Christian Economists Talk Ethics, Economics and Culture

Millions of Americans are angry, frustrated and confused by economic changes in recent generations. There has been tremendous growth in sectors devoted to the highly-specialized ‘knowledge’ economy of professionals; bankers, lawyers, doctors, engineers, computer scientists, financiers. These are the so-called ‘winners’ of our new cognitive elite society. Simultaneously, the service industry has also done well – jobs requiring good people skills are always in demand and can’t be done by machines.

However, both low skill workers (whose jobs can be automated away) and industrial workers (whose services are no longer as in-demand) have been left behind. The stock market is at a new high, but there’s an increasing class anxiety for those not already anchored in financial security. COVID lockdowns have been destructive to non-white collar jobs and there’s the sense that the economy no longer functions for much of the workforce.

It’s in the context of this simmering disillusionment that the Church must question prevailing orthodoxies. What does a Christ-centric understanding of the economy look like? What are the limits of free markets? What does it mean to seek to help and love our neighbors without utopian socialist visions? These are the types of questions addressed in a panel hosted by Notre Dame University’s de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture for its annual conference last week.

The panel was composed of political theorist Ryan T. Anderson, President of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, economist Joseph Kaboski of Notre Dame and Mary Hirschfeld, moral theologian and economist at Villanova. Without giving exact prescriptions, they agreed that we cannot discuss the economy absent terms of families, churches and the essential dignity of labor.

Hirshfeld identified as problematic the discussion of income and wealth as though they are intrinsic goods as opposed to, using philosophy terminology, instrumental goods. The difference is simple: instrumental goods are desirable only insofar as they let me achieve something else and not at all for their own sake. A big house is an instrumental good that enables the intrinsic good of providing shelter for a family; absent the essential goodness that the largeness of the house provides, it’s just a waste of resources.

While income is the best example of an instrumental good mistaken for an intrinsic one, labor is the best example of an intrinsic good mistaken for an instrumental one. A major problem is that lower-income jobs do not make enough money to support a lifestyle with intrinsic goods like healthy food, shelter and family. But, another important problem is that we don’t respect his labor as intrinsically valuable and beneficial to society. All of the professional classes previously listed might earn 2-10 times as much as a janitor or other minimum wage employee, but does that mean his labor is 1/10th as important?

This criticism rings especially true when many highly-paid professions don’t even necessarily contribute a net-benefit to society. I’m reminded of a Wall Street Journal article on the truly awful psychological effects social media have on young girls, unprecedented in human history; the inventors and shareholders of Instagram (owned by Facebook) profited by making society mentally unstable. Yet, despite these issues, according to the market their contribution is thousands of times greater than that of a grocery bagger, janitor, gardener or nursing home caretaker.

This isn’t to say that the panelists were insisting government action is necessary to rectify this situation. Rather, in our own hearts we must recognize how certain professions are devalued, not only monetarily but socially and how this is an assault on the God-given dignity of those workers.

Economists and policy-makers tend to talk about GDP growth and jobs numbers as the only things that matter, and the point of the panel wasn’t to say that those things don’t matter. Instead, the problem has been that we discuss these numbers like they’re the only metrics that matter. While the stock market and GDP have grown immensely in the last decade, so too has social discontent. We need an expanded view of how to measure the economy, one that can take into account our deep needs for community, family and meaningful labor.

As the world changes so too changes the way we engage with markets. What doesn’t change, though, is the necessity of work and its intrinsic dignity. It’s a challenge for every generation to provide not only food and shelter but also meaning to everyone through their labor. Ours is no different in this regard, only that the nature of those challenges has once again transformed.