Comments

I thought that by definition God was supernatural.

I once wondered what could prove to me that something was a deity, and after much thought decided the best definition would be an entity that could violate the laws of thermodynamics. This is a very different conception to some sort of emergent property.

I don't think that an economy or a culture is at all equivalent to the general conception of God. You can't pray to an economy or a culture with any reasonable expectations of having your prayer answered. (You can make requests of various people with a hope of having your request answered, but that's different from praying to an economy, or to a culture.)

-- TracyW - 29 Jan 2006

I don't think that an economy or a culture is at all equivalent to the general conception of God. You can't pray to an economy or a culture with any reasonable expectations of having your prayer answered.

I do think there's a connection between Religion & Market economy.....a psychological connection.

This observation isn't original to me (though I thought it up for myself before discovering a zillion other people had already thought it up...):

My sense is that the 'invisible hand' of Adam Smith is, psychologically, related to the unseen workings of God.....

I don't understand religion at all, although I'd like to, and although I do belong to a church.

So take this with a HUGE grain of salt.

People have an ability to believe that although we don't understand how things work there's a 'reason' for why things happen as they do — or if not a reason, that somehow things will 'work out' or 'happen for the best.'

I think religion & religious faith, or at least Christian faith (since I know even less about other religions than I do about my own) develops this core ability.

In the secular realm I think 'market economists' — people who believe that the market 'works' or works better than other economic arrangements are using that same capability.

So I certainly agree; the idea of a God to whom one can pray is very different from an economy or a culture.

But at the psychological level, I think the ability to 'trust' or 'have confidence' in forces you can't see and don't control grows out of the same core capability......

-- CatherineJohnson - 30 Jan 2006

Here's something I've wondered about for a long time.

We have a "God part" of the brain, in the temporal lobes. (That's probably way oversimplifying, but for my purposes it doesn't matter.)

I live amongst people who either don't care about religion one way or another, or think religion is actively bad.

I question that for a number of reasons......but one of my questions has to do with the fact that our brains are built for religious belief (or for religious perception? What if our brains are built for religious perception? That's a whole other can of worms...)

My question has always been: why would you deliberately choose not to develop a core aspect of human brain capacity?

Or, in the strong form, why would you deliberately choose to try to suppress a core aspect of human brain capacity?

It may be, of course, that we have 'good' and 'bad' capacities & we should encourage the good and discourage the bad.

But I haven't seen that work.

The 'bad' capacities - aggression, greed, etc. - need to be, at a minimum, channeled into good activities. (I've mentioned the boy who bullied Christopher in 2nd grade who I WOULD BET REAL MONEY WILL BE RUNNING WESTCHESTER WHEN HE GROWS UP AND DOING A GOOD JOB OF IT.)

My own view is stronger; my own view is that suppressing and/or erasing aggression and greed would be a bad idea, with bad consequences.

-- CatherineJohnson - 30 Jan 2006

btw, the monogamous voles are great for talking about this issue

there are two sets of voles, one set that's completely random; they mate then split. Even the babies aren't very social, it seems.

The other set are monogamous, and the dads do lots of caring for the babies.

The monogamous male voles are highly possessive of their mates.

They'll fight any male who comes near.

The asocial male voles could care less.

At least in the World of Voles, if you're going to have dads taking care of babies you're ALSO going to have dads who are a) aggressive and b) sexually possessive.

Seeing as how humans are working off the same set of sex hormones voles are (oxytocin & vasopressin) I don't think we're in a separate category.

-- CatherineJohnson - 30 Jan 2006

Okay, what do you mean by God here?
1. A creator of the universe
2. Someone who personally cares about human beings and other living things (not a sparrow shall fall ...).
3. Some emergent property of the ultimate superset of all living things, which may or may not even notice anything else exists.
4. Something that can break the laws of thermodynamics.

These are not mutually exclusive options, so feel free to pick more than one.

-- TracyW - 30 Jan 2006

Understanding Economic Jargon
by the multi-talented aaron swartz ...
author of the ny times password dodge
recently cited here ...

-- VlorbikDotCom - 31 Jan 2006

For Vlorbik's link, I think my only response is "Huh?" Why would he believe that swapping words to make an argument sound religious rather than economic mean anything?

On further thinking about it, I remember the American connection between capitalism and American churches.

This is quite a parochial view.

In NZ, the economists are, broadly speaking, atheists/agnostics, and the churches are socialist. (Socialists are not broadly religious, however, and I am using "socialist" in a general sense, not in the strict Communist, red-flag-raising sense). I think the same is true in much of Europe and Australia. I don't know about Asia or Africa.

