If only Jesus had read Adam Smith, or perhaps Ayn Rand

The Rich and Therefore Blessed Young Man

1. As Jesus was setting out on a journey, a man ran up to him and knelt before him, and asked, “Good Teacher, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?” 2. And Jesus said to him, “What have you done so far?” 3. And he said to Him, “Well I was born into a wealthy family, got into a good school in Galilee because my parents donated a few thousand talents for a building with a nice reed roof, and now I have a high-paying job in the Roman treasury managing risk.” 4. Looking at him, Jesus felt an admiration for him, and said to him, “Blessed are you! For you are not far from being independently wealthy." And the man was happy. Then Jesus said, "But there is one thing you lack: A bigger house in a gated community in Tiberias. Buy that and you will have a treasure indeed. And make sure you get a stone countertop for the kitchen. Those are really nice." The disciples were amazed. 5. Peter asked him, “Lord, shouldn’t he sell all his possessions and give it to the poor?” Jesus grew angry. “Get behind me, Satan! He has earned it!” Peter protested: “Lord,” he said, “Did this man not have an unjust advantage? What about those who are not born into wealthy families, or who do not have the benefit of a good education, or who, despite all their toil, live in the poorer areas of Galilee, like Nazareth, your own home town?” 6. “Well,” said Jesus, “first of all, that’s why I left Nazareth. There were too many poor people always asking me for charity. They were as numerous as the stars in the sky, and they annoyed me. Second, once people start spending again, like this rich young man, the Galilean economy will inevitably rebound, and eventually some of it will trickle down to the poor. Blessed are the patient! But giving the money away, especially if he can’t write it off, is a big fat waste.” The disciples’ amazement knew no bounds. “But Lord," they said, "what about the passages in both the Law and the Prophets that tell us to care for widows and orphans, for the poor, for the sick, for the refugee? What about the many passages in the Scriptures about justice?” 7. “Those are just metaphors,” said Jesus. “Don’t take everything so literally.”

- James Martin, SJ, The Not-so-Social Gospel.

There are a couple more where that came from: The Lazy Paralytic and The Very Poorly Prepared Crowd. Evidently, Jesus needed to take Economics 101.

The case against growth, and other stories

The case against growth: Ted Trainer (UNSW) makes the case that very few people are taking seriously the full economic and political implications of the concept of limits to growth: "The growth problem is not just that the economy has grown to be too big, now depleting resources and damaging ecosystems. The more central problem is that growth is integral to the system. Most of the system's basic structures and mechanism are driven by growth and cannot operate without it. It is not that this society has a growth economy; it is that this is a growth society. Growth cannot be removed leaving the rest of the economy more or less as it is. Unfortunately people in the current 'De-growth' movement tend to think growth is like a faulty air conditioning unit on a house, which can be taken away and the house will function the way it did before."

Peak stuff? Fred Pearce investigates the claim that consumer societies are becoming post-industrial. Based on various metrics that have actually started to decline in many rich countries (for example, car use is waning in most developed countries), some commentators look forward to the "dematerialisation" of the economy proving the silver bullet that saves us from ourselves. As others note, however, such evidence is patchy, and fails to account for the fact that we've still got decades of massive consumption growth if the developing world is to approach our present consumer lifestyles. Even if there is a point at which such development reaches a natural plateau in per capita consumption, it is not at all clear that reaching that plateau won't involve massively overshooting various planetary boundaries (as outlined effectively in the "case against growth" above).

How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love Climate Change: Brad Littlejohn offers some dark humour reflecting on our obsession with novelty. Discussion in the comments ponder further about the place of novelty and humour in our ecological deliberations.

Fossil fuel glut: Much noise has been made about developments in the fossil carbon extraction business that ensure these companies are not about to go out of business anytime soon, with claims that "peak oil" is disproved or that the US will lead a fossil fuelled renaissance. The reality is that these non-conventional carbon pools are only now economically available due to a high oil price, and that unless the price stays high, they will not be extracted. So we have indeed very likely seen the end of rising production of cheap, easily accessible conventional oil. That doesn't mean we run out of oil, just that energy gets expensive, which still has all kinds of economic implications. And if we insist on remaining addicted to fossil carbon, pursuing non-conventional sources is leap out of the frying pan of energy insecurity into the fire of climate chaos.

Economic growth and ecological health: It has become popular in certain circles to argue that as countries get richer, they clean up their environmental problems and that therefore the solution to our ecological woes is to grow the global economy as fast as possible (sometimes called an environmental Kuznets curve). This piece is a sustained critique of that idea.

