which confronts the economic theorist in the formulation of the economic concept. Working within the framework of the economy of creation, a Christian economic theory will seek to restore economic theory to its rightful task, to limit its activities in a way that creatively keeps it from usurping other special scientific perspectives, and rightfully point to distributive and allocative states of affairs which other sciences are not so focused upon.
At the outset the authors ask us to consider “Six Paradoxes” which confront economic theorising. How is it that a society of enormous wealth experiences enormous scarcity? they ask. How is it that poverty is increasing not on the fringes but at the heart of wealthy societies? How is it possible that as wealth increases opportunities to practice care decrease? Why does unemployment rise instead of dropping in the midst of economic growth? A rising standard of living coincides with a rising incidence of disease. How come? With more wealth we have far less time. Why? Poverty, environmental degeneration and unemployment are three intractable problems which are caught in the seeming grid-lock of these paradoxes.
But solutions to the paradoxical and intractable problems of our stewardship do not come by formulae - not even by enshrining the six paradoxes and three intractables and resolving them by 12 categorical imperatives. Adequate reform can only be by a painstaking, historical labour seeking the renewal of society in all aspects. Redefining basic concepts is itself a painstaking and complex task. Our view of development needs to be changed. Our concepts of salaries, conservation, taxation and interest rates - to name but a few - need to be re-thought.
Decisions to limit basic rates of pay, or to have high unemployment, are not just a matter of bowing to fate as cowardly Ministers of Industry might have us believe. These decisions come out of a normative vision about stewardship and nurture for a nation’s people. But, as the authors point out, policies born of fatalism, encourage fatalistic attitudes. The dogmas of economic rationalism nurture other self-serving abstractions about curves on graphs “flattening out”, as if the policies can ignore the steamrolling effects they have on people’s lives - on how they share a pie as a family, munch a packet of chips on the way to class or swap Tazos in the school yard.
Stewardship, for the economic rationalist politician may be about making “tough” decisions, ensuring that “bottom line” entries on ledgers are in the black and discovering how much is left after all budget items have been accounted for. But if unemployment rates seem to go up when we wield a black pen, and that they can only come down when we use a red one, then seemingly that is the price we have to pay. It is talked about as if it is simply too bad. The result is that the unemployment rate becomes a part of the political economic debate but the unemployed persons, and their families friends and associates, are assumed to be somehow “outside” the economic field of reckoning. Throughout the western world we now secure the talk about the price of unemployment in terms of avoiding national debt, but when it comes to practical discussion of the day to day personal price that people have to pay for such a political economy our politicians have no way of including such empirical matters in their economic equations. The price of talking abstractly about people’s lives has been artificially inflated at the expense of adequately formulating the unpriceable scarcity of human stewardship and accountability. “Surplus accounting” becomes a normative framework. Thus despite alternative rhetorics unemployment and the unemployed are and remain an integral part of the economy, even as Marxists have insisted for over one hundred years.
Likewise, ruining rain forests doesn’t do away with the environment; it changes it for the worse. It is not a question of whether large-scale multi-nationals are to contribute to the fabric of civil society; it is rather with the rightful management their involvement, the public legal shaping of their contribution, in direct and indirect ways.
Accountancy can only ever makes sense in terms of our deepest
values. The “bottom line” of our accountancy, as one dimension of our ultimate
accountability, concerns who we are. The
true “bottom line” is our stewardship as human beings, as workers in
God’s vineyard if you will, in which the arguments about our budgeting can
alone make sense. Counting our pennies makes sense in the context of a
structure of ac-count-ability, but that accountability Coram Deo is nothing other
than a stewardship, living in the context of Genesis 1:28. Since Christ has
come that does not mean exploiting the earth until all its resources run out;
to the contrary it means looking after the earth, developing it and sharing it.
Stewardship is a generation-to-generation thing.
So we come to the question of who we are. Who are “we” in “our” economic life. If by “we” we reduce our stewardship to the aspect of creation we explore via our economic theory then we will find ourselves dominated by, and enslaved to, the concepts and the theories we have constructed. They were formulated to help us better understand our own work, but they become a tyranny. When “we” is reduced to who we are in an economic sense our conceptual dilemmas are only just starting. Do we call a halt and assume “we” means “we Australians”, “we British” or “we Europeans”? Or is it a matter of who “we” are in our private lives? Or is the “we” really our market value in a global sense? Whichever way it goes we face intractable logical and theoretical problems because philosophically we have crossed over the reductionist threshold and defined ourselves in terms of whatever economic science might discover about ourselves. We must then find some or other countervailing absolute to hold us and the economy made out of our abstractions in its place. That in a nutshell is the problematic which the authors claim is avoidable. And that is why they see themselves fully immersed in the history of economic thought by developing the outline of a practical regime for the historical resolution of global, glocal and local economic problems which will have large-scale public and private ramifications.
