This life is all you’ve got, so make the most of it

There are two main arguments about religious beliefs.  One is about whether they are factually true—whether you really will go to Heaven or Hell, or to a reincarnated new life, when you die, for example. The other is about whether religious faith is a good thing regardless of whether it is true.  Many lack religious faith and regret the lack.

THIS LIFE: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom by Martin Hägglund (2019) Is aimed at unhappy disbelievers.  He made the case that you can be a better and happier person without religious belief than with it

Hankering for Heaven or Nirvana won’t free you from the pain and risk of life, Hägglund wrote; it is better to face the fact that this life is all you’ve got, and to make the most of it.

Secular faith is the faith that your finite life really is worthwhile, despite its risk and pain.  Spiritual freedom is the power to choose what makes your life meaningful.

Your life’s meaning can be devotion to your loved ones, to a vocation or avocation or to work to make the world a better place.  It evidently goes without saying, because Hägglund doesn’t explicitly say it, that it does not include devotion to money, power or sex, drugs and rock-and-roll.

I sometimes talk to people who tell me they’re spiritual, not religious.  I tell them that I myself am not spiritual at all.  They often tell me that actually I am spiritual, even if I don’t know it or won’t admit it.

Hägglund did the same thing in reverse.  He argued that religious people who try to make the world a better place really are more secular than religious, because they care about this world rather than the hypothetical next world.

He began by writing about the great Christian writer C.S. Lewis and his grief for the death of his wife, Joy Davidian.  Lewis confessed in A Grief Observed that his Christian religious faith did not console him or shield him from the pain of the loss of his beloved.

Friends tried to tell Lewis that he and his beloved would meet again in Heaven, but, as he pointed out, there is no support for this idea in Scripture.  The whole point of Heaven is that it would be qualitatively different from Earthly life, not a continuation of it.

Lewis believed that an endless continuation of earthly life would eventually become unbearable.  As he remarked somewhere, all that is necessary for Hell is eternal life, plus human nature as it is.  He thought Heaven must be some sort of timeless transcendent state of being beyond out comprehension.

Hägglund argued that the desire to exist in a timeless transcendent state makes this life meaningless, because nothing in this life would count compared to that.  He said the same is true of use of Buddhist meditation practice or Stoic philosophy to cultivate a serenity that makes you indifferent to the pain of loss.  Hägglund said the price of that is to never care deeply about anything or commit strongly to anything.  He thinks that is an unworthy way to live.

The conflict between this world and a transcendent hope are shown in the life of Saint Augustine, he wrote.  Augustine’s Confessions show his struggle to free himself from caring about things in this world so that he can devote himself exclusively to God.  Augustine even worried about whether church music would cause people to come to church to enjoy the music rather than pray to God.

Hägglund contrasted Augustine with writers such as Marcel Proust and the contemporary Norwegian writer, Karl Ove Knausgaard, who treasure and lovingly describe the ordinary details of life.

My economic philosophy in a nutshell

When, lo, these many years ago, I studied economics in college, I learned that capital was the most important factor in a prosperous economy.

I still think this is true.  But that doesn’t mean that owners of financial assets are the most valuable members of society.

Standard economics teaches that three  are factors of production—land, labor and capital.  “Land” means all natural resources—everything of value not created by human beings.  “Labor” means all human effort, physical or mental.

“Capital” is the most important of the three.  It means everything that increases the productivity of land and labor—railroads, machine tools, computers.  It is the force multiplier for land and labor.  It is what makes economic growth possible.

The problem is that “capital” also means also the financial resources available (but not necessarily used) to create these tangible resources.

Landlords who receive rents contribute nothing to the wealth of nations.  Laborers who earn wages contribute a fixed amount.  Capitalists who make profits have—so I was taught—an incentive to direct their capital in a way that created the most value, and thus increase the total wealth of society.

Late in life I have come to read Karl Marx’s rebuttal.  Physical and intellectual capital is not created by capitalists, he noted.  Every railroad, every machine tool, every computer was created not by money, but by the mental and physical effort of human beings.

The increase in human wealth that physical capital generates does not go to those who created it.  It goes to those who own it.

Marx denied that the owners of capital are job creators.  He asserted that workers are capital creators.

Right, wrong and the “wrong” side of history

When Leon Trotsky was in exile the Soviet Union after losing his power struggle with Joseph Stalin, he still led a tiny splinter group.  He expelled dissidents from the group, saying he had consigned them “to the dust bin of history.”

Leon Trotsky

There are certain unstated assumptions in that remark, and in any statement about the right or wrong side of history.   The assumptions are that (1) the course of history is predictable, (2) the outcome of history is just and (3) being on the winning side proves you were right.

I disagree with all these assumptions.  I don’t think the course of history is predictable. I don’t think the outcome of history is necessarily just and I don’t think being a winner proves you are right.

Just to be clear, I agree that gay couples ought to enjoy the same rights as straight married couples.  I think this is a question of right and wrong, not of the right or wrong side of history.  However, I don’t think that people who were slower to see this than I was should be fired from their jobs or driven out of business merely because of their personal opinions.

