God--for lack of a better word--is good … for business
Monday, September 15, 2008 at 1:44AM OP-ED: "Want More Growth in China? Have Faith," by Rob Moll, Wall Street Journal, 8 August 2008, p. W9.
Fascinating op-ed.
One of the most important dissenting voices in China today belongs to Peter Zhao, a Communist Party member and adviser to the Chinese Central Committee. Mr. Zhao is among a group of Chinese intellectuals who look to the West to find the key to economic success. Mr. Zhao in particular believes that Christianity and the ethical system based upon its teachings are the reason that Western countries dominate the global economy. "The strong U.S. economy is just on the surface," he says. "The backbone is the moral foundation."
Big subject for Great Powers: our competitive religious landscape is a huge asset in economic terms, allowing for a demand-led religious environment—as in, ask and you shall receive . . . the religion you need most right now given your age, circumstances, economic trajectory, whatever.
It is THE social and economic and political lubricant.
Hitchens will never get that.
Reader Comments (14)
Chinese business practices are based on a web of family-based contacts.
The Western model, and especially the Anglo-American model, are based no a higher radius of trust beyond the kin network. This allows human capital to be better allocated and reduces transaction costs. This may well have been based on Christianity, in particular in Western Christianity, where the existence of an institutional church outside of, or alongside of, political authority allowed a degree of freedom unknown anywhere else. I tend to think Christianity was the major factor, but it is hard or impossible to prove. Even so, it would have provided a marginal advantage compounded over two millenia.
Whether China can replicate this extremely deeply rooted and long-developing process in anything like "real time" remains to be seen. The Chinese certainly are good at doing very quickly things that took other countries decades or centuries. If anybody can build-in Christianity and scale up quickly, it will be the Chinese.
If China were to become predominantly Christian, this would be a world-historic event on an immense scale, with inconceivable consequences.
Adam Smith did have a pragmatic religious slant to his 1776 work. He said the market forces would do good for most, and provide more national resources to help the poor. Before exploring practical economic ideas he had studied and taught courses on the practical philosophy of Christian morals.
One of his background remarks leading to his 1776 work was the time he noticed that jobs for the unemployed came when people with money to invest came around.
Does Zhao quote Smith?
With respect to concrete reality, the prominent Asian philosophies and religions do tend to be more reality-based than Christianity. Take Confucianism for example: it provides probably the most direct social instruction of any religious/philosophical script. That is not to say that such instructions are not part of other religions, but that they are more implicit in the text.
In regards to China in particular, the state religion seems to be a combination of nationalism and Chinese culture. The Chinese culture element is quite interesting because it plays on a peculiar sense of cultural identity that cuts deeply through Chinese society. There are all sorts of facts and historical claims (e.g. inventing paper) that may or may not be true, but everyone accepts them as fact. Furthermore, race, ethnicity, cultural identity and nationality are regarded as equivalent, which is why you will meet ethnic Chinese who have been outside of China for generations and who may not speak Chinese but will still identify themselves as Chinese. Moreover, on the mainland, this tendency is heavily reinforced through the educational system, the media, and even corporate marketing. Naturally, the government and state media are very adept on playing these attributes.
Religious people can make money. Secularists can be poor. But, like its relationship with morality, religion has only a passing affiliation.
It is not possible to generalize meaningfully at this level. Islam is not Christianity is not Buddhism, etc. And each of these large, old and influential bodies of thought, prayer and practice have taken many different forms over the centuries and in different places. The Calvinism of Calvin's own Geneva, of Amsterdam in the Dutch Golden Age and in the USA in Michigan or in Tennessee in 2008 are all different, though related.
More specifically, religion is very often a dynamic force, as history has repeatedly shown. I will also say that this is particularly true of Christianity, as a matter of historical record, a fact beyond the scope of an already overlong comment on Tom's blog.
Additionally, people live within a moral framework, however they articulate it to themselves. The religions of the world over the centuries have provided various distinct moral frameworks. The economic and political and legal order exists within that framework, which is itself evolving over time.
The economic order does not and cannot supply its own moral framework. No less a libertarian than Hayek himself said this. He correctly observed that capitalism can only function, and even survive, by drawing on a moral order that it did not create and cannot replace with its own resources.
The Chinese leadership are very astute. They see the growing "demand" for religion in an increasingly wealthy country, and they want to channel that in ways that are stabilizing rather than destabilizing, prosperity-enhancing, and which serve the Party and the regime's interests. The problem is that religion is a force far beyond mere politics and economics, and it is rarely an "instrument" that can be controlled by the state.
The point is that it wasn't just religious thinking that got distorted and misused both by accident, and by clever scheming leaders.
http://www.econlib.org/library/Tracy/DestuttdeTracyBio.html