Takagi on Latter-day Saints and Capitalism

 

The most recent issue of the Mormon Studies Review (vol. 10) contains a couple of articles on Mormons and capitalism, and I’d like to draw attention to one in particular. Shinji Takagi, a professor emeritus of economics at Osaka University, wrote an article that we published last year in BYU Studies Quarterly. It was a fascinating look at the Nephite monetary system. His MSR article is titled “Capitalism and Distributive Justice: Musings of a Mormon Economist,” and it is one of the most brilliant articles I’ve read in a long time. Since access to MSR is restricted to subscribers or people like me who work for an organization that has privileges, I’m going to describe his argument in some detail here, hoping that this will encourage some of you to access his article.

Takagi explains that capitalism can take a variety of forms, but the variety that has dominated the United States in recent decades is “neoliberal capitalism, which calls for wholesale deregulation and privatization to minimize the government’s role.” The problem with neoliberal capitalism is that has caused income inequality to rise significantly, and it also “has exhibited a proclivity for economic crises and, given its focus on competitive individualism, an increasing incidence of mental health disorders.”

Takagi then contrasts this system with the egalitarian principles taught by Joseph Smith, which he quotes from the Doctrine and Covenants. “Despite scriptural pronouncements and a rich heritage of economic cooperation,” Takagi points out, “there is little trace of egalitarian philosophy in the practice of contemporary Mormonism.” The other article in MSR I referred to traces the history of how LDS thought on capitalism changed over time. Allison M. Kelley, in “Free Agency, Hard Work, and the Justification of Economic Inequality in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints,” also explains how Mormons justify their devotion to free-market capitalism. But back to Takagi. He argues that “capitalism’s indoctrination campaign has been so successful that many (including myself) find it difficult to liberate themselves from its spell, accepting as truth many unproven propositions, including the proposition that it is the only system capable of generating material progress.” He then tackles two primary types of capitalist arguments—philosophy (noneconomic) and efficiency (economic)—and shows that they cannot withstand scrutiny.

On the philosophical underpinnings of neoliberal capitalism, he raises four concerns. First, too many capitalists accept “the polarity of capitalism and socialism.” I’ve discussed in previous posts there are many types of capitalism, and there are also many manifestations of socialism, especially if you recognize that communism and socialism are not, in practice, the same system. Takagi’s second concern is that “many often confuse capitalism with a market economy.” He points out that markets have existed for millennia, but capitalism is a much more recent development, so we ought not equate these two ideas. His third concern is that “many conflate capitalism with modernity and progress.” This happens because early “capitalism in England proved more successful in producing material gains, which forced other countries to adopt capitalistic systems in order to compete.” But this doesn’t mean other systems couldn’t produce even better results. His fourth concern is that “economic liberalism . . . has gained a large following since the early nineteenth century.” Libertarian thinking has been very influential, but it has distinct downsides. Takagi says he has heard Latter-day Saints claim that capitalism is “the only economic system compatible with the divine plan. Individual liberty is important, but why would agency necessarily deny a role for the government?” It can be argued, based on the experience of more socialist countries (such as western Europe and Scandinavia), that freedom is enhanced by such things as “universal education, access to health care, and social protection.”

Takagi next examines the economic arguments for neoliberal capitalism. “A problem arises,” he says, “when one fails to understand that economics is an abstraction of reality.” Economic propositions are derived from assumptions, but these assumptions, such as perfect information and no transaction costs, “almost certainly do not hold in the real world.” Takagi argues that while economics assumes that humans will always act rationally, in reality people do not. For instance, many of us are prone to being altruistic. He also argues against the possibility of perfect information, which market functioning depends on. He uses the examples of health care and finance to demonstrate the need for government regulation of markets. The problem with libertarianism, as I’ve read elsewhere, is that it has never worked in real-world situations. As Takagi explains, “no market for health care would function without a credible mechanism for ensuring a minimum standard of qualification. Likewise, the capital market (where securities are traded) would remain underdeveloped without a credible mechanism to ascertain the creditworthiness of borrowers.”

So, the economic arguments for neoliberal capitalism also fail because the whole system is based on assumptions, theories, that do not hold in practice. “Concepts in economics are often metaphors and should not be taken literally, especially for public policy purposes.” Economics is useful to describe how people often behave, but “it is not meant to prescribe how people should behave.”

The upshot of Takagi’s critique is that Latter-day Saints need to reconsider their devotion to capitalism, something that early Church leaders (and scripture) specifically condemned. This is especially true for supporters of neoliberal capitalism (primarily Republicans), who are supporting a form of capitalism that not only attempts to exclude government oversight of capitalist markets but also directly contradicts numerous passages in the Doctrine and Covenants by spreading the awful social disease of wealth inequality. As Takagi concludes, “Free-market capitalism with private charity does not do the job. Collective action is required to create a more just society in which there is no poverty and everyone thus has freedom and an opportunity to pursue happiness.”