Anyway, the case for free markets is quite different from the case for the existance of a deity. We have had the communist countries try to run economics without using markets. So we can compare the results. I think that we can all agree, regardless of our religious beliefs, that we have not had two worlds, one with a God and one without. So we can't compare the results. Consequently the evidence on which we make up our minds whether free-markets work or not is inherently different to that we use to make up our minds whether God exists or not.

-- TracyW - 31 Jan 2006

follow up with the link called
"let there be markets" from aaron's page
if you really don't understand
what he's getting at.

-- VlorbikDotCom - 31 Jan 2006

Based on the link, I think he means to be talking about classical economics, not neo-classical economics.

Classical economics did start off with perfect utility-maximising agents with infinite knowledge, etc. This is the first chaper of Samuelson - and the bulk of Econ 101.

But economics moved on past this a long time ago (in fact, arguably it moved on past it in Adam Smith's time. BTW, Adam Smith's main insight was that markets led people to produce what other people valued, "It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest" - I think both Adam Smith and Gordon Bigelow would agree that whatever roles status and society plays in our purchases, we do need food and drink to survive, and someone has to produce that.

I cannot speak to the Evangelicals, I do not know enough about the political side of Victorian England. I have never heard in my economics classes a lecturer claim that "markets are products of higher-order law, products of nature or of divine will" You could make the argument that markets are products of humans, and humans are products of nature, so markets are products of nature, but in my experience the general economics description of how markets arise is:

1. Humans are better off if we trade and are not purely self-dependent.

2. Trade started by bartering, but bartering is inefficient since it depends on "mutual coincidence of wants" - i.e. if I have caught a lot of fish and want to trade some for a flax coat, I have to find someone with an extra flax coat who wants some fish. Consequently there is an incentive to find some good that everything else can be traded for - and that good becomes money.

I guess you could call this process natural, depending on your definition of "natural", or even a "product of higher-order law" but God need not be evoked any where in this.

Gordon Bigelow also makes the mistake of ignoring governments' imperfections. It is not just markets are imperfect, any observation of the real world shows that governments are imperfect. Governments have killed millions of people, and not only governments run by Evangelicals. Mao Zedong's Communist government is reckoned to have killed some 50 million people, and Robert Mugabee is currently driving Zimbabwae into poverty. Governments also do things like destroy savings by inflation, steal people's property (NZ government did this after the NZ Wars in the 1860s under the guise of confiscating Maori rebels property, funnily enough the property that got consfiscated was the Maori land that was good for settlement), start wars, impose apartheid, etc. They lie and fail to keep promises ("Read my lips: No new taxes"?)

And "Free markets don't promote public virtue; they promote private interest." Well, it may be a private interest, keeping me and Gordon Bigelow fed, but that doesn't mean it's bad.

And "The first evangelicals fought for free trade because they thought it would encourage virtuous behavior, but two centuries of capitalism have taught a different lesson, many tunes over. "?

• Communist countries destroyed their environment, killed millions of people.
• On the other side, trust appears to increase with market economies - see for exampe "Economic Man" in Cross-cultural Perspective: Behavioral Experimetns in 15 Small-scale Socities" (pdf file).
• Another piece of evidence that capitalism encourages virtuous behaviour is that death rates due to violence in the West in the 20th century have been far lower than that amongst hunter-gatherer societies, even counting both World Wars. See Steven Pinker's The Blank Slate, or this article on Constant Battles: The Myth of the Peaceful, Noble Savage.
• Capitalist countries also tend to be less corrupt. The Corruption Index for 2005 has countries like Iceland, Finland, NZ at the top (with the USA in 17th place) and with such non-capitalist societies as Chad, Bangladesh, Turkmenistan, Myanmar at last.

This adds to my view that Gordon Bigelow has quite a parochial view of the world. He has not looked at what non-capitalist societies are like before making his claims about capitalism.

So, I agree fully that 200 years of capitalism has not turned human beings into perfect moral entities. But, one can still support capitalism & demoracy on the basis that human beings in a capitalist-democratic society, while still highly falliable, do appear to be better morally than other societies.

-- TracyW - 01 Feb 2006

How many can recite this by heart?

THE SCENE: Two Indians watch a herd of buffalo passing by.

INDIAN: Well, I think it's about time - the way the corn's been growing for the last two or three generations.

SECOND INDIAN: Look at that heard of buffalo! They're ready!