But gay marriage is not the topic of this post.  The topic is why philosophies of history are bad guides to moral and ethical philosophy.

Free enterprise vs. capitalism

Adam Smith

I define “free enterprise” as the “system of natural liberty” advocated by Adam Smith, in which people are free to pursue their own goals in their own way, “subject only to the law of justice.”

I define “capitalism” in the same way as Karl Marx, who coined the word — a system in which political and economic power is in the hands of owners of financial assets

By these definitions, free enterprise is not necessary to capitalism, nor vice versa.  What’s necessary for capitalism is institutions that allow great concentrations of wealth, such as limited liability corporations, lending at compound interest and the power of banks to create money.  Government-protected monopolies help, too.

In the same way, capitalism is not necessary to free enterprise.  The Phoenician traders in the ancient world, who traveled from the eastern Mediterranean to Britain to buy tin, were not capitalists in the way that J.P. Morgan or John D. Rockefeller were capitalists, but they certainly had the entrepreneurial spirit.

Karl Marx

Adam Smith, the great economist and philosopher, did not particularly admire capitalists.  He saw economic competition as a means to hold their power in check.

As for myself, I am not an opponent of either free enterprise nor capitalism, although I am a critic of both, especially the latter.  I think the working of the free market is a more effective way to coordinate economic activity than central planning, provided that it is, as Smith said, “subject to the law of justice” — unlike Milton Friedman and others, who thought a free market could be a substitute for the law of justice.

Likewise, I see a benefit to being able to create concentrations of wealth and use them to create new sources of wealth for the benefit of society.   American capitalists made it possible to create a U.S. steel industry, a computer industry and all the other industries.  Maybe this could have been done in some other way, but this is the way it happened. 

The problem is how to prevent mere possession of wealth from enabling its owners to monopolize the fruits of the economic system, which is what is happening now and which Marx thought was the inevitable result of capitalist ownership.

American exceptionalism: Capitalism as freedom

One of the things that is exceptional about the United States is that, unlike people in all other countries I know about, we Americans associate capitalism with freedom.

That is not to say Americans are the only people who think that way—Margaret Thatcher in 1980s Britain and Ludwig Erhard in postwar West Germany were as strong believers in capitalism as any American ever was.  But the United States is the only country in which such beliefs go unchallenged.

John Lauritz Larson’s THE MARKET REVOLUTION IN AMERICA: Liberty, Ambition and the Eclipse of the Common Good, which I read on the recommendation of my friend Craig Hanyan, attempts to explain why.

Most of the peoples of the world define capitalism as Karl Marx did—a system ruled by the holders of financial assets, in contrast to older systems ruled by landowning aristocrats and Oriental despots and a hoped-for future system ruled by workers.

Americans think of capitalism as Adam Smith’s “system of natural liberty,” in which each person is free to pursue their own interests in their own way, subject only to “the law of justice.”  I was brought up to believe in this and I still do, although my idea of the “law of justice” is broader than Adam Smith’s probably was.

Larson’s argument is that the United States between the Revolution and the Civil War was the world’s greatest example of Adam Smith’s ideas in practice.   The system of natural liberty didn’t apply to black people or to native Americans,  but white American citizens, especially those in the North, experienced a degree of freedom and rising prosperity that was a wonder of the world.

Nouriel Roubini asks: Is capitalism doomed?

Nouriel Roubini is a professor of economics at New York University’s Stern School of Business, and chair of Roubini Global Economics, a financial consulting firm.  He was nicknamed “Dr. Doom” for his predictions that the booming financial and real estate markets were going to crash.  But he proved to be right.  Now he is saying that the capitalist system itself is in crisis.  Here is what he wrote last week in his syndicated newspaper column.

Nouriel Roubini

Karl Marx, it seems, was partly right in arguing that globalization, financial intermediation run amok, and redistribution of income and wealth from labor to capital could lead capitalism to self-destruct (though his view that socialism would be better has proved wrong).  Firms are cutting jobs because there is not enough final demand.  But cutting jobs reduces labor income, increases inequality, and reduces final demand.

Recent popular demonstrations, from the Middle East to Israel to the United Kingdom, and rising popular anger in China—and soon enough in other advanced economies and emerging markets—are all driven by the same issues and tensions: growing inequality, poverty, unemployment, and hopelessness.  Even the world’s middle classes are feeling the squeeze of falling incomes and opportunities.

Unless governments act, he wrote, the world could be on the brink of another depression as bad as the Great Depression of the 1930s.

Over time, advanced economies will need to invest in human capital, skills, and social safety nets to increase productivity and enable workers to compete, be flexible, and thrive in a globalized economy.  The alternative is—like in the 1930s—unending stagnation, depression, currency and trade wars, capital controls, financial crisis, sovereign insolvencies, and massive social and political instability.

via Slate Magazine.

All this seems obvious to me.  Why is it not obvious to our political and business leaders?  It is partly because of the excessive power and influence of the wealthy elite, but I think it is also because of the excessive power and influence of financial institutions compared to goods-producing companies.