One Quote Review: Divine Economy by D. Stephen Long

A popular textbook of introductory economics illustrates abstract equivalence and formal substitutionability. First, ‘opportunity costs’ are explained: they are the costs incurred by someone for forsaking one choice in favour of another. Then a question is posed based on the following example: ‘Mrs Harris spends an hour preparing a meal.’ However, she is also a ‘psychologist in private practice, and can obtain $50 per hour for her services.’ Thus, we must ask: what are the opportunity costs involved in her preparing the family meal? This seems a harmless enough question. The situation is a nice way of explaining that for every action chosen, another opportunity is sacrificed. The facts seem incontestable. No matter what our values might be concerning family, work, religion, politics, etc., when Mrs. Harris makes dinner she forgoes the opportunity of generating $50.

But this description is misleading. While it appears to give us merely the facts, it gives us much more. It invites us to construe our lives, primarily our lives as family members, in terms of the activities of producers and consumers. The family meal loses all incommensurable status with other consumable objects. All such objects are placed before the individual and he or she is asked ‘Which objects will you forego for the sake of the others? How long will you continue to exchange until you have sufficient xs and adequate ys? How many xs will you forego for the sake of how many ys?’ The question assumes a form of rationality, known as ‘marginalism,’ that inevitably reduces all forms of life to ‘utility’ and ‘interest’.

To pose the question this way assumes already the legitimacy of viewing all human action in terms of ‘opportunity costs’. In fact, this putatively harmless example contains a complex metaphysics that assumes all human action and language takes place in a tragic world of scarcity. The ability to ask this question entails acquiescence to that metaphysics. Any action that I take will be inscribed in a world of lack wherein my choice is made possible only by the other options I choose against. Rather than viewing human action as arising out of a plenitude, this metaphysics assumes it is ensconced in scarcity. Death, violence, and antagonism become the source and end of such a metaphysics.

What could not be substituted into the calculation of opportunity costs? Let us suppose that Mrs Harris engages in sexual intercourse with her husband. And let us suppose that he could hire a prostitute at fifty percent of the opportunity costs incurred for the time they spend together. Although our values might be shocked by such a calculation, the economic facts are clear. It costs this couple $25 per hour for sexual intercourse. If he utilized the services of a prostitute and she worked the hour, the economic index of productivity would increase by $75.

These so-called facts are no more settled than the values one putatively chooses. For the principle of formal substitutability treats all human action as if it were a disconnected or isolated event. The fact of the matter is not that Mrs. Harris’ husband saved the family $25 and increased the productivity by $75. The fact is that he committed adultery and thus denied God’s purposes for marriage. This fact has much more concrete or empirical reality than the putative economic facts mentioned. We can point to the concrete historical embodiment of something called ‘adultery’ much more readily than something called ‘opportunity cost’. Yet in a social reality determined primarily by marginalist rationality, the latter is called a ‘fact’ and the former a ‘value’.

– Stephen D. Long, Divine Economy: Theology and the Market, p. 4-5.

Your Correspondent, Everyone but economists call things that grow without ceasing “cancer”