INDIAN: Everything's living The Great Spirit's Way - in Harmony.

SECOND INDIAN: He'll be here soon.

INDIAN: The True White Brother is coming home. Remember what the Great Spirit said? If we did what we were supposed to do, and lived according to the Plan, White Brother would finish his work in the East and come back to us.

SECOND INDIAN: It'll be nice to have the family together again.

A Conquistador, a Padre and several Spanish soldiers enter to a trumpet fanfare and flamenco music. The buffalo scatter.

CONQUISTADOR: Buenos dias, amigos!

INDIAN: Hello! You must be The True White Brother!

CONQUISTADOR: Sure! You must be The Indians!

INDIAN: Yes!

SECOND INDIAN: Welcome Home!

All the Spanish soldiers cheer.

CONQUISTADOR: Welcome to New Spain! This is your new Father - Father Corona.

FATHER CORONA: Pax vneuti nicutm! down on your knees, now! D'ye recognize what I'm holidn' over your head, lads?

INDIAN: It's a Cross. The Symbol of the Quartering of the Universe into Active and Passive Principles.

FATHER CORONA: God have mercy on their heathen souls!

CONQUISTADOR: What the Father means is - what is the Cross made of? Gold! Have you got any?

INDIAN: No.

CONQUISTADOR: What about the Seven Cities of Gold? Phoenix, Tucson, Las Vegas?

SECOND INDIAN: This is Gold.

CONQUISTADOR: What's that?

INDIAN: Corn.

SPANISH SOLDIER: Corn! Now we can make tortillas!

ANOTHER SPANISH SOLDIER: We been waiting for this for hundreds of years!

THIRD SPANISH SOLDIER: I just invented tacos!

CONQUISTADOR: So this is all you've got?

INDIAN: Yes, but aren't you The True White Brother who's supposed to come and live with us in peace?

CONQUISTADOR: Sure! Therefore, I claim this rich, verdant pasture land in the name of the Empire of Spain!

VESPUCCI: Hey! Hey, Capitano! The rain, she's a-stoppa to fall! And the corn, she's all dead!

CONQUISTADOR: Shuduppa', Vespucch! I claim this stinking desert in the name of the Empire of Spain. Forever! Let's go!

The Spanish soldiers grumble. The buffalo heard mills about.

SPANISH SOLDIERS: (singing) God bless Vespucciland! M-m-m-mmmmmm...

FATHER CORONA: Oh! By the way, Domini Domini Domini, you're all Catholics now! God bless you!

CONQUISTADOR: Come on, Father! No one in their right mind would live in this stinking desert!

THIRD SPANISH SOLDIER: Come on, Cisco!

Temporarily Humboldt County … The Firesign Theatre

-- SteveH - 01 Feb 2006

Sorry, I can't resist copying Gorgon's sections, but tweaking it a bit to show how, according to his logic, KTMs are in favour of enforced religion. (Obsessive? Moi? Never! :) )

-- TracyW - 01 Feb 2006

/* What Americans fail to understand is that the necessities of life -- the food they eat, the cars they drive, the clothes they wear -- are provided not by ignoramouses but by well-educated people. A good education ensures that everyone receives what they deserve and all the necessities of life are provided for. Understanding and applying how people learn is the way to a good education,

etc ... */

this really is the kind of faith-based
argument you seem to be claiming it's not.
so your reductio ad absurdum fails badly.

shutting up. this is KTM. hardly the place
to argue about religion, whether in the form of faith
in "god" or "markets" or "education"...

-- VlorbikDotCom - 01 Feb 2006

I did think about re-writing that sentence from scratch, as the connection between an efficient education system and the receiving necessities of life takes a couple more steps than the connection between an efficient economic system and receiving the necessities of life. (An economic system is the system of producing, distributing and consuming goods, so by definition that is how we get the necessities of life.)

I did really like the sentence: "Understanding and applying how people learn is the way to a good education, so having government pursue unsupported educational theories can only hurt us, not help." so I decided to leave the paragraph as it was.

Anyway, the argument that a market economy ensures everyone receives what they deserve is very outside the mainstream of economics. Economics is normally criticised for ignoring philosophical theories about fairness, justice, etc. A typical economic argument would be that "a perfect market economy would ensure that everyone received their marginal value", with the more or less explicit caveat that perfect market economies don't exist. But hey, why should we expect Gordon Bigelow to use actual quotes, when he can just make up his own arguments to destroy?

-- TracyW - 01 Feb 2006