by Wendell Berry
Kansas Dad had this book on our shelf. I wasn't sure it would be something we could use in high school, but after skimming a bunch of books on economics and finally settling on a main text for our economics study, I decided we needed something to address how our Christian faith should influence our ideas on economics. Wendell Berry isn't Catholic, but his thoughts on economic policy are relatively close to my own though far more eloquent.
Because this is a book of essays, many published in other sources years apart, there is a bit of a disjointed feel to the book. It's also sometimes a little depressing to think of Mr. Berry speaking and writing and living his ideals for so many years in a society that is only ever so slightly changing.
In the first essay, "Money Versus Goods," postulates an economy rooted in the land and people rather than entirely focused on money and spending.
But spending is not an economic virtue. Miserliness is not an economic virtue either. Saving is. Not-wasting is. To encourage spending with no regard at all to what is being purchased may be pro-finance, but it is anti-economic. Finance, as opposed to economy, is always ready and eager to confuse wants with needs. From a financial point of view, it is good, even patriotic, to buy a new car whether you need one or not. From an economic point of view, however, it is wrong to buy anything you do not need. [...] In an authentic economy, we would ask what the land and the people need. People do need jobs, obviously. But they need jobs that serve natural and human communities, not arbitrarily "created" jobs that serve only the economy.While I don't think is it wrong to buy something you want but don't need, I do think in our society, we buy far more of our wants than we should. Kansas Dad and I do that less than many because we have purposefully chosen a lifestyle that by its nature limits our spending money, but also because we generally carefully consider any purchase. I still buy far more books than we need.
In "Major in Homecoming," Mr. Berry addresses education.
Education has increasingly been reduced to job training, preparing young people not for responsible adulthood and citizenship but for expert servitude to the corporations.Those of us who homeschool are able to provide an education more focused on developing character and the ability to appreciate goodness and beauty, but we still live in the world. Our children will most likely go to college (Kansas Dad is a professor, after all) and we pray they are able to support themselves in adulthood, but we hope they will seek out the kind of education that makes them better people, not just better employees.
He touches on the same topic in "Economy and Pleasure."
The idea of the teacher and scholar as one called upon to preserve and pass on a common cultural and natural birthright has been almost entirely replaced by the idea of the teacher and scholar as a developer of "human capital" and a bestower of economic advantage.Think about Wendell Berry the next time you see an advertisement for a college or university.
A number of the essays identify significant problems with the modern agricultural industry.
In addition to an array of labor-saving or people-replacing devices and potions, it has given us massive soil erosion and degradation, water pollution, maritime hypoxic zones, destroyed rural communities and cultures, a farming population dwindled almost to disappearance, toxic food, and an absolute dependence on a despised and exploited force of migrant workers.First Son will be reading more about the agribusiness model in The Omnivore's Dilemma as part of his Health and Happiness course of study. (We'll be using the Young Reader's Edition because he'll be able to read it faster.)
Mr. Berry argues for a local economy designed to benefit the local people. He recommends economic policies and business practices that favor industries that are smaller, more diverse, and more comfortably nestled into communities. In "An Argument for Diversity:"
Two facts are immediately apparent. One is that the present local economy, based like the economics of most rural places exclusively on the export of raw materials, is ruinous. Another is that the influence of a complex, aggressive national economy upon a simple, passive local economy will also be ruinous.More than once, Mr. Berry reminds us that the "solutions" for modern-day problems carry a future cost that may be as great or greater than the problems they purportedly solve.
But the industrial use of any "resource" implies its exhaustion. It is for this reason that the industrial economy has been accompanied by an ever-increasing hurry of research and exploration, the motive of which is not "free enterprise" or "the spirit of free inquiry," as industrial scientists and apologists would have us believe, but the desperation that naturally and logically accompanies gluttony.One of the longer essays is "Conserving Forest Communities." I'd like First Son to read this one, despite it's length. In in, Mr. Berry uses a model of managing a forest for the well-being of a community while considering first of all the future of the forest to imagine how such an economy might work on a grander scale. While there are still many questions about how we might shift our nation toward such an economy, the idea of the ideal is a hopeful note in what may otherwise be a somber book.
The ideal of the industrial economy is to shorten as much as possible the interval separating investment and payoff; it wants to make things fast, especially money. But even the slightest acquaintance with the vital statistics of trees places us in another kind of world. A forest makes things slowly; a good forest economy would therefore be a patient economy. It would also be an unselfish one, for good foresters must always look toward harvests that they will not live to reap.The last essay, "The Total Economy," looks critically at the "free-market" economy and it's underlying assumptions. I think this essay is one of the most important for our study of economics as it directly addresses the kinds of arguments we find beneath and behind every economic report in America.
I'm still thinking about what our economics study will look like, but some of these essays will be included. Here are the ones I'm considering:
- Money Versus Goods
- An Argument for Diversity
- Waste
- Conserving Forest Communities (perhaps only part of this one)
- The Total Economy
I could have written a post about every essay in the book. It's wonderful, if slightly depressing. Highly recommended.
All opinions are my own. I have received nothing in exchange for writing this post. Links to Amazon are affiliate links.