How Money Makes People Less Humane. Some really interesting research on the effects of money (either having it, wanting it, thinking about it or even having it subconsciously suggested) on empathy. The upshot is that, statistically speaking, money functions to disconnect us from those around us, making us less caring, less sensitive, more suspicious and more individualistic. Or, as the scriptures would say: "the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil" (1 Timothy 6.10).

Head in the sand: coastal property prices and sea level rise

If you own property in vulnerable low-lying coastal areas and yet have been keeping your head in the sand about sea level rise, you probably deserve to face the crippling loss of value and insurance premium hikes coming your way. Moves like this from Gosford council are an attempt to delay the inevitable. For the record, I think the NSW government ought to give clear direction to councils on such matters, but radical shifts in property values are ultimately inevitable. Trying to keep this fact from potential buyers through lobbying councils or any other means is a form of fraud. The best thing that most owners concerned about loss of value can do is campaign hard for aggressive mitigation and so prolong the period before retreat becomes necessary. There will be social tipping points on this issue as more people wake up to the fact that certain locations are increasingly vulnerable to storm surges and salt water intrusion. At some point, these properties will become unsellable, uninsurable and then, ultimately, unliveable. Some areas may have sufficient resources to afford coastal defences, but this is never going to be feasible for every piece of coastline. And even with the most aggressive and effective emissions mitigation, we are still going to see multi-metre sea level rise over the next few centuries, including probably something like a metre this century. Without such mitigation, it will be many times worse and is likely to continue rising for millennia.

This is one of the "sunk costs" of our failure to act on the knowledge we've had for decades about the dangers of basing our lives on the accumulated solar energy of eons past.

Assorted opinions

The Conversation: Celebrating 150 years of captivity. I am increasingly uneasy about the ambiguities involved in most zoos. This piece articulates a number of them succinctly.

NY Mag: Sugar Daddies. Sugar Daddies are "private donors or their privately held companies writing checks totaling $1 million or more (sometimes much more) in this [US] election cycle." Some profiles on those spending most to influence the 2012 US presidential election.

Biologos: Thinking aloud together (part 2, part 3). Scot McKnight ponders how to get scientists and pastors talking about the implications of evolutionary biology and human origins.

Rachel Held Evans: 15 reasons I left church. Though many are quite US-centric, these are worth pondering. I'm sure I could add a few more.

Stephen King: Tax me, for F@%&’s Sake!. Multi-millionaire horror writer joins Warren Buffet and numerous other super-rich figures in calling for much higher taxes on themselves. King brings his own (very profitable but not always highbrow) blend of narrative shock and awe to the argument.

ABC: Why we hate Gillard so much. "[T]here are three pertinent distinctions between this government and the Howard Government: it is a Labor Government, it is a minority government, and the current prime minister is a woman."

Brad reflects on economies of deception - "When the pursuit of profit becomes a self-justifying end, truth becomes a readily dispensable commodity, because truth will not maximize profit" - and reviews the important book Merchants of Doubt.

The sin that dare not speak its name

Guest post by anonymous
I have asked Byron for permission to remain anonymous since I fear the backlash (personal and official) that may occur if I put my name to this post.

There is a grave sin openly celebrated in our nation (perhaps especially in Sydney) that makes me feel queasy. At certain times of year - and this is one of them - its advocates feel they can come out of the closet and proudly flaunt their unfortunate condition. Criticism is difficult to raise in polite company, especially amongst educated people. To speak out is considered ignorant at best, hate-filled at worst. Yet the Bible is clear and so we must be too. It would be cruel to remain silent.

This perversion is aggressively defended by highly organised and well-funded lobby groups. Some political parties treat it as a normal and desirable pattern of life, and most teach it is necessary to at least tolerate it. I know that every political party has strengths and weaknesses and that no party is perfect, but I still struggle to understand how a Christian can in good conscience vote for any party that openly and brazenly supports a sin so roundly and straightforwardly condemned in the Bible.

Advocates want to teach our children to embrace it and indeed in many schools it is put forward as perfectly natural, even necessary for a well-functioning society. I personally know of parents who have had the courage to question the ideology being taught in our classrooms and who, as a result, have subsequently been slandered and ostracised - or perhaps worse, condescendingly patronised as backwards and ignorant.

From my study of history, I realise that this abomination has been tolerated by the elite of some societies, but I am not aware of any civilisation that has embraced it so wholeheartedly as ours.

It was not so long ago that the church's teaching of such things carried more weight and a man would have been ashamed to admit such desires in public. Parents would have warned their children against it with serious and hushed voices. The tables are now turned and it is those of us who still hold to the conservative position embraced by the church for centuries who are shunned. I was sickened to discover that is possible to buy children's books that celebrate what ought to be anathema.

