Morality and Morality Plays

My favorite Nobel Laureate in economics, Paul Krugman, is fond of saying, "economics is not a morality play."

Late last year, he explained exactly what he means: "economics is not a morality play. It’s not a happy story in which virtue is rewarded and vice punished. The market economy is a system for organizing activity — a pretty good system most of the time, though not always — with no special moral significance. The rich don’t necessarily deserve their wealth, and the poor certainly don’t deserve their poverty; nonetheless, we accept a system with considerable inequality because systems without any inequality don’t work."

Republicans who claim to be good Christians will certainly recognize the principle as stated in Matthew 5:45: "That ye may be the children of your Father which is in heaven: for he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust." In fact, the Book of Job in the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament) is devoted entirely to this theological problem.

This is not the same as saying that there are no moral issues involved with economics. Reinhold Niebuhr, the great 20th century American theologian, in his 1932 book Moral Man and Immoral Society explained: "human society will never escape the problem of the equitable distribution of the physical and cultural goods which provide for the preservation and fulfillment of human life." A few pages later, he explains the particular aspects of our own history and that of democracy in general that generate moral complexity: "...the creeds and institutions of democracy have never become fully divorced from the special interests of the commercial classes who conceived and developed them. It was their interest to destroy political restraint upon economic activity, and they therefore weakened the authority of the state and made it more pliant to their needs....[therefore] the economic, rather than the political and military, power has become the significant coercive force of modern society."

Franklin Delano Roosevelt was making much the same point in 1936 when he said: "We know now that Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob." And he did not yet have to deal with the power of today's multinational corporations who seem answerable to no national power.

But when Krugman says that an economic system must have a certain amount of inequality in order to work, we are still left to wonder what is meant by an economic system that works. Works for whom? Works to what end?

These are fundamentally moral, not technical, questions.