The final chapter is "A Twelve-Step Program for Economic Recovery". This sounds over ambitious but it is also an implicit suggestion for the reform of the economics curriculum within the academy. The practical regime they put forward is also a suggestion about what contribution economic theory should make to the entire encyclopaedia. The book’s “practical” side is thus also an implicit challenge to universities to ensure that the study of economics gets “theoretical” and in tune with reality, priceable and unpriceable scarcities. We live in a global commonwealth bestowed with great riches, great wealth and the next generation needs sharper insight into our stewardly view of ourselves and the way things have been formed historically.
The first proposal concerns the world monetary system - the way in which the world's rich countries are structurally to be dependent upon poorer countries. Nations are called to serve and care for each other. They must do this with an eye to the true situation in the global market. In this way we can take seriously our own nationality but reckon with the interdependencies which span the global and make the earth the home for all of its inhabitants.
The second step considers salaries and wages - payment for services rendered should not only be retrospective but prospective. Payment should be such to enable people to continue the good work they are doing. If this principle was applied to the full gamut of industrial relations, across the board, including to cut the salaries of over-paid senior executives, then not only would the disparity between the over-paid and the under-paid close significantly. As well the over-paid would find themselves significantly more at ease with their fellows, more able to contribute and less likely to inflict alienating managerial systems which hide the fact that they have retired from active stewardship into inactive sinecures. A retrospective comparative view of wages and salaries would then compare the "caring" function of the jobs performed. A prospective view would allow us to see tasks that are needed in the future for genuine care of the planet and of our social ecology.
The third step concerns restructuring our understanding of the responsibility of powerful corporations - re-building the fabric of civil society. By using our socio-political imagination we might be able to find ways to persuade management of large-scale corporations to extend their brand name sponsorship of high profile national sporting teams to make relevant contributions to social development programmes (which would include sport) in poorer areas in our nations and continents so that as public companies they also have a moral incentive to help build a society that will grow past fixations upon advertising icons and consumer goods.
The fourth is oriented to pricing and production. The following steps include social security, the environment and economic growth are the focus of the next steps followed by public debate, technology, networking, assessing international trade and the predominance of Western life-style.
The 12-point program is as much for the "widow and her mite" as it is for the corporate "movers and shakers", erstwhile whistle blowers, unionists, and citizens engaged in buying and selling activities in the market place of the life of nations. It is as much for those united in diffuse organisations like church structures (denominations) which use resources is a decentralised way, as it is for highly regimented corporations which are ruled from the top. It is as much a schema which can be applied with profit by an informal alliance by parents in a local sporting team, as it is an approach to economic planning which should be taken seriously by politicians who work out their stewardship by debating in Parliament.
It is also a worthwhile statement of principle that can help academics better face questions about the normative and appropriate “division of labour” within the increasingly tattered social fabric of our academic stewardship around the world. The twelve points can be used on the personal level, on the inter-personal level as friends and colleagues discuss their own contribution, as well as in more formal and organised settings from the local sporting club all the way up to the united nations and the board rooms of multi-national organisations.
At the beginning of the final chapter the authors quote from the post-Marxist theologian Ernst Bloch : "When you begin to pay in hard cash for what you have preached about - the poor, the exploited and the oppressed - then you are Christians. If you do not, then you are chatter-boxes and hypocrites." They then ask : Can we achieve something of the radicality of human action to which the Bible calls us, also in economics? The aim of Beyond Poverty and Affluence is to challenge not only Christians, but all of us, to reappraise our stewardship and our economic theories.
References:
H R Catherwood 1964 The Christian in Industrial Society IVP London.
Bob Goudzwaard 1970 Ongeprijsde Schaarste [Non-priced scarcity: social costs and uncompensated effects as a problem for economic theory and policy] Van Stockum. The Hague. With English Summary.
----------------------- 1972 A Christian political Option Wedge. Toronto
----------------------- 1975 Add for the Overdeveloped West Wedge Toronto
----------------------- & John van Baars 1978 “Norms for the International Economic Order” in Justice in the International Economic Order Proceedings of the second International Conference of Reformed Institutions for Christian Higher Education Calvin College. Grand Rapids August pp. 223-254.
----------------------- 1979 Capitalism and Progress : A Diagnosis of Western Society Eerdmans Grand Rapids
------------------------ 1984 Idols of our Time IVP Downer’s Grove
------------------------ 1996 "Who Cares? Poverty and the Dynamics of Responsibility: An Outsider's Contribution to the American Debate on Poverty and Welfare" in S W Carlson-Theis and J W Skillen eds Welfare in America: Christian Perspectives on a Policy in Crisis Eerdmans pp. 49-80.
Alan Storkey 1986 Transforming Economics SPCK London.
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October 2005 © Christian Radical Reflections, is written by Bruce C Wearne (PhD), 29 Lawrence Rd., Point Lonsdale Vic 3225 AUSTRALIA, 61-3-5258-3913. Each edition may be photocopied or retransmitted in its entirety but not otherwise published, reprinted or transmitted without permission. This personal project aims to encourage positive Christian citizenship, the development of policies and political attitudes that better express our love for God and our neighbour. Your comments are welcome. Email can be sent to bcwearne@ozemail.com.au http://members.ozemail.com.au/~bcwearne/index.html |