And worst of all, many churches now overlook members who ought to be disciplined - preferring perhaps to avoid controversy - or even teach inclusion of this most egregious wrong, claiming that the cultural conditions of the biblical authors blinkered their vision, that they had not seen the great good that could result from accepting such desires as part of God's blessing upon humanity.

Don't get me wrong; there is such a thing as natural and healthy desire. But not every desire is healthy. Some are simply corruptions in which we mistake our true needs for manufactured false wants. Whether cursed with corrupt genes or seduced by an iniquitous lifestyle I cannot say, but those ensnared in wickedness are not to be despised. They are to be pitied and helped, not attacked. We must try, as the saying goes, to love the sinner while hating the sin. Let us remember that none of us are without fault. I am sure they make all kinds of positive contributions to society in other ways. And they are not beyond repentance. With the help of God's Spirit, they can begin afresh and discover healing.

What am I talking about? What is the sin that dare not speak its name? I am referring, of course, to the love of money, which is a root of all kinds of evil. Tolerance is cruelty. Repentance is possible. Healing is promised.

Are Australians rich?

On average, yes, almost twice as wealthy as a decade ago. It would be interesting to see these stats broken down into bands in order to make inequality visible.

Bank makes money: in other news, dog bites man

Major US bank launders billions of dollars of Mexican drug money.

That big banks generally make stratospheric profits means they are also the target of much suspicion and criticism, a fair bit of which is justified, as the above story illustrates. If you haven't already seen it, watch Inside Job. The problem is not a few bad apples, but a rotten system. Contemporary banking practices are the embodiment of hypercapitalism's myopic obsessions.

"It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God."

- Mark 10.25 (NRSV).

What others are doing

Jason offers a pastoral reflection upon the Christchurch earthquake.

Kate summarises why climate change is bad for biodiversity, otherwise known as the web of life (though as a couple of comments point out, we're really talking about anthropogenic environmental change, not just climate change, as there are other factors contributing to the current precipitous biodiversity decline).

Jeremy is in search of the biodegradable shoe. He also thinks there are three basic paths ahead for the world over this century.

Bill discusses what he thinks might be the most popular tax in history.

David distinguishes (very helpfully) between stuff and things, and while he's dishing out useful advice, he also gives some tips on how to make trillions of dollars.

Halden is a little underwhelmed by ecumenism.

And Brad relates a tale of two Protestantisms, in which O'Donovan sides with the Augustinian English Anglicans against the Donatist Scots Presbyterians (perhaps unsurprisingly, since O'Donovan is an English Anglican who happens to live in Scotland). If nothing after that last comma made sense, don't worry, the post itself is very readable.

Jesus was no capitalist usurer

Brad offers a reading of the parable in Luke 19.11-27 that may turn a few common assumptions on their head. But to my mind it makes a lot of sense of some otherwise uncomfortable details.

The implications of this reading are significant, since it removes one of the few passages used by defenders of usury to claim that Jesus (implicitly) overturns the scriptural prohibition against charging interest on a loan. It goes without saying that this practice is a central pillar of our present economic system.

How to balance a budget

The ABC's Clarke and Dawe give a masterclass in budgeting. Those not following Australian politics might be a little baffled.
H/T Dave Taylor.

Can Christians be bankers?

The parable of the unforgiving servant in Matthew 18.23-35 is justly famous as an illustration of the gratuitousness of divine forgiveness. The debt of the first servant is larger than the entire GDP of multiple Roman provinces at the time (or so I have heard). Don't ask how this man had amassed such a debt; dodgy loans are apparently nothing new. Perhaps someone got a tasty commission and knew there was little regulatory oversight. But I digress...

The main point of the parable, however, is not the enormity of the debt forgiven the first servant, but the failure of that servant to treat his neighbour in the light of the forgiveness he himself had just received. It is a striking image of one of Jesus' central teachings: that we are to forgive others as we have been forgiven by our heavenly Father.

Yet listening to this parable in church last Sunday made me wonder: the image is financial; is the application also financial? That is, when Jesus warns against a failure to cancel the debts of one who cannot repay us and says that God will not forgive us if we do not forgive others, is he only talking about moral or relational debts? Are actual monetary debts excluded? I see no reason that they should be. And Jesus isn't talking about restructuring bad debts, or recovering what can be recovered. The entire debt is forgiven.

This is a profound teaching and would, it seems to me, effectively make it impossible for a Christian who takes the teaching of Christ seriously to work at any of the major banks. Thoughts?
I also cannot see how a Christian can work in (much of) the advertising industry either, but that is for other reasons and is perhaps a post for another day.

