Last weekend there was a conference celebrating the 50th anniversary of John Robinson’s Honest to God, the one jointly sponsored by Modern Church and the Progressive Christianity Network. I am writing a string of blog posts about it; the others are on the Modern Church blog site.
This one makes an economic point. I am not an economist, but economists like scientists are rarely good philosophers so they usually do not appreciate the limits of their discipline.
James Crossley is a New Testament scholar at Sheffield University, and he had been asked to speak on ‘being honest about Jesus’. Since one of the chapters in Honest to God was on Jesus it was appropriate to ask a New Testament scholar to reflect on the current state of Jesus scholarship. Crossley, like many New Testament scholars, located the ministry of Jesus in the social upheaval in Galilee in his day. The Romans had built Tiberias and Sepphoris around the time of his childhood. There was much dislocation of peasant land, with the accompanying resentment by peasants.
Crossley added that there is another side to the story. The archaeologist Morten Horning Jensen has argued that the economy was growing at the time. Nevertheless, Crossley replied, public perceptions might not have recognised this: if people perceived the changes negatively, they could still have generated social unrest.
It was only a passing comment, so this is not really a criticism of Crossley’s lecture as such, but I think it deserves comment especially as it came from a scholar who revealed a keen interest in Marxism.
What I disagree with is the implication that at a time of economic growth social unrest needs to be explained in terms of perception rather than reality. Economic growth does not mean the poor and dispossessed are getting any better off. It often reflects a situation where the rich are getting richer and the poor poorer. 800 years before the time of Jesus Isaiah complained that the rich were adding extensions to their houses while the poor were suffering ever-greater impoverishment, and archaeological digs have borne him out. At the time of Jesus Galilee was under Roman rule. Peasants were being driven by debt to sell their farms and become day labourers. As a result moneyed landowners could buy up land at cheap prices to add to their estates.
Exactly the same is happening today. I live in Liverpool, which was already one of the poorest parts of the UK even before the present Government set about impoverishing it even further – through cutbacks to local authorities, cuts to public services, cuts to welfare benefits and the infamous ‘bedroom tax’. Meanwhile the statistics tell us that the economy is growing.
If economic growth benefits the poor, it will not do so automatically. It will happen for a reason – like, for example, government policy. During the recent recession the poor were impoverished and the rich were vastly enriched. Neither was the result of the recession; both were results of government policies. If the current growth does end up benefiting the poor, it will do so not as a result of the growth itself but because of government policy changes.
Economic growth is measured by the Gross Domestic Product, which simply adds up everything we all spend and receive. As far as the economy is concerned, one person spending £50 on an expensive lunch equals 100 people spending 50p each on their lunches. It doesn’t distinguish between the two. If tomorrow the one spends £100 on his lunch and the 100 people starve, the economic statistics will tell us nothing has changed. Apply this principle across the whole range of money-exchanging processes and the result is inevitable: the poorer you are the less you matter. If we want economic growth, forget about the poor: what matters is what the rich do. Here in Liverpool the local Council (Labour!) has decided to sell off part of our local park for housing – big expensive luxury houses, because they will produce more income from Council Tax.
The evidence makes it look – to me at least – as if the same applied in Jesus’ day. The economy was growing. The poor were getting poorer. The two go together.
There was an exception after the Second World War, when the welfare of the people needed economic growth because so much had been destroyed. Today we are back to normal – complete with the myths of growth to pull the wool over our eyes and get us all to support the enrichment of those who already have too much.
If, on the other hand, we want people’s needs to be met, the size of the economy is pretty irrelevant. What matters is how it is distributed.