“Economics of Externalities”
4, 2016 Community Christian Church of Springfield, MO
Roger Ray,
pastor
David Suzuki –
Economics is not a science – YouTube video as the wisdom lesson https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4NiauhOCfsk
There
is a scene, not one of the better-known ones, in Gone with the Wind: The war is
over, Scarlett is in desperate straits and she comes into the plantation house at
Tara and finds her now deranged father counting money…. But it is Confederate
bills. It is obvious that Gerold O’Hara has gone insane because he is counting
the now worthless confederate money as if the currency of the fallen south
actually had any value. The image comes to mind for me today because, in a very
real way, Gerold O’Hara has become the symbol of corporate America.
As
the Buddhist philosopher, Alan Watts, has famously put it, money does not
exist. It is nonsense to talk about not having enough money for education,
healthcare, housing, or infrastructure because money is only a concept, a
measuring tool. You would never hear a carpenter saying that he couldn’t finish
building a house because he had run out of inches.
Money
is only how we measure value, it is the way that we have agreed to exchange
things that really are valuable. Money has no inherent worth. But What does
have inherent worth?
Things
that have a limited supply have value. Land has value because they are not
making any new land.
Clean
water, clean air, have value because we need them to live. Our lives have value
because we are mortal… we may extend our lives but we know that there is a
limit, even to that. Money doesn’t
really exist, but forests do, the fish in the ocean exist, you and I…we’re
real, we have value.
That’s
what I love about the little video clip we used as our wisdom lesson from David
Suzuki today. Economics is not a science. It is an aspect of sociology but we
tend to treat it like it is on par with chemistry or mathematics. It isn’t.
Bill
Clinton defeated George H. W. Bush in the 1992 presidential election repeating
a fundamental claim: “It’s the economy stupid.” And that resonated with people
because what he really meant was not the “economy”…. What it really was, was
unemployment… it was poverty… it was homelessness… it was trying to live
without health insurance or a retirement program. And for a lot of us, it was
really fear… fear that we would grow old and sick without the resources to care
for ourselves…. It was fear that we wouldn’t be able to provide for our kids if
something went just a little bit wrong with our income. It was fear that our
kids wouldn’t be able to get an education, that they would get stuck in a
crummy job and would always be unsatisfied with their lives.
Clinton
could say that it was “the economy” but the fact is that the real issue is that
economic reasoning is what has created almost all of our fear. The people who
control the economy, the captains of industry, the banking system, Wall Street,
they keep rigging the system so that more and more of what has real value
belongs to them.
Natural
resources are limited and if we talk about using natural resources in a
renewable way, they are even more limited. But, as Gandhi said, there is more
than enough for the world’s needs but there is not enough for the world’s
greed. There is no morally defensible reason for homelessness or hunger in this
century. We have more empty, foreclosed houses in this country than we have
homeless people. We throw away ten times more food than what it would take to
make sure that hunger came to a screeching halt in this country.
If
only we had a more just and humane way of distributing goods, everyone who
wanted a college education could have one. Laborers would not work more than 32
hours a week and everyone would get at least a month of paid vacation every
year. What’s more, if we had a more equitable means of distributing resources,
we would have more actors, poets, musicians, artists, and architects. We would
have more research scientists and inventors.
Our
society is technologically, scientifically, and intellectually capable of so
much more than we have realized because so much of our government, employment,
and even our healthcare and education systems are run by economics in stead of
humanity.
Things
like clean water and air, a safe food supply, or even a life lived as a
musician or an artist, is what an economist will call an “externality.” For an
economist, the value of a great work of art is only what its cash value at
auction would be but when you go through the Nelson Adkins art museum in Kansas
City and you stand in front of that grand canvas of Monet’s water lilies, is
the first thing that comes to you mind the approximate value of the painting? If you have ever had the good fortune, as I
have, to walk through the British Museum, to walk among the Elgin Marbles of
the Greek Parthenon or to stand in front of the Rosetta Stone, is the value of
those works of artistic and historic value purely based in what they would
bring at auction?
In
economics, a forest only has value if it has been cut down, turned into lumber
and sold. For an economist, the value of a cold mountain stream is nothing,
unless it can be bottled and sold in a grocery store. Men and women, at best,
our economy is only one concern among many and it is much less of a concern
than the health of our ecology and the happiness of our children and
grandchildren. Surely this is obvious to us and yet it does not appear to be
honest to the decision makers in our government.
We
are, of course, now very engaged in raising support for the Native Americans
who are rallying around the Sioux tribe at Standing Rock, North Dakota. The
Indians and others who are gathered there in peaceful protest choose to call
themselves “water protectors” because they are not there to riot, they are not
leading a protest, they are just trying to protect the Missouri river from the
prospect of being polluted with crude oil.
It
is not a hypothetical issue. Just since 2010 there have been more than 3000 gas
and oil pipeline accidents, leaks, and explosions. More than 80 people have
been killed.
Over
a million gallons of crude oil has been spilled. Over 800,000 gallons were
spilled in North Dakota in 2013 when lightening stuck a pipeline and caused it
to explode.
Just
a month ago a gas pipeline in Helena, Alabama exploded. Friends in the area
called me because they knew that my brother lives in Helena. So I called him
and though he was actually fairly close to the explosion, he and his family
were safe. I knew that someone had been killed and 80 or so people had been
injured. My brother’s response was that he was afraid that the incident would
make gasoline prices go up in their area…. That’s how economics teaches us to
think. I hung up the phone and could hardly believe that was my own brother’s
take on things…. Though since I have learned that he voted for Trump, my
expectations of logical thinking have gone down for my Alabama family.
But
folks, I turned on NPR… good, reliable, liberal, National Public Radio, and
they described the explosion and mentioned the casualties and then said,
“Locals fear that their gas prices will be going up.”
This
is no accident. This is a lifetime of training to think about everything in
terms of dollars and cents. As I have
been reading about the Native American cultures our European and African
ancestors encountered on this continent, one of the stark differences between
our cultures, one that showed up in our languages, was that Native Americans
didn’t commonly have a word for “work.” They didn’t have careers. They didn’t
leave their children behind and go to the office… they did what they did to
survive together.
The
language, the logic or economics has so seeped into our skulls that we
literally raise our children to believe that the purpose of living is to get a
job and pay your bills. People, do you know that you are more than a job and
that living is more than just paying your bills? Native Americans helped one
another to build their shelters. They hunted, fished, and farmed but they
didn’t have a word for work, or job, or career, or even retirement.
Not
many of us, I’m guessing, would embrace returning to a stone age standard of
living, but our choice in this century is not one of constant anxiety and
pressure or living off of the land.
You
have heard me say that I believe that the Dakota Access Pipeline project will
eventually be finished. I believe that because it is a $3.8 billion project and
more than $3 billion of that has already been spent. So what is the value of the Missouri River,
that joins the Mississippi River at St Louis and they meet the Ohio River at
Cairo, Illinois, and together they flow past Memphis all of the way to New
Orleans? What is the value of a water system that provides drinking water for
millions and waters the farmland that feeds half of this nation?
I’m
just saying, it’s the water, stupid. It’s the air. It’s the land. It is food,
and breath, and drink, and life itself. If we are not protectors of land, air,
and water then what are we but just some crazy old man counting confederate
dollars while the world falls apart all around us?