The advent of Advent

Today is the first day of the liturgical new year. At this time of year, Christians await the coming of the Messiah; pagans go shopping. Christians yearn for a new world; pagans max out the credit card. Christians fast and pray; pagans hurry around in fear of missing a bargain or not having the right present for everyone.

Peace on earth: it's a promise based on the coming of the King; it's an experience tasted by those who wait for his advent.

The best democracy money can buy

After JFK made elections more about style than substance, the need for aspiring US politicians to be wealthy to afford to run for office has been increasing. According to this report, 261 of the members of US Congress are millionaires. That's almost 50%, whereas millionaires are less than 1% of the US population. The effects of big money on the democratic process are generally not healthy.

I don't wish to particularly pick on the USA, since the distorting effects on democracy of hyper-capitalism's concentration of wealth in the hands of a few is not confined to politics of the land of the free very expensive. The love of money is a root of all kinds of evil. One of the kinds of evil that grows from the way we have set up our society is plutocracy.

The party's over? Living on credit

So just how big is one trillion dollars? If right this moment you went out and started spending one dollar every single second, it would take you more than 31,000 years to spend one trillion dollars.

- Michael Snyder, "3 Charts That Prove
We Are Living In The Biggest Debt Bubble In The History Of Our World".

Over the last few months, I've been starting to get a sense of the significance of a debt-based economy and why it is such a ludicrously bad idea. Effectively, living on credit only makes sense if you are confident that the future will be (economically) bigger than the past. This has proven to be true for the last sixty years (and especially for the last thirty, which is when the credit society has really got going), and yet the comforting image of year-over-year global economic growth has been fuelled by the creation of ever larger mountains of debt. Check out the linked article to get a sense of the scale of the issue in the US, though remember that many other countries have debts of proportional size (or larger).

While the bet we've been making with the future has held up so far, what was revealed in 2008 is the downside of this scenario. If we don't keep piling up more debt, we face a very nasty period of deleveraging, which could make the Great Depression look like a party. But the higher the debt levels get, the worse the hangover when we stop drinking from the debt bottle.

If infinite growth were actually possible, then perhaps this wouldn't be a problem (though it would still face the risk of systemic shock being made much worse by all the debt hanging around). But infinite economic growth on a finite planet is not possible. We are betting against the future and keep doubling down, making our ultimate inevitable loss many times greater.

I am not an economist nor an economist's son and perhaps I'm missing something crucial, but this doesn't really sound like good news to me.

On track for going off the track

Perhaps you've heard that Arctic sea is "recovering" or is "just fine": unfortunately not so. You may also have heard that warming has stopped: unfortunately not so (and this doesn't include the record-breaking 2010).

Where's the talk of peak oil? Just where it should be: behind closed doors. Carry on. Nothing to see here.

The rapacious hunger of the ever expanding global economy means that it is not only species that are threatened with extinction.

Goliath whips David: enormous fossil fuel companies outspent the environmental lobby by about 8:1 blocking any US action on climate chaos.

Speaking of big money: keeping the wheels of denial, um, oiled.

Norway sells shares in illegal logging. What is it about the Norwegians that makes them smarter than the rest of us? Or maybe not.

Thank God global warming is a hoax.

Super-extreme weather in Indonesia is the worst on record.

NYT: What is the legal status of submerged countries?

NYT: Developing a climate plan Z.

Scientists reach for new term to describe super windstorm.

In case it felt left out: Atlantic garbage patch found to rival Pacific's.

The North West passage in the Arctic has melted open for only the fourth time in recorded history. The first three occurrences were way back in 2009, 2008 and 2007.

Heat records broken in 17 countries this year so far. Only one country has set a record for cold. No year has prior to this one has come close to having this many records broken (and remember, each year such a feat becomes statistically less likely if temperatures fluctuate randomly).

Friendship: why money doesn't make the (entire) world go round

"[...] it is friendship that allows us to see that there is more than what the prevalent neoliberal discourse places before us as our possibilities. In a world often ruled by the dollar and what it can buy, friendship, like love, opens other vistas."

- Todd May, "Friendship in an Age of Economics".

This is an interesting article in the NYT from philosopher Todd May arguing that friendship reveals to us something we've known all along but are prone to forget in an age obsessed with economic activity: that the best bits of life are outside the economic sphere, within the realm of gift.

Friendships are more important than money. Trust is something that cannot be bought or sold, only nurtured or eroded, grown or destroyed.