I Don’t Believe in Faith Crises

 

Frankly, I don’t even know what “faith crisis” means. I understand that people stop believing certain things. I understand that they get disillusioned. I understand that they choose to leave the Church for a variety of reasons. But I don’t understand faith crisis. I keep wondering where the emergency is.

Let me start by saying that I am a very impatient person. If you’ve ever driven slowly in front of me, you’d know what I mean. I’m an insufferable perfectionist as a sports fan. I interrupt people when they’re talking. I don’t like walking slow. At almost 67 years young, I still run up stairs. I’m an editor, so inconsistencies grind on my nerves. And on and on. But for some reason, I have an enviable level of patience with the foibles and flaws of Mormonism. Yes, I find lots of things that I’m not happy about or that don’t make sense or that disappoint me (such as the Church’s recent fiasco over hiding its finances). But I am in no hurry to pack my bags and leave the Church. Let me try to explain why.

First, not much surprises me. I’ve been around the block a few times and have seen a lot of reality. And that reality includes both divine intervention and human imperfection. There’s not much about the Church’s history that is new to me. As editorial director at BYU Studies for almost 17 years, I have seen a lot. We don’t get to publish much of it, but I read a great deal—books, scholarly journals, blogs, news stories, whatever. I have no illusions about how humans can mess up God’s work, and how he can still bring about his own purposes, which sometimes are not at all what we think they are. But finding out something unsavory that happened over a hundred years ago does not provoke a crisis. Hopefully we can learn from our imperfect history and try to do better.

I worked in the bowels of the holy bureaucracy in Salt Lake City for seven and a half years and have now worked for almost 17 additional years on the periphery in Provo. I do Mormonism all day long, five days a week. Sometimes it’s aggravating. Long ago I wrote an essay for Dialogue titled “Why the True Church Cannot Be Perfect.” The primary point of the essay was that the Church isn’t perfect. The rest was to explain why it has to be so. That doesn’t mean the Church gets a free pass. It often damages people. But it’s what we have. It’s not just Jesus’s church. It’s also ours (you know, that “of Latter-day Saints” part), so I figure it’s up to us to try to make it work better. There’s no crisis about it. It’s imperfect. So what? Get over it and do what you can on the inside to improve it.

If you’ve been reading this blog for a while, you know that I find LDS theology quite lacking. There are gaping holes, inconsistencies, really bad assumptions, and folk beliefs that make no sense at all. But as I put it in my mission memoir, Bruder: The Perplexingly Spiritual Life and Not Entirely Unexpected Death of a Mormon Missionary, “We Mormons like to think we have THE TRUTH, as if it were some rare diamond that only one church can possess, and if you have it, you have all of it. But truth is much more amorphous than we Mormons imagine. It is multifaceted, and nobody has all of it. The LDS Church grasps pieces of the truth, but some doctrines have shifted over time, some aren’t consistent with others, and some don’t hold up well under careful scrutiny. Still, all things considered, I think Joseph Smith tapped into a very productive vein of religious truth.” But he obviously didn’t have everything figured out, and we have made precious little progress (if any) over the past 193 years. We Latter-day Saints are a proud lot. We smugly assume that other churches know nothing about the hereafter, but if we are honest, we will admit that we know next to nothing. But does that constitute a crisis? No. We just need to acquire some humility and prepare ourselves for many surprises when we graduate from this mortal grade school and start the next phase of our long education.

Above all else, the Church is not an organizational chart. It is people. And people are imperfect. Members, leaders, everybody. The Church has done a great disservice to itself and to its members by creating the illusion that leaders are infallible, that they’re always inspired. All this does is create unrealistic expectations. And I would guess that unrealistic expectations lie behind most of what people call faith crises. They have these expectations of perfection, so of course they are going to be disappointed. The solution if to ratchet down our expectations so that we don’t get blown out of the water by reality. But we need to recognize the difference between expectations and hopes. It is always good to hope for miracles, for blessings, for pleasant surprises. But we should be careful about what we expect. There is a very fine line between faith and expectation, especially when our expectations are based on the performance of fallible humans.

As I mentioned earlier, I have seen not just the imperfections of the Church and its leaders and members; I have also seen divine intervention, sometimes in strange and wonderful ways. And quite often that intervention doesn’t fit within the staid corporate structure of the Church. In fact, quite often the organization impedes divine intervention. When I was young and impressionable, God opened the heavens briefly to me two or three times in ways that were both breathtaking and perplexing. In later years, I have had a few quiet assurances that God is there, that he wants me to do certain things, and that he doesn’t want me to forsake my religious roots. “Be patient” is the message. Things will work out.

So I don’t understand Latter-day Saints who are in a great hurry to give up on something they could help improve and that just might improve them. I don’t understand people in self-constructed crisis. So what if our history is messy? So what if our leaders are human? So what if our theology is full of holes? So what if the organization is aggravating? So what if the Church is full of people who watch Fox News and think vaccines will kill you? Yes, there’s a lot to not like about Mormonism. But there’s a lot to like too. Am I a better person because of my membership in the Church? I would like to think so. Does the Church give me opportunities to improve myself? Of course. Are there good people in the Church who need my meager service? Sure. So where’s the crisis?