There's nothing like a post from Steve to rouse me from my administrator's doldrums, particularly when he starts to channel his (self-described) "hero," Michael Novak, on Catholicism and economics. I always hesitate to take Steve on because he is so smart (the exercise of prudentia) and because he is such a nice guy (the exercise of caritas), but, as he knows, he's pushing my buttons with this one -- I knew I'd pay for that "outlier" remark. In any event, here's my response to a couple of his recent posts.
First, a "Swedish" study? I'm instantly suspicious: remember the old right wing syllogism: Sweden leads the world in suicide; Sweden is socialist; therefore socialism stinks. I always thought it was the weather and the diet of pickled herring.
Second (and more seriously). I'm trying to figure out what this study proves about: (i) the comparative merits of American-style capitalist economics and European-style social democracy; (ii) what style of economics CST should favor. With respect to the first question, the study (which I have not looked at closely) seems to suggest that Americans in general have more stuff than Europeans, and that there is more equality in the US because American poor people have more stuff than European poor people. I'm no welfare economist, but my impression is that this is a very rose-colored picture. First of all, it fails to take into account the social costs of consumption that Rob pointed out. This has been a great theme of JPII. His problem with western capitalism is not that it is crushing labor (the 19th c. Catholic concern), but that it is promoting an idolatry of the material, an endless, soul destroying lust for more stuff. So maybe having more stuff is not so good! The Pope certainly has recognized the virtues of capitalist entrepreneurship, but he is distinctly aware that the creation of wealth can have very perverse spiritual effects. Second, I don't know about those equality figures -- certainly the picture is at best much more uneven. In the last 15 years or so wealth has become more concentrated at the top; the bottom is poorer and the middle and lower classes are more and more vulnerable to increasing debt burdens and slippage of social and economic status with little safety net (See Sullivan, Warren & Westbrook, "The Fragile Middle Class: Americans in Debt"). Third, is the "quality" of poverty really better here? Sure, lots of poor people in the US have (relatively cheap) TVs, (maybe) bigger apartments and crummy old beaters, but they lack health insurance, access to decent child care, schools and housing. The working poor--forget welfare--can barely sustain a living. For anecdotal evidence of that, take a look at Barbara Ehrenreich's "Nickel and Dimed," to get a sense of the desperate condition of people who actually have jobs and try to work for a living. I'm sure if we looked at things such as infant mortality, literacy, and other quantifiable factors, (not to mention racial disparities!) we would find that the life of the poor in the US can be genuinely brutal, and worse than that of the poor in Western Europe. I don't think there is really all that much to be complacent about when we talk about US capitalism and the amelioration of poverty. We are still talking about some pretty "savage inequalities", as one commentator whose name I've forgotten has put it.
Leaving aside the question of whether the Swedish study fully reflects both the social costs (Rob's point) or the level of inequality in the US (my point), there is a larger question about the reassurance Steve seems to draw from it. This study (as well as Steve and Novak) seems preoccupied with an old battle. Their old battle is the one against "socialism" or "European-style social democracy", sometimes referred to more generically as "statism" as a kind of omnibus category. And the argument seems to be that capitalism has created more wealth for EVERYBODY, and not just the capitalists, than any form of state organization of the economy that ever existed (most notably, Soviet communism and the different types of socialism.) From a Catholic perspective, Novak and Steve would argue, capitalism is much better because it preserves liberty (essential to the dignity of the human person) and, because of its wealth-creative force, it is much better for the poor than any state-sponsored attempts to redistribute wealth or restrain entrepreneurial energies. Steve apparently is claiming that the Swedish study vindicates both claims: American-style capitalism produces both more wealth and less inequality. Having addressed the question of whether the study actually does prove the latter point, I want to address more broadly the way Steve has framed the question.
First, forget socialism and social democracy as betes noirs. To a large extent, they are yesterday's news. It's also not news that American style capitalism produces more wealth than socialism and most social democratic regimes. The question is how uncritically we should embrace American-style capitalism. How should we should think about what the process of capitalist creative destruction costs in human terms, and whether there is any way --governmental or private -- that the costs can be mitigated? European social democracy was an attempt to take those human costs into account, and was often inspired by the CST tradition. Can that experiment suvive in the face of brutal global competition? Maybe not, but that is no reason to assume that the struggle to ameliorate the inequalities still produced by capitalism in its global form should be abandoned. Whether that struggle will gravitate toward European-style social democracy I don't know, I don't think the Swedish study establishes that the wealth creative effects of capitalism are significant enough to eliminate the need to deal with the profound inequalities that capitalism can generate.
