Oh me oh my…
“People in Africa aren’t dying from too much capitalism but too little. Perhaps you want to blame the French or the Americans. But I assure you they are not ultimately to blame. African collectivism is socialism woven into the fabric of the culture itself, and people remain in their poverty because there is no incentive to produce more than a minimum necessary to survive.”
I think I just threw up a little. In my mouth.
I hope Carter is paying attention to the flies he’s drawing, now that he’s turning right.
OK, I admit that was an ad hominem reaction (from someone lived in Africa for eight years, I might add) to a patently ignorant comment. I’m afraid I’m having a very bad day.
That’s the comment thread which keeps on giving.
Its going to die a long, painful death I’m sure. If I could somehow mention Mark Driscoll over there, maybe I could cause computers everywhere to implode.
Speaking of (and I’ll have to be objective, since I have a good friend in the employ of MHC): Pastor Mark hopes to have his sermons heard in 100 churches around the world by 2019, but on a one-week delay so that any necessary editing or translation can be carried out. I’ll let you ponder that one. :-)
http://blog.marshillchurch.org/2009/04/29/how-to-preach-in-different-time-zones-simultaneously/
That would be about a million souls that he will save, right?
With a one week delay, we’d have to subtract a few…?
I love when people speak in broad generalizations “Africa” needs “capitalism.”
I wonder whether, as a form of self-discipline, we might simply refuse to employ (or deploy) word-bombs like “liberal” and “conservative”. Given that they now seem empty ciphers in which folks drop simplistic polarized ideas, should we not categorize them under the rubric of “abusive language” (Col 3:8) and foolish, graceless talk (Eph 4:29f.)?
I’m gonna try it, anyway!
Only a liberal would do something like that!
=P
I see a lot lambasting of capitalism but very little productive engagement with some serious arguments. If we want to solve poverty, wealth needs to be created. What, therefore, is the means by which wealth is created? This century is unparalleled in its creation of wealth. Capitalism has created more wealth and alleviated more people from poverty than any other economic system. This is not to say that markets should be completely free. Certainly the selling of certain goods and services (prostitution, child pornography, etc.) are morally reprehensible. But that is a false dichotomy. How would ya’ll respond? I am genuinely interested.
How about some serious evidence that the “creation of wealth” actually benefits poor people? What do you mean by “wealth”? And why should we use the language of “economic systems”?
This is not sophistry, I think. It goes to the question of how much our perspective on something is determined by adopting a culturally preset framing. In identifying poverty as a problem to be solved through a system, have we not already given the game away?
I guess I never thought about it like that. Poverty isn’t a problem that doesn’t need to be solved. Well, I suppose that’s one way to deal with it.
I will answer each of your questions in turn.
1. How do I know that “the ‘creation of wealth’ actually benefits poor people”. Let me quote from Johan Norberg, Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute, “Over the past 40 years, average life expectancy in the developing countries has risen from 46 to 64 years. Since 1950, infant mortality has fallen from 18 to 8 per cent. The proportion of illiterates has fallen from 70 per cent to about 25. Since 1970 child labour and the proportion of people in the world who have to go hungry has fallen by more than half. Since 1980 the number of people in absolute poverty was reduced by more than 200 million.” He goes on, “In the least liberal economies, the income gap between the wealthiest fifth and the poorest is more than twice as much as in the most liberal countries….During the 1970s and 1980s, developing countries with open markets had annual growth of 4.49 per cent, whereas open industrialised countries had only 2.29 per cent. During the 1990s, globalising developing countries had 5 per cent growth annually, whereas the industrialised countries had 1.9 per cent. Free trade, in other words, gives poor countries a means of moving up on more affluent ones and eventually catching up with them.”
2. How one defines wealth is negligible in this discussion. The goal to which I think you would agree is that the bare minimum of wealth that we would like create would be those goods and services that are requisite for sustainable existence.
3. Why should we use language of “economic systems”? When we do physics we use the language-game that has (been) developed for physics. When we do psychology we use that language-game. When we do economics we use that language-game. This does not necessitate incommensurability. Why must we use the language of physics when we do physics?
Part of your response evidences the silliness that attends many discussions within theology circles. I don’t know about your knowledge of economics, but many of the theologians I overhear or speak to have probably never read any economics. The first task of criticism is a profound understand of the object of study. My problem is that those critics of capitalism never engage the best arguments for capitalism.
Thanks for your reply, JBH. I confess to being a theologian, not an economist. I do however teach at a small Christian liberal arts university in which I’m in regular conversation with specialists in economics and political science. Good neo-Kuyperians, they don’t apologize for using those disciplinary language games–despite my proddings that they take the church and its practices more seriously. Be that as it may, I’ve learned as much in criticism of global capitalism from them as I have from theologians.
As for the rest of your post, I’ll say no more as I’ve sworn off using the “L” word. ;)
Did I just say liberal arts?
Crap.
I do think there are substantive arguments, but they are not against capitalism in itself. Surely, if one applies these principles to all of life, it would be anti-Christian. Just as if you took paradigms in physics or biology as a whole would have disastrous consequences. I just see an over-realized eschatology in theologians like Hauerwas and Yoder. The political vision of the Church is a beautiful and necessary commitment, but I think we need to couple that with a two city theology as well as not surreptitiously usher in post-millennial pretensions in our acknowledgment of the necessarily political vision of the kurios Iesous.
To the extent that capitalism is inhibited in Africa it is done so largely by Westerners for the advantage of Westerners. Take agriculture: European and American farm subsidies ensure that Africans cannot compete. We will talk about free trade and free markets in order to ensure that Shell et al can access Nigeria’s oil etc., but if Africans threaten to horn in on the turf of farmers in the developed world, forget about it. Free markets exist all over Africa but the global economy is structured so that Africans face many barriers to entering them.
While this quote may seem abrasive, there is some coherent thought behind it. Collectivism is a rampant problem that becomes worse in direct relationship to poverty. However it does seem that European imperialism is greatly responsible for the current manifestations of Africa’s problems; this in no way implies that Africa would be in any sense “better off” if there had never been any contact with the Europeans, slavery and tribal barbarism have been rampant in Africa since long before the Europeans became involved, they were just able to exploit it on a wide scale. In regards to capitalism, there is huge influence of the neo-Marxist environmentalist type who invest much effort to prevent the industrialization of the third world in the name of protecting the environment. But what it comes down to is that many consider ‘capitalism’ to be synonymous with ‘corruption,’ if this is the case, then of course Africa needs no more of it.