The Bailout And The Economics Of Apocalypse

As a rule of thumb, when times turn bad imagination turns psychotic and people run for cover that is no longer there. Apocalyptic thinking overwhelms careful analysis of options remaining, decisions beckoning, and outcomes possible. Futuring collapses into catastrophizing, and the wisdom of the many is denigrated by the posturing of the few, who demand unquestioning acceptance of their prophecies of what is to come for everyone except an especially privileged cadre of those willing to get themselves in touch and tune with the elemental Force(s) of the universe.

One of the most interesting things that happened in the recent messing around with ostensibly collapsing financial markets in this country and abroad was how quickly financiers and economists morphed into theologians. "Disaster, "meltdown" and even "global catastrophe" became the scare words. All of a sudden, it would seem, God had decided to shift the playing field of Armageddon from the Plain of Jezreel to the island of Manhattan, with Wall Street the newly designated romping ground for the Beast from the Abyss. The mountains about to fall on everyone, the prophetic messengers are still crying, are mountains of debt, and their crumbling will bury everyone, the profligate and the frugal, the law-flouting and the law-obeying, the goods-consuming and the goods-producing alike.

As all really impressive apocalypticists do, these guys (we did not hear much from competent female economists, and Nancy Pelosi doesn't count) moved swiftly and seductively to their flash finishes, their pretentious pronouncements of a way --- the only way --- to stave off the End, this time, of global prosperity as the formerly prosperous (that is, they and most everyone else but us) have known it. But then, the apocalyptic thinking took a turn that not even John of Patmos could have envisioned. It is not toward the time-honored way of repentance, of greed, for an obvious example; this, it would appear, is a way for only the economically simple-minded. The far more complicated way, especially of Messrs. Paulson and Bernanke, seems to be a way of repenting of repenting itself. If I understand the implications of their proposals --- and whether anyone does at this moment is unclear --- a lot of money will be made available to those whose previous investment mistakes are what fired up the Dragon in the first place, so that many of these same institutions will be able to go out and make these same mistakes again.

What mistakes? From the standpoint of MBA courses at least, the really sleazy ones appear to be so subtle and complex that it will take experts a long time to figure out how anyone managed to make them at all, not to mention making them work. Even so, it should not be beyond these experts to get their work done in time to put a stop to all the economic slicing and dicing for good. Overarching the wheeling and dealing, though, is the really fundamental issue, and it is not an issue of economics.

At the risk of oversimplification at a time when apocalypticists are calling for still more obfuscation, I wonder if the issue might not be put this way: John and/or Jane Doe want to borrow money to buy a place or maybe even a business of their own. By any reasonable standard of assessing ability to pay, neither or both can marshall the resources to pay the money back. No problem. Potential lenders size up whether either or both have the moxie to appear to be willing and able to pay it back, and on the basis of appearance rather than reality set John and/or Jane up with a mortgage, take commissions off the top, and skip town (otherwise known as pursuing other opportunities). To jump into the theological about this for just a moment, what adds flavor to the scenario is the image of a Miltonic Satan, whispering in the ears of John and/or Jane, "You can afford it; you deserve it," and in the ears of their benefactors, "You can get away with it."

For the Johns and Janes who need no prompting to make and get stuck with financial commitments they have no right to make, and for the devilish financial advisors who make an unjustifiable profit assuring their Does how right they are in their narcissism, a dose of economic hellfire and brimstone just might be the thing to bring them to their senses. Although Dante may have made us recoil at the idea of it, Purgation is not always a bad thing. But the Doe clan is a very large clan in our society today, and it includes truly innocent victims of a truly devilish system which deforms a sound theology of money (gain, save, give) into a Deceiver-inspired one (gain, spend, steal). Putting the minions of the Deceiver in charge of making the system work that they have already shown to be deserving of collapse may be a credible way of ensuring peoples' deposits, but it is hardly the way to ensure their economic future against unjust suffering.

Community Mental Health: A Forgotten Initiative

Lately, I have been conjuring with a way to settle once and for all the question of which Presidential candidate is the most committed to bringing about "real" change, that is, change that will really matter to real people and not just to Washington-minded bureaucrats. My idea was inspired by a re-reading of Matthew 25:31-46, Jesus' words about feeding the hungry, quenching peoples' thirst, being hospitable, providing clothing to the naked, caring for the sick, and visiting the imprisoned --- and his startling idea that we can expect to see him especially in the faces of the least of all of these. The body blow is delivered at vs. 45: "…anything you failed to do for one of these, however insignificant, you failed to do for me." (REB) As the most powerful nation on earth, and by our own grandiose declaration the most generous, our country has not done well with most of this little homily, except in sporadic crises. I am not the only one worried about what Jesus may make of our systemic failure some day.

A particularly distressing example of making ourselves the goats and not the sheep of God's Kingdom is our unwillingness to bring about real change in caring for the mentally ill. If there are any doubts about how far down on the food chain many of these folks are, following a few off-medication, homeless schizophrenics around a street or two downtown will dissolve those doubts in less than an hour. What makes the short-changing of the mentally ill especially noxious is that not all that long ago, we had in place at the Federal level just what would have made lasting change possible, the Community Mental Health Act, signed into law in 1963 by President John F. Kennedy. It called for building mental health centers all over the country, mostly in low-income communities, that would provide access to comprehensive treatment to to all who needed it, especially those previously warehoused in state mental hospitals. A linchpin of this approach was the empowerment of clients and communities.

