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How religion shaped modern economics
- neonate 6y agohttps://archive.is/CzLiZ https://archive.is/CzLiZ
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- joubert 6y agoRelated: "How the 'Western Mind' was shaped by the Medieval Church" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25704563 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25704563
- throw0101a 6y agoSee also "A New Theory of Western Civilization": * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25227902 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25227902
- jonmc12 6y agoAlso, "The Rise of New Economic Attitudes — Economic Humanism, Economic Nationalism — During the Later Middle Ages and the Renaissance, A. D. 1200–1550" https://doi.org/10.1017/S0362152900004992 https://doi.org/10.1017/S0362152900004992
- specialist 6y agoAlso, Debt: The First 5,000 Years covers the religious origins of debt, money, markets, capital, value, values, etc. https://www.amazon.com/Debt-First-5-000-Years/dp/1612191290 https://www.amazon.com/Debt-First-5-000-Years/dp/1612191290 My TLDR for this thread: Capitalism is very old. Calvinists and Smith's views towards money, debt, etc. had many precedents. George Gilder's tortured rationalization that God endorses usury is probably unprecedented. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Gilder#Wealth_and_Poverty https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Gilder#Wealth_and_Pover...
- sjg007 6y agoWe are enslaved one could say.
- blululu 6y agoSomething interesting in Graeber’s history is the connection between medieval Islamic philosophy and modern capitalism. The fact that Adam Smith lifts some examples and arguments straight out of Al Ghazali has potentially significant implications for a history of economic thought.
- chalst 6y agoIndeed, but a little care is needed: the key Islamic philosophers had a higher profile in educated thought from the Renaissance to the beginning of the Enlightenment, so the simple fact of Smith citing Al-Ghazali is less significant in itself than it might at first appear. Smith was a friend of Hume, who was particularly influenced by Al-Ghazali.
- QuesnayJr 6y agoPeople like heroic narratives in intellectual history, but very little of what's in Adam Smith is new and unique to Smith. I picked my username semi-jokingly to draw attention to Francois Quesnay, who was a significant predecessor to Smith. But Quesnay isn't even unique -- you can point to any number of competitors. This is well-understood by actual historians of economic thought. The significance of Smith is that he's where everybody learned these ideas from, not because the ideas are necessarily new with him. "Wealth of Nations" as much of an act of synthesis as it is an act of creation.
- chalst 6y agoI recommend Michael Hudson on the relationship between debt and capitalism. His view is that the danger to the stability of the economy presented by debt is not a feature of capitalism but is very old, but with capitalism comes a nrw unhealthy relationship with debt, where the interests of the creditor are regarded as sacrosanct. Two links: His tribute to David Graeber - https://michael-hudson.com/2020/09/vale-david-graeber/ https://michael-hudson.com/2020/09/vale-david-graeber/ A summary of his book on debt cancellation in bronze-age societies - https://b-ok.global/book/4983733/12aafa?dsource=recommend https://b-ok.global/book/4983733/12aafa?dsource=recommend
- mgh2 6y agoNot sure if Ben Shapiro is a good resource: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RVD0xik-_FM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RVD0xik-_FM
- DyslexicAtheist 6y agonot sure what he has to do with it, nor why that's relevant? Also PragerU isn't https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PragerU#Critiques_of_videos https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PragerU#Critiques_of_videos
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- approxim8ion 6y agoNeither Shapiro not PragerU are anywhere near good resources unfortunately.
- WalterBright 6y agoFree markets work well even with people who are committed communists. In the USSR, the underground free market was wisely tolerated because it filled in a lot of gaps the collective system was unable to. Farmers were also allowed to farm their own plots and sell the results.
- dfee 6y agoWell, they’re not so committed then, are they?
- WalterBright 6y agoI meant that even the true believers would participate in the underground economy. It's cognitive dissonance.
- noizejoy 6y ago... even with countries who are committed free market economies, social institutions are wisely tolerated.
- yrimaxi 6y agoPowerful states were a prerequisite for capitalist development. How’s that for dissonance? Actually that doesn’t pose any kind of cognitive dissonance to more mainstream economists since they know what role the state must play in a capitalist economy. Which is not “leave it be”.
- WalterBright 6y agoThe role of government in free markets is as guarantor of rights.
- nybble41 6y agoAnd to that end you don't actually need a state. There are other means to guarantee rights that don't inherently undermine themselves by directly infringing rights in the process. The state is a protection racket. They claim to exist to defend you—mostly from other states, or other entities that do pretty much exactly what states do with without the false veneer of "legitimacy"—but in the end the only real threat to your life and property if you don't do as they demand comes from the state itself. Unfortunately they're a popular protection racket, with a large emphasis on PR and propaganda, so if you try to stand up for yourself your own neighbours will turn on you rather than joining you.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- snicker7 6y agoConfused by the thesis, which is that modern capitalism owes itself to Protestantism turning away from predestination. But Catholicism had never embraced predestination.
