NOTES: Nibley, Enoch the Prophet

<p>I recently reread Hugh Nibley's <i>Enoch the Prophet</i> with an eye toward what it has to say regarding Millennial Social Thought (MST). Most of these passages come from the end of the book, and I will relate them here without much comment, just some ideas about Latter-day Saint Zionism.</p><ul><li>Their gathering together is the first step in a long process of withdrawing from a wicked world. (p. 252)</li><li>The interests of the Latter-day Saints in the city of Enoch is not simply a literary or even a scientific one. It is historic and prophetic. The city of Enoch is very much our concern. (p. 255)</li><li>...we are committed to forming as quickly as possible the closest possible partnership with that society. (p. 255)</li><li>Prophets emphasize the moral aspect of Zion, while the Psalms...favor the political. (p. 255)</li><li>...Zion actually has been on the earth in the past and can be enjoyed by the Saints again as soon as they are willing to "return to the original relationship with Yahweh".... (p. 256)</li><li>the only order of society acceptable to God.... (p. 256)</li><li>Zion is any society in which the celestial law is operative.... (p. 256)</li><li>Yachad (lit. unity, oneness) it was a reminder that <i>unity</i> is the first law of Enoch's society by which the Saints are expected to live in every dispensation. (p. 263)</li><li>Until the separation is complete the powers of destruction are held in check. (p. 266)</li><li>The Church itself, never again to be taken from the earth, must ever more closely approximate the Zion of Enoch.... Even though the work is still in its preliminary stages, one is justified in saying "this is the new chapel," when only the foundations are in. (pp. 272-3)</li><li>Let our anxiety be centered upon this one thing, the sanctification of our own hearts.... (p. 274)</li></ul><p>I also ended up with notes to look into the following sources: <i>Journal of Discourses</i> 9:3, 10:306, 15:3, and 17:113; <i>Teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith</i> p. 66; Doctrine and Covenants 78, 105, and 119; and "Abraham the Seer" by Martin Buber (1956).</p>