Second, the "Leviathan" that Novak inveighs against is the state. But, today, the state looks weaker than ever. Besides the disintegration of states in what used to be called the third world, and the vulnerability of great nation states to terrorist NGOs, we see the massive power of multinationals -- particularly international finance -- to influence world affairs and the fate of the most impoverished peoples on earth. I suppose the old difference between left and right remains: Which Leviathan do you fear most -- the State or Capital?
Third, it is the note of triumphalism in Novak (and, I fear, in Steve's post on this topic) that troubles me the most, and which I find does not resonate with the CST tradition. To look at capitalism as a relatively unmixed blessing ignores its character as a human institution which, as Steve has pointed out, must be "fallen." It creates wealth and destroys wealth. It enriches the poor but creates more poverty. Capitalist economies are richer than command economies and (maybe) their poor are better off than other poor, but they still generate inequalities deeply inimical to human dignity. Statist solutions are not necessarily any better -- in the effort to redistribute wealth they may reduce aggregate wealth and simply enrich powerful interest groups. But CST does not tell us that the "preferential option for the poor" and the positive rights needed to preserve human dignity can be established simply by letting corporations do what they do best. Yes, the "poor will always be with us." The question is what we as Catholic Christians should do about it.
I'll conclude by countering Steve's Swedes with a couple of Italian economists, Stefano Zamagni and Luigino Biondi, economists whose Catholic-inspired thinking about the "economy of communion" offers an interesting alternative to our usual sharp antitheses.
The Notre Dame Journal of Law, Ethics, and Public Policy has published its "Symposium on Criminal Punishment," 18 Notre Dame J. Law, Ethics & Pub. Pol'y 303-646 (2004). The volume includes essays by George Fletcher ("Punishment, Guilt, and Shame in Biblical Thought"), Christian Brugger ("Aquinas and Capital Punishment"), Daniel Robinson ("Punishment, Forgiveness, and the Proxy Problem"), Kyron Huigens ("On Aristotelian Criminal Law"), Stuart Green ("Moral Ambiguity in White Collar Criminal Law"), and many others. I regret that I do not have links to the essays themselves, but I've had the chance to look over many of them, and highly recommend the volume. We at Notre Dame are very proud of this journal, and of its excellent student staff.
Rick
Today is the feast day of Saints John Fisher and Thomas More. Bishop Fisher was one of the (relatively few) bishops who refused to take the oath of succession which acknowledged the issue of Henry and Anne as the legitimate heir to the throne, and he was imprisoned in the Tower in April 1534. It is reported that, shortly before his execution, Fisher opened his New Testament to the following words from St. John's Gospel: "Eternal life is this: to know You, the only true God, and Him Whom You have sent, Jesus Christ. I have given You glory on earth by finishing the work You gave me to do. Do You now, Father, give me glory at Your side". Closing the book, he observed: "There is enough learning in that to last me the rest of my life."
Just a few days later, Thomas More was convicted of treason. He reportedly told his judges that "we may yet hereafter in heaven merrily all meet together to everlasting salvation." On the scaffold, he famously told the crowd that he was dying as "the King's good servant-but God's first."
A few years ago, Pope John Paul II proclaimed Thomas More the patron saint of politicians and statesmen.
Rick
In response to Rob's argument about the moral costs of consumption, consider that not only is the US ahead of Europe on key quality of life measures, the US is also way ahead on virtually all measures of religiosity:
What the best available empirical research reveals is that secularization is unambiguously observable in most of Western Europe, but not in the United States. In fact, religion remains remarkably strong in the United States. For instance, more than 95 percent of Americans claim to believe in God or a universal spirit or lifeforce, compared to 61 percent of the British; nearly 80 percent of Americans claim to believe in heaven, compared to 50 percent of the British; 84 percent of Americans believe that Jesus is God or the son of God, compared to 46 percent of the British (Gallup and Lindsay 1999). Comparing additional traditional religious beliefs, over 70 percent of Americans believe in life after death, compared to 46 percent of Italians, 43 percent of the French, and 35 percent of Scandinavians (Gallup 1979). And over 70 percent of Americans believe in bell, compared to only 28 percent of the British (Greeley 1995). Concerning traditional religious participation, nearly 45 percent of Americans attend church more than once a week, compared to 23 percent of Belgians, 19 percent of West Germans, 13 percent of the British, 10 percent of the French, 3 percent of Danes, and only 2 percent of Icelanders (Verweij, Ester, and Nauta 1997).
The question of why this disparity exists is hotly debated, but consider this partial explanation:
A third consideration involves the possible impact of different social welfare systems. Perhaps when the government takes a greater role in providing social services, religion wanes, and when the government fails to provide extensive social services, religion thrives. For instance, religious belief and participation is the absolute lowest level in Scandinavia, whose countries are characterized by generous social support and extensive welfare systems. In contrast, the United States government offers far fewer social services and welfare programs than any European nation.