During the 1980's not only the vision but the legislation died, with the systematic, federally-initiated tearing down of its own nation-wide network of by then adequately funded and staffed clinics. On the basis of "less government" ideology --- as laughable then as it is today --- money was transferred in significantly diminished amounts to the states in the form of block grants. The all too predictable result has been rising expectations met by demoralizing fiscal restraints, increased caseloads, stifling regulations, and a general falling-off in the quality and accessibility of mental health care. There is little evidence to date that our current Presidential candidates have thought very much about this desperate situation, and even less that they and their running mates have had even a single anxious moment pondering what the indifference of Christians --- all four of them included --- is doing to Jesus.

From one vantage point, of course, these failures are beyond even the possibility of correction, primarily because this country no longer has the financial resources needed to complete the job. In a word, we are broke. Not dead broke yet, but just wait. Like too many consumers with too much charged on their credit cards, government --- whether Republican or Democrat --- has run up its own (that is, our) tab too, and no politician now seems willing to say the one politically-incorrect word that would begin to fix the problem: priorities. They, like we, are more content to keep bandying about the more familiar but no longer helpful ones, such as lower taxes, less government, military hegemony, family values, entitlements, trickle down economics, and most importantly of all, consumption as the vital center of the good life. But "priorities" is the one word most in need of amplification, and the one priority most in need of an upward advance on our lists is making a decent life possible for those in our society who are least able to make it possible on their own. Rethinking the uses and misuses of accumulation can still make it happen.

So my idea for the morning is that the Presidential candidate who makes the first move to talk about this priority deserves the accolade of being considered the more serious about making a real difference and bringing about real change in society. I plan to keep on listening for the first hint from either candidate --- or from his running mate, for that matter --- that caring for those mentally ill who are least able to care for themselves matters, and matters greatly, to him/her. Without getting too weird, Fundamentalistic, or Swift-Boaty about it, I think that Jesus will be listening, too.

The Money That Buys Happiness

About the time that this year's Presidential Campaign reaches its peak intensity, many Finance Committees will be launching their churches' Stewardship Campaigns for the purpose of underwriting 2009 budgets. In megachurches at least, the slickness of the latter is likely to match and even exceed the flimflamness of the former. Hopefully, in spite of all the political and theological hype to come, we will also get exposed to some really good ideas both about rebuilding America and about what God wants us to do with money.

With respect to the second kind of green stuff, it will be hard to find anything better than John Wesley's never tiresome sermon on the subject. For Americans at least, Wesley's political judgments are best forgotten, but his three points about the uses of money (gain and save all you can, in order to give all you can) are worthy of everyone's remembering. And it will be a truly great season of fundraising if there is not even a passing reference to the idea that prosperity is a sign of God's special blessing on those who give a bunch. Getting one's name on a piece of church property or on a program in the line item budget should be reward enough. In religion, even if not in politics, access to Power and Favor should not have to be bought.

Contrary to what most of us were taught growing up, though, there may be a sense in which money can buy at least a measure of happiness in this life, even if it cannot ensure salvation in the next. Recently, a group of researchers from the University of British Columbia and Harvard Business School teamed up on three small studies designed to see if there might be some measureable relationship between spending habits and happiness. In one study, participants rated their general happiness and then gave information on how much of their earnings they spent on themselves and on others each year. Not surprisingly, the higher earners in this study were happier. But: so were those who spent higher percentages of their earnings on others, whether the earnings themselves were large or small. Now we may be getting somewhere.

A second study had to do with the relationship between happiness and how bonus money was spent. No matter what the size of their bonuses, participants in this particular study who gave higher percentages of them to others after receiving them seemed happier than those who kept more of the money for themselves. Finally, and to me more than a little reminiscent of Jesus' parable of the talents (Matthew 25:14-30), the researchers gave another group of participants different quantities of money which had to be spent by the end of the day. At random, half were assigned the task of buying something for themselves with it, and the other half of either buying something for others or donating the money to charity. People in the second group reported feeling happier than did people in the first. Whether they had been given a larger or a smaller amount of money in the first place made no difference in their respective reactions.

Most social science research that depends on participants' unverifiable self-reporting are open to questions and other interpretations. For example, it is always difficult to get a true before-and-after measure of the differences that specific actions do and do not make to people's feelings and affective states. And with respect to these three studies in particular, it is not clear to me whether the researchers really have "happiness" right or not. They seem to have in mind something like a pleasureable experience related to very specific actions in the here and now, whereas true happiness, whether defined by Aristotle or Jesus, has more to do with a general sense of well-being across large chunks of a lifetime. Nonetheless, I like these little studies and I am glad I came across them.

They have served to remind me of two important things about Christian living. The first is that what we are doing with our money can be a very powerful symbol of what we are and are not doing with our lives. As Wesley put it, God wants all and not just a portion of us, and because that is so, we have to find ways of making all of our money matters matter to the expression of our love for God. The second thing is that it is in losing ourselves that we find ourselves, in the embrace of a self-emptying God. And in losing ourselves for the sake of others, we find true happiness. Scientific method may not get us all the way to this understanding of things. But life in the Spirit can, and does.