REVIEW: Strickler, This Could Be Our Future

<p>I recently read a book that has a few ideas that could relate to Millennial Social Thought (MST). The book is <i>This Could Be Our Future: A Manifesto for a More Generous World</i>, by Yancey Strickler. He is a cofounder of Kickstarter, the crowdfunding website. The two points of the book that relate most closely to my interests are Strickler's condemnation of profit maximization as a guilding influence in decision-making, and the idea of Public Benefit Corporations (PBC), a different legal structure for businesses.</p><p>Firstly, he says modern society has been based on the premise of financial maximization, which he says has three components:<ol><li>the point of life is maximizing financial wealth,</li><li>we live in an adversarial world, and</li><li>the first two points are inevitable and eternal.</li><ol>Of course, my training as an economist would tell me that (1) is the result of the liquidity of money and the limitless sources of utility, and that (2) is the result of scarcity. People want to maximize their money value because, as Homer Simpson's brain explains to him when he finds $20 instead of a peanut, "Money can be exchanged for goods and services." Even if I satiate my desire for one means of wellbeing, there are others. Uncertainty about the future and the natural desire for novelty mean that I'm almost never going to get to a point where I think, "I have enough for the rest of my life." Even if I <b>did</b>, I have people around me whose wellbeing is of interest to me, like my children, and they have circles of affinity, too, which might not even exist yet, like their children. How many of them are there going to be, and what are their interests and needs going to be in the future? The safest gameplan is to maximize my financial wealth.</p><p>That's before we even address the fact that the world has finite resources. I know a lot of futurists picture a world where scarcity might no longer hold for some resources, but unless we end up with a superabundance of all sources of utility, there will always be scarcity at least in some metric. So while Strickler presents the dominance of financial maximization as a recent phenomenon (which he pins on Milton Friedman), I view it more as the human condition.</p><p>When Strickler writes (p. 71), "More than employees, customers, or its own future, shareholders and the stock price were the priority" of business, he intends it as an "ain't it a shame" line, but I view this as just the legal necessity of business. The owners want to maximize their welfare, and liquid money allows them to each do that in their own way. When Strickler writes (p. 110), "The case against financial maximization isn't anti-money. It's pro-money. It's just pro-people, too. In service of people, money can be a very positive force," I think the same can be said of financial maximization within a value system. It's not financial maximization that Strickler has a problem with, it's the amoral application of it.</p><p>Strickler wants us to have a constraining value system, which is the idea of PBCs. Instead of existing for the benefit of the shareholders, which produces the motivation of financial maximization, PBCs have explicit values. As Strickler writes, these firms are "maximizing and optimizing for a different set of values" (p. 163); "a broader spectrum of values is so crucial" (p. 152).</p><p>In the 1950s Simon Kuznets and Abraham Maslow developed ideas about humans' ability and willingness to solve problems. Maslow's hierarchy of needs shows that people must solve basic concerns before they are in a position to address advanced ones, and the Kuznets curve shows that we will accept worsening of less-crucial problems as we pursue the improvement of more-pressing ones. If I had to sum up Strickler's argument, I would say that we've become rich enough of a country to sacrifice some financial maximization for the purpose of other goals. That may be true, but it's also something that maybe only someone in a privileged economic position could argue. But that's the audience Strickler is addressing, the people in the influential positions who determine what values their corporations will pursue. He writes, "To go back to Maslow's hierarchy, there are people and organizations that have fulfilled their safety and security needs. They can afford to be more generous and more long-term oriented because they aren't facing profound existential threats every day" (p. 175). Of course, different people will have different opinions about when they've reached that level of security. The more the social contract disintegrates, the more you have to grab for yourself because there will be no safety net should you miscalculate. Retaining more for yourself then further destroys social goods. But things can work in the opposite direction, as well: a more-generous society can encourage me to be less grasping because I know my peers won't allow me to end up destitute. I see Strickler's book as an attempt to coordinate the change of direction. He quotes John Maynard Keynes: "When the accumulation of wealth is no longer of high social importance, there will be great changes in the code of morals" (p. 194). But it requires a great change to the moral code to dislodge wealth accumulation from the pinnacle of social importance.</p><p>I argued at the beginning of this post that concerns for the future and for others in my circles of sympathy can drive wealth maximization. Strickler sees rational self-interest as producing financial maximization only for me and only in the present (pp.130-3). I think that's just a matter of disagreeing about how much concern people have for their kin and future selves. As Bruce Cannon Gibney argues in <i>A Generation of Sociopaths</i>, the Baby Boomers are a uniquely selfish generation that can't see social or future goals that would discourage the maximization of personal consumption. As Deirdre McCloskey points out, the lack of ethics in economics doesn't mean that we should make economic decisions without a system of ethics. It's the return of public ethics that Strickler needs for his system to work. He tries to convince the rich that they have enough that they can now afford to behave ethically. But I'm not sure that any amount of money is enough to convince an unethical person of that. The ethics have to come first.</p>

REVIEW: Desmond, Poverty, by America

I once read a quote from the author Nick Hornby about how he regrets naming his About a Boy the way he did because it makes for awkward sentences like, "I'd like to ask about About a Boy." I wonder if this author feels the same way about his book Poverty, by America, by Matthew Desmond. Or perhaps it creates the opportunity for fun, like I can say this post is a review of Poverty, by America, by Matthew Desmond, by Brandon Minster. Then YOU can write a reply to a review of Poverty, by America, by Matthew Desmond, by Brandon Minster, by whoever you are. Eventually one of these will get the attention of Matthew Desmond himself, and if HE then replied.... But let's not get ahead of ourselves.

As someone interested in Millennial Social Thought (MST), I take an interest in poverty. The stated goal of economic zionism is the end of poverty. Desmond's book ends with three basic ideas of how to reduce, if not end, poverty in America. But the majority of the book makes an argument that what causes poverty in America is not so much the improvidence or fecklessness of the poor, and not even the indifference of the non-poor, but the actual carefully uninformed approval of the middle class. It's a bold take, given that most people who read the book are probably going to be in this group. But by the time you've read all of his argument, it's hard to disagree.