- keithnz 6y agoHis point was more about the progression of protestant thought from predestination to free will which then formed the shared thinking necessary for Adam Smiths ideas. For clarity, the idea was that the catholic church didn't control your afterlife through their priests and rituals etc so you didn't need the pope and the catholic church for salvation. Your salvation was independent of that. Which was initially thought of as predestination ( names written in the book of life stuff )
- analog31 6y agoIt could also be the other way around, that religion adapted to nascent capitalism and developments in other fields including science and technology.
- wombatmobile 6y agoThe key point is not predestination. It is the locus of control. Under Catholicism, the church enjoyed a monopoly over interpreting and proclaiming the word of God. The Catholic Church secured this monopoly by encoding the bible in Latin, and requiring priests to know Latin before they could participate in religious dissemination, the source of which was the Vatican. Protestantism, enabled by the printing press, changed the locus of control to parishes, and ultimately, to individuals. Rome no longer held a broadcast monopoly on the word of God. Suddenly, the bible was in English. And German. And French. And Dutch. And Belgian. And American. It was possible for congregations to roll their own sermons, without instruction from the central authority. It was even possible for an individual preacher to break the shackles of the institution by speaking his own interpretation of the bible to his congregation. From the article: > Americans still have a profound faith that our individual destinies are in our own hands. That’s why many people who have only the remotest prospect of ever making their way into the top income-tax bracket nonetheless favor keeping that tax rate low, and why people who have no chance of inheriting money from a taxable estate passionately oppose “death taxes.”
- young_unixer 6y agoChristian values are deeply individualistic. Capitalism is the practical expression of individualism. There are ways for individualist thought to develop without religion, but it just happened that christianity had already given the west an individualist viewpoint and it was easier to accept the values of capitalism and individual freedom this way. Sure, now there's a big pushback against individualism, but it was good while it lasted.
- MontagFTB 6y agoI’m genuinely curious: what biblical sources exist that teach Christian individualism above other ways of living?
- riwsky 6y agoThe story of Abraham (where he goes to sacrifice his beloved son, Isaac) emphasizes one man’s individual devotion to God, over and above any societal (or even his own) sense of consequentialist ethics; while I would probably agree that Christianity as a whole (and particularly the words biblically attributed to Jesus) is prosocial, you still have big name Christian philosophers with an individualist bent—heck, you could even argue that modern individualist philosophy starts with Christianity, in the seminal existentialist works of Kierkegaard.
- mbesto 6y agoCouldn't you basically argue this for any major religions' worship of said prophets/God(s)?
- MontagFTB 6y agoOff the top of my head I’d counter with another OT reference: the Ten Commandments. One could argue every one is an effort to get an individual’s perspective off of themselves as the primary object of worship, and to focus on others as more important than themselves (God among them.)
- sn41 6y ago
- 29athrowaway 6y ago> "Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground." - Genesis 1:28 "Fill the earth", "subdue it", "rule over <every creature here>" = Habitat loss for every other creature = Anthropocene extinction. But you cannot talk about this, because it's in the Bible, even if we all die from starvation in 100 years.
- bmitc 6y agoThe book One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America has it the other way around. https://www.amazon.com/One-Nation-Under-God-Corporate/dp/0465097413/ https://www.amazon.com/One-Nation-Under-God-Corporate/dp/046...
- greenie_beans 6y agoHow are they at odds? I’ve only read the WSJ essay and the blurb for the book you linked.
- ARandomerDude 6y agoFrom the book description: > We're often told that the United States is, was, and always has been a Christian nation. But in One Nation Under God, historian Kevin M. Kruse reveals that the belief that America is fundamentally and formally Christian originated in the 1930s. What a bizarre claim. Even the most cursory glance at historical documents would reveal this belief before the 1930s. One such example (among innumerable others) is from Princeton Seminary professor Charles Hodge's Systematic Theology, published in 1895. > Proof that this is a Christian and Protestant Nation > The proposition that the United States of America are a Christian and Protestant nation, is not so much the assertion of a principle as the statement of a fact. That fact is not simply that the great majority of the people are Christians and Protestants, but that the organic life, the institutions, laws, and official action of the government, whether that action be legislative, judicial, or executive, is, and of right should be, and in fact must be, in accordance with the principles of Protestant Christianity... https://books.google.com/books/about/Systematic_Theology.html?id=QqRJAQAAMAAJ https://books.google.com/books/about/Systematic_Theology.htm...
- throwawaygal7 6y agoThere is a post ww2, really post 1970s mythos about the founders being deists of the sort we have in philosophy departments today. Because some of the founders were... low church Christians who read the bible as they saw fit, this thesis can be maintained by citations back to the original claimant. Argument from authority at its best. Of course, this view of the founders unravels pretty quickly when reading their personal writings or the federalist papers. John Jay comes to mind, perhaps a second tier father but none the less a fairly 'orthodox' christian at least by american protestant standards. My suspicion is that this book is motivated by the desire to undermine the Christian foundations of american to make further secularization 'natural' and 'in keeping with our foundational documents,' rather than the clear departure that it plainly is. Professors are people too, with their biases and ideologies. I myself am happy to bean increasingly secular nation, but I dont share the authors desire to erase the past
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- raverbashing 6y ago"How Religion shaped modern economics" Hey let me tell you about how a sports rule (3 strikes and you're out) became a judicial and informal rule instrument. Other countries of course have a progressive warning/penalty system but not indiscriminate like 3 fouls (of any level) and you're out.