"A friend loves at all times, and a brother is born for adversity." - Proverbs 17.17

H/T Mister Tim.

Spend less. Earn less. Work less.

“Sooner or later we spend what we earn. So if want to consume less we must earn less, and if we want to earn less we must work less. At least, we must perform less paid work. If that sounds shocking today, it is nothing more than a call to resume the great historical trend of declining working hours. Until the trend was disrupted in the 1980s, falling working hours were regarded as the surest sign of social progress. A return to the downward trend would mean a social choice to take less of the gain from productivity growth in money income and more in free time.”

- Clive Hamilton, Requiem for a Species: why we resist the truth about climate change (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2010), 86-87.

A while back, I suggested we make wealth history. This is more or less what I meant. The love of money is a root of all kinds of evil. And that is true both personally and as a society.

The goal is not simply less. The goal is more of the things that count: like time building and enjoying relationships of trust, time for reflection, time for rest, time to heal and dream and worship.

Of course, Hamilton has neglected two possibilities in this brief paragraph. The first is earning less through voluntary pay cuts. However, perhaps this can be regarded as agreeing to perform some of your paid work voluntarily. The second is generosity, in which money earned is not spent but rather given away to those in need. While this may increase the consumption levels of the recipient, this is a good thing if it means their basic needs are now met. However, if it simply means someone else consuming unnecessary luxuries, then while it may have other worthy beneficial outcomes, ecologically it just pushes down one lump in the carpet only for it to reappear elsewhere.

In it for the money? Climate science funding

I often hear the claim that the 97% of active climate scientists who accept anthropogenic global warming must only take that stand because it is profitable to do so and they would lose their jobs or funding if they didn't. Here is a two part series showing why such an argument is ludicrous.

Part I
Part II

The bottom line? "In the United States, it is essentially impossible to get rich from public funding for research because there are rules that forbid institutions from allowing that to happen."

Peter Jensen on living in apocalyptic times

"What with Global Warming, the War on Terror and the Global Financial Crisis, we may well think that we live in apocalyptic times."

So began Archbishop Peter Jensen's presidential address to Synod. The bulk of the speech concerned the particular financial and organisational issues that have arisen as the result of very significant losses in Diocesan wealth over the last twelve months, but his opening sought to say something about living with the perception of being in apocalyptic times.

Jensen affirmed that "we are always in apocalyptic times", that elements of crisis and threat are a perennial feature of human experience and that "we are always only one step away from the end of all things". And so the lessons to be learned include the ubiquity of human folly (and hence the folly of utopianism), the necessity of hard work in facing contemporary challenges (while relativising the importance of all human projects) and accepting that "the ordinary human feeling that we are powerful creatures who live in a stable world and a stable universe, is deluded." In short, our response ought to be "neither paralysis nor pain, [but] persistent active faith".
The full address can be found here. H/T to John Shorter for sending me the link.

For those unfamiliar with the peculiar flavour(s) of Sydney Anglicanism, Archbishop Jensen and evangelical Anglicanism in Sydney were the subjects of the latest episode of Compass, the ABC's religious affairs program. Of course there will always be more to say and this is a brief snapshot, but it is not entirely inaccurate.

The cost of dying

From the SMH:

In terms of health costs, our final year of life is our most expensive. Almost all of this expense is in the last few weeks. Dying in an ICU costs more than most of us have ever paid in contributions to the Medicare levy. Nor is it a particularly pleasant experience. Evidence suggests that as many as half the people admitted to an ICU at the end of life would have chosen otherwise had they been given the choice.

Discuss.

I will kick off the discussion. The use of financial resources in medical care is a thorny issue and becoming all the more difficult as our ability to use ever more expensive treatments increases faster than our ability to purchase them. Personally, I know that I have already used more hospital resources than I have paid into the system (and would likely be dead already without that treatment).

Life is a good gift, to be carefully nurtured and guarded. The pointless squandering of life and the nonsensical cutting short of life are tragedies to be mourned. Yet the gift of life is not an absolute good (or, to put this another way: there are things worse than death). And so I do think that there is a form of raging against "the dying of the light" that fails to recognise our creaturely status as recipients of a gift. The unqualified refusal to ever depart in peace can also signify a lack of trust in the God who can raise the dead. In Christ all things are ours and so we need not grasp after what is not ours to secure. Death is a defeated enemy and can be "accepted" in hope of its finally being swallowed in life.

At the same time, it is important to resist the calculative rationality that tends to assign a financial cost to everything and desires to judge all actions on the basis of this figure as though merely demonstrating the more economic option resolved all moral dilemmas. Living and dying are far more than simply lines in an account book.