To begin with, Desmond would define poverty a little differently. Most folks would probably say poverty is a shortage of money, but Desmond writes, "Poverty isn't simply the condition of not having enough money. It's the condition of not having enough choice and being taken advantage of because of that" (p.78). Just as the benefit of money comes from the opportunities and experiences it facilitates, the thing that matters about poverty isn't the small amount of cash in your hand but the exploitation that results. Desmond sets for himself the task of convincing exploiters that they exploit. Not some nebulous, "somewhere" rich person, but you in the suburbs. And to paraphrase the famous Upton Sinclair quote, it is difficult to get a man to understand his exploitative gains when his social position and self-regard depend on him not understanding it.

Hiding most of this from the prosperous is the duality of American life. The middle class think they understand the poor because their lives include the same basic activities: procuring housing, buying food, working for income. But the fact that these things have the same name doesn't mean they are the same activity. As Desmond explains (p. 78),

There is not just one banking sector. There are two--one for the poor and one for the rest of us--just as there are two housing markets and two labor markets. The duality of American life can make it difficult for some of us who benefit from the current arrangement to remember that the poor are exploited laborers, exploited consumers, and exploited borrowers, precisely because we are not. Many features of our society are not broken, just bifurcated. For some, a home creates wealth; for others, a home drains it. For some, access to cresit extends financial power; for others, it destroys it. It is quite understandable, then, that well-fed Americans can be perplexed by the poor, even disappointed in them, believing that they accept stupidly bad deals on impulse or because they don't know any better. But what if those deals are the only ones on offer? What good is financial literacy training for people forced to choose the best bad option?

I once had a job working for a firm that advised banks on schemes to increase financial literacy, but nowhere in those schemes was the underserving of poor neighborhoods addressed. You cash your paycheck at the check-cashing store when the bank branch is a multi-transfer transit ride away, not because you have been misled to think that the check-cashing store is better than the bank.

Desmond also seeks to undermine middle-class anti-welfarism by identifying the many ways the middle class benefit from welfare by a different name. The largest example is the home mortgage interest deduction, which results in a transfer many times that of Temporary Assistance for Needy Families. Desmond identifies three possible reasons for not seeing tax deductions as welfare. The first is just economic confusion--it can't be a government handout if it never came from the government's hands, right? He patiently explains how letting you keep a sum of money is financially identical to sending you a check for that amount. His second reason is that the well-off believe they are entitled to government assistance, but the poor are not. I guess this would be like looking on government as an insurance program, and if we have paid in through taxes we feel entitled to withdraw. If this is the case, then progressive taxation is actually shooting the poor in the foot, and they'd be better off with a flat-tax system that allows the poor equal claim on government resources because they paid into the system, as well. Finally, Desmond's third possibility is "we like it. It's the rudest explanation, I know, which is probably why we cloak it behind all sorts of justifications and quick evasions" (p. 102).

This is in line with Leo Tolstoy's conclusions in What Then Must We Do?, which Desmond quotes (p. 119).

I sit on a man's back, choking him and making him carry me, and yet assure myself and others that I am very sorry for him and wish to ease his lot by all possible means--except by getting off his back.... It is really so simple. If I want to aid the poor, that is, to help the poor not to be poor, I ought not to make them poor.

But the self-awareness of Tolstoy is missing in the American discourse. We aren't on their backs, they have drug problems. We aren't choking them, no one wants to work anymore. Desmond writes, "If this is our design, our social contract, then we should at least own up to it. We should at least stand up and profess, Yes, this is the kind of nation we want. What we cannot do is look the American poor in the face and say, We'd love to help you, but we just can't afford to, because that is a lie" (p. 102).

Desmond ends with three propositions: "Life the floor by rebalancing our social safety net; empower the poor by reigning in exploitation; and invest in broad prosperity by turning away from segregation. That's how we end poverty in America" (p. 170). It's the second idea that I want to spend some more time pondering. Desmond advocates for replacing profit maximization with profit sufficiency, but what would we take as the idea of sufficient? The long-run growth rate? That's doable, but how do we still get the efficient allocation of resources without the availability of supernormal profits? Extremely high marginal rates? But then how do we undermine the view that government resources are for the wealthy because they paid for them with taxes?

While those questions might remain, Desmond's book is still worthwhile and important. The first step to correcting an unjust system is recognizing the injustice. Poverty, by America does just that, and goes a long way towards making the average American face up to it.