- zed88 6y agoThe idea of free markets existed in India, Arabia and China long before this, the 'Silk route/road' gave birth to first truly global and free market with many 'bazaars'. There is a whole book in Sanskrit named as "Arthashastra", which was written in 3rd century BCE. This is again some kind of whitewashing the history where Europeans seem to have invented everything and nothing ever happened before them.
- AniseAbyss 6y agoIt was Christianity holding us back- nothing to be proud of.
- ralusek 6y agoI can't help but notice that many of the same people eager to point out that western civilization isn't the first or best to do a particular set of things, are then reluctant to place blame for any of the less than palatable elements of those things anywhere other than on western civilization. Very well might not be the case here, but it was simply a thought that occurred to me.
- tobylane 6y agoI'm not sure I understand. Are you saying that (if it applies here) people don't like talking about the pre-European origins of flaws in economics? Or is there a better example in another area?
- ralusek 6y agoIt's 5:00am here, and I haven't slept yet, so I'm not going to do a great job of clarifying my point. > This is again some kind of whitewashing the history where Europeans seem to have invented everything and nothing ever happened before them. My point is basically that this person seems to believe that our current problem is whitewashing history, whereas I would argue that we have an equally pernicious problem, wherein western civilization is made out to be uniquely responsible for problems that are actually found all over the world, and throughout history. A couple examples: 1.) The 1619 Project is an attempt to reframe the defining characteristic of the US and its founding as being uniquely fixated around slavery. Despite it existing in a world in which slavery had existed in virtually every civilization up to and beyond that point. And more importantly, despite it being one of, if not the purest embodiments of liberal governance explicitly outlined up until that point, since which its constitution has served as the foundational text for countless other nations to come, as well as the basis by which the abolition of slavery and the subsequent civil rights movements would come to follow...perhaps its least interesting feature, in slavery, is elevated to the forefront of the nation's character. We are so far down this rabbit hole that during the George Floyd crisis, we had congresswomen making claims that the existence of POLICE in the US (again, a concept that exists virtually the world over), are simply downstream from government officials whose purpose was to catch runaway slaves. 2.) The various attempts to go after logic/mathematics/scientific method as being constructions of the western patriarchy, arbitrarily imposed upon other cultures. If you are unaware of this movement, it is an academic argument that suggests that "western science" and "western medicine" are equally valid as, say, shamanistic practices of other cultures, and that things like logic and mathematics are simply held to an arbitrary standard of correctness due to a western-centric view of the world. All the while failing to acknowledge that we use Arabic numerals, contributions of Islamic scholars in the invention of algebra, or that concepts like the Pythagorean theorem were very much un-arbitrarily and independently arrived at within multiple cultures. So without even getting into the non-arbitrary nature of the correctness of logic and mathematics, attempts at accusing western civilization of whitewashing and imposing their modes of thinking onto the world, there is a complete failure to understand the cultures that contributed to those modes of thinking in the first place. There is literally a whitewashing of how influenced western civilization is by other cultures, when accusing western civilization of actively erasing other cultures with its modalities. Maybe it's a sophomoric point, maybe I'm not getting it across clearly. I'm just finding a pattern among the self-flagellation of the west, that there's a certain beauty that seems to be lost in reducing the complicated way in which the west fits into the web of historical and contemporary civilizations to basically be one of oppression and whitewashing. For all of the whitewashing that may occur, I am simply making the point that there exists just as pernicious an issue in which the west is not framed as uniquely good and benevolent, but the precise opposite.
- kgwgk 6y agoSee also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School_of_Salamanca#Economics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School_of_Salamanca#Economics
- timkam 6y agoI think this is very interesting but not too surprising. Until a couple of hundred years, many (if not most) educated people where closely associated with some form of organized religion, and the study of human behavior from both descriptive and prescriptive perspectives was an important line of work of religious scholars. Also, I'm wondering if one can track a clear line from the principles of (micro)economic rationality, i.e. clear and consistent preferences, back to religious principles like "if in doubt, remain consistent" (colloquialized) as devised by Talmudic scholars in the 19th century, see e.g. Shev Shema'tata: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shev_Shema%27tata https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shev_Shema%27tata.
- cassepipe 6y agoIf you are really interested in the origin of capitalism, Ellen Meiksins Wood, based on historian Robert Brenner's work,makes a pretty compelling argument for an agrarian origin of capitalism, not in the "West" but specifically in Britain. She draws the line between trade on the one hand, that existed and flourished in Holland,Firenze and others parts of the world where capitalism nevertheless did not "happen" and the specific conditions that gave rise to a new mode of production in England well before anywhere else. It's called "the origin of capitalism".
- amelius 6y agoSo religion caused all this wealth inequality?
- randcraw 6y agoNo, though religion sometimes justifies inequality, by claiming that those at the bottom of society were put there before birth as part of God's grand design. Calvinism's tenet of Predestination claims exactly that. AFAIK, Calvinism is alone among Christian denominations in making that prejudgement.