So social democracy may not only be a bad idea for one's pocket book; perhaps it is also a bad idea for one's soul.
Monday, June 21, 2004
I am not even an amateur economist, nor do I quibble with the fact that higher per capita GDPs are a good thing. I do, however, feel obliged to point out that much of the evidence of America's supremacy over Europe in terms of wealth creation (see Steve's post below) has come at a substantial moral cost to Americans themselves. Besides reflecting the degree to which technological conveniences have become standard to the American way of life (even among the poor), the rates of ownership of televisions, cars, air conditioning, etc., along with the square footage of our homes, all provide a sense of the degree to which the consumer culture has found its ultimate expression in modern American life. Given the vastly lower percentage of poor and middle-class Americans who have health insurance, save for college, or save for retirement, I'm not sure that the nearly universal ownership of televisions is a good thing. And I'm doubtful that the rise in square footage of the average home is a positive indicator of a family's overall health, given the corresponding need of both parents to work outside the home in order to make mortgage payments. (I'd be interested in seeing the US-EU comparison of per capita personal debt levels.) If both parents need to be working, I think that the European tendency to ensure paid parental leave after a child's birth is more vital to the health of the family than the square footage of the American home to which the nanny is welcomed every day.
I'm not challenging Steve's characterization of the study's relevance, and I do not suggest we embrace the obviously flawed model of the European social welfare state. But I do think we need to resist any temptation to judge the health of a society (even economic health) solely by measures that feed into culturally destructive habits. In this regard, I was reminded of David Hart's article, Freedom and Decency, in the current First Things (the article is not available on-line). He wrote concerning our society's insistence that censorship is utterly incompatible with freedom. I think his words also apply to the market economy:
A society is just precisely to the degree that it makes true freedom possible; to do this it must leave certain areas of moral existence to govern themselves, but it must also in many cases seek to defeat the most vicious aspects of fallen nature, and to aid as far as possible in the elevation in each soul of right reason over mere appetite and impulse -- which necessarily involves denying certain persons the things they want most. . . . When appetite seizes the reins of the soul or the city, it drives the chariot toward ruin; so it is the very art of sound governance to seek to perfect the intricate and delicate choreography of moral and legal custom that will best promote the sway of reverent reason in city and soul alike.
. . . . The ultimate consequence of a purely libertarian political ethos, if it could be taken to its logical end, would be a world in which we would no longer even remember that we should want to choose the good, as we would have learned to deem things good solely because they have been chosen.
Rob
Our Lord taught that "You always have the poor with you ...." Even so, Catholic Social Teaching commands that we have a preferential option for the poor. Yet, as I understand CST, it leaves many of the policy decisions relevant to how we ameliorate the status of the poor to prudential judgment rather than magisterial teaching.
In making those prudential judgments, we need to consider a new Swedish study - reported at OpinionJournal.com - assessing the relative merits of European-style social democracy versus Anglo-American democratic capitalism.
The growing split between the U.S. and Europe has been much in the news, mostly on foreign policy. But less well understood is the gap in economic growth and standards of living. Now comes a European report that puts the American advantage in surprisingly stark relief.
The study, "The EU vs. USA," was done by a pair of economists--Fredrik Bergstrom and Robert Gidehag--for the Swedish think tank Timbro. It found that if Europe were part of the U.S., only tiny Luxembourg could rival the richest of the 50 American states in gross domestic product per capita. Most European countries would rank below the U.S. average, as the chart below shows. ...
Higher GDP per capita allows the average American to spend about $9,700 more on consumption every year than the average European. So Yanks have by far more cars, TVs, computers and other modern goods. "Most Americans have a standard of living which the majority of Europeans will never come anywhere near," the Swedish study says.
But what about equality? Well, the percentage of Americans living below the poverty line has dropped to 12% from 22% since 1959. In 1999, 25% of American households were considered "low income," meaning they had an annual income of less than $25,000. If Sweden--the very model of a modern welfare state--were judged by the same standard, about 40% of its households would be considered low-income.
In other words poverty is relative, and in the U.S. a large 45.9% of the "poor" own their homes, 72.8% have a car and almost 77% have air conditioning, which remains a luxury in most of Western Europe. The average living space for poor American households is 1,200 square feet. In Europe, the average space for all households, not just the poor, is 1,000 square feet.
Many who claim to be in the mainstream of CST seem to prefer European social democracy to Anglo-American democratic capitalism. In light of this study, they have a lot of explaining to do. Personally, it makes me feel a lot better about being on the neo-conservative "fringe" of CST.
