On "The Wealth of Nations" by Adam Smith ***

I won't bother so much with a summary of this work, which can be gleaned from many a website, as with my own observations about the text and its readability many centuries hence. It starts off well enough, but I think reading select passages in small doses is likely to be more enjoyable than reading the entire text. I mean, I actually enjoyed the first few chapters, but at some point, the arguments, the older language, the statistics, all began to get to me and made for a tedious slog, with moments of illumination. One is dealing, after all, with a text whose economic insights go back to the height of the slave and colonial eras, so that stats are, um, out of date.

As a foundational work of economics, of course, the value of the book can't be denied. One might say the work is the foundation for theories of capitalism. I'd long heard about how there were moral arguments to be had in the text, ones that argued against simple greed of one's enterprises, but I don't think I saw that here (that argument might be in Smith's other great work, which is less often referenced). Here, Smith seems mostly focused on what his title denotes--how nations build and can build wealth. In a sense, that is the moral argument, because the more wealth the nation has, the better off its people--or so one could claim.

Some econimic ideas that are explored and how they relate to some things even in the present include Smith's arguments for the division of labor (namely, how we gain more wealth by specializing and then trading than by trying to do everything ourselves). Later in the book, he critiques an argument that others had made regarding how nations that focused entirely on trade or manufacturing actually create no wealth, because new wealth can only be created by new materials--namely by gains made in agriculture. Smith shows how a manufactured good is more than the sum of its parts.

Smith is very much a proponent of free trade and shows quite well why it is actually to people's benefit for a nation to engage in such. Essentially, just think of the specialization of labor but on a macro level rather than a micro. It simply makes more sense for a given nation to excell in what it does and then trade for things it does not excel at or have ready resources for. The exception to the rule, Smith would argue, are those things that are strategically important for a nation to produce for its self--something that clearly has meaning even today. We don't want another nation crippling the economy because a certain good or product that is essential can no longer be produced in state. When a nation has extra of something, it benefits it to sell that excess to others; when it is in need, it benefits to be able to glean that need from others. This keeps prices reasonable for all.

Landowners, I gleaned, don't come out too well in Smith's analysis--not so much in his opinion, but in my own, as gleaned from Smith's theories--since it's the job of landowners to extract as much wealth from that ownership as possible, leaving only enough for those who labor on the land to subsist. Makes me think of Pearl S. Buck's The Good Earth, where owning land is everything. But seriously, what exactly does the landowner do if the only job is to extract wealth from the person who actually uses the land? This definitely sets up a class system that is hard to pull oneself out of.

On taxes, Smith argues that they should be set at just the right amount--not so low as to not glean as much benefit as could be gleaned and not so high as to discourage production. Finding that balance is of course key. He also argues that it is best to tax non-necessities, that is, luxuries. Why? Because a tax on necessities is essentially in the end a tax on the rich anyway. Why? Because, say, you tax basic food or housing. The laborer must have those things, which means that wages have to increase to pay said tax. If wages increase, the one paying the wages is short a given amount, so though the lower class may be paying the tax, the upper class ultimately pays it anyway in the form of higher wages. By contrast, a tax on a luxury--say, tobacco or alcohol--comes from the person who pays for the good. There is no essential need to raise the cost of labor, because purchasing such is the laborer's choice (or the rich man's choice).

On debt, Smith argues for the value of it to larger economies, since it is a stable form of investment. He also argues regarding how public debt is rarely ever paid off in full, in part because war tends to be a time when such debt is accumulated faster than in time of peace. New taxation to pay for war rarely ends up being used to pay off (war) debt in the end. He denotes how if nations were to refuse to accumulate extra debt to wage war we would have fewer wars; what he doesn't note, however, is that wars are usually "total" in a sense. The cost of a nation saying, I won't accumulate extra to defend myself, would likely end in a war loss rather than simply put an end to war. Would that things were different in that regard.

On “The Rise of Christianity” by Rodney Stark *****

Another fine book by Stark. I much enjoyed reading this prequel to his Cities of God. Although the books cover much of the same ground, they are different enough to both warrant reading. Cities of God focuses on why and how Christianity spread where it did; this one focuses on why Christianity found popularity.

The subject is one that has been addressed numerous times. I'm reminded of Gibbons's own list of reasons, having to do with the differing culture of Christianity, but Stark really brings the arguments home from a sociological view. He focuses on such subjects as kinship networks and migration. But he also looks at exactly what appealed. Take, for example, the spread of disease. Christians were more likely to nurse one another (and others); this meant that more survived and that that caring also appealed to those people, Christian or not, who did survive. Christianity gave a better home to women in terms of how it saw women as more equal to men. Christianity gave a home to people in cities who otherwise were often lonely by providing networks previously unavailable. Add to such items as that the more often cited sacrifices of Christians—their willingness to die for the cause, their higher sense of virtue, and one begins