How to Think About Work and Money

The whole idea of moral neutrality is a mythology, but Keynes’s whole system is built on this, and the core commitment of Keynes’s economics was to re-orient economic analysis away from production to consumption. That the earlier approach to economics had said the purpose of the economy is to produce things that people want and need. The purpose of economic activity is to produce the goods and services that human beings want and need. So there’s a focus on production as the end point, or purpose of economic activity. For Keynes, very, very strongly the end point is consumption rather than production, and his argument was what’s the point of producing it if we’re not going to consume it, and therefore, consumption is what we want, and we want is to maximize consumption.

So you have the economy you want, not when you are producing the most goods and services, and certainly not when you’re producing the most good, or worthy, or desirable goods and services, but rather when you are satisfying people’s desires. When people are using, consuming the stuff that’s being made. So there’s a focus on gratifying your desires, pleasing your desires, because that’s what consumption ultimately is in this conception. When you use economic stuff you do it in order to satisfy some desire that you have.

Now I think that Austrian economics is somewhat better than the other two schools, because it has an avowed moral framework for understanding human action, and it goes beyond utilitarianism, but I still think we have a long way to go, and that Christina voices have to come in and critique all three of these schools, and return us to a much more robust understanding of the moral, spiritual, and cultural basis of economic activity, and look I think that economic growth is a great thing. I think it’s something that the church should be in favor of. I think that we do need limits on political authority, but I think those have to be pieces of a larger whole that we are still, I think, struggling to articulate in a way that has an impact in the public culture.

Well if you gave a complete answer to that question you’d have no space left for religious freedom. So you need some ambiguity in order to maintain religious freedom you have to have some ambiguity in the public square, and that creates a realm of contested meaning where people will argue with each other over what these things mean, and have different viewpoints about it. The danger that creates is that public institutions and systems can drift from their moral purpose. People can get the idea that well everything moral and spiritual is up for grabs, because it’s all contested. Maybe I think that serving human needs is more important than accumulating money and stuff, but you might have a sort of Ayn Rayndian philosophy that says no. Everyone has a moral responsibility to be selfish. So who’s to say that one is better than the other, and who’s to say that this view should prevail in public culture?

The fact is we need some shared moral commitments. We need some shared commitments that public institutions do in fact represent and affirm. Even if we cannot give a complete account of them, and the problem we’re encountering in the economic realm, and I would argue in many other realms of culture as well is that we’ve lost the ability to articulate the moral purpose of work, of economic activity, of businesses, and of the system itself in a way that represents a consensus value of society. That we need to have a moral consensus in society that transcends our divisions, at least transcends our major divisions. You’re never going to get everybody on board, but you got to be able to have some coherence as a culture, and our nation of religious freedom, and you referred to the phrase “enterprise society.”

I like to use this phrase “enterprise society” to describe America and the kind of culture that it represents where people are free to invent and create, and build, and to offer their ideas in the public square, and to offer their work, and their businesses in the public square in ways that make sense to them. That enterprise society is an incredibly precious thing, because it’s just part and partial of religious freedom, but in order to keep society together in that context we have to have some kind of coherence. We have to have some kind of integrity. I think the way you do that is not by charging into the political system, and imposing it through some political movement. I think the way you rebuild or create that integrity is by going into all areas of public life, like business, like all the things you do in your neighborhood, and offer our view of things to our culture in a way that’s contextualized, and win some, and that speaks again to the spiritual longings of people around us.

We’re adding value. We’re producing value. When we produce value for other people when we create value through our work the economy can grow, and unfortunately in the Christian world there are ideologies circulating that basically say that economic growth only comes from this consumerist whipping up of desires. So economic growth is bad, and I think we need to identify the wrong turn that we took in the 20th century with people like Keynes and Friedman, and say in spite of what they claimed, economic growth does not come from whipping up people’s desires, and teaching them a consumerist view of human live so that we can affirm economic growth that comes from ethical wealth creation, while not signing onto a selfish view of human life.

In the midst of that, certain values seem to be in play. One is, and we haven’t talked too much about this, but I think it’s assumed in some of what we said, the avoiding of selfishness. That we don’t engage in the economy to simply satisfy our own desires, or simply for selfish reasons. That there is a desire to pursue a citizenship that is virtuous, that seeks to contribute to society, and to produce an environment that leads to human flourishing, and represents good stewardship of the creation that God created us to manage and be stewards over, and hopefully this leads to better models of community, and better models of conversation about how we do our work and our theology. So that’s what you’re kind of encouraging us to think about as Christians. Is that fair?

The second point that I want to make is that cuts against the grain, because we have generally been taught, particularly in America to think about ourselves as individual activists, if I can say it that way. People who asses, and do what we do because of what it means for me or for my family, or maybe even my community, but we don’t think more globally about how we kind of put the whole package together. So we’ve challenged people today I think to think at a more global level about why they do what they do, and how their piece fits into the whole of it, right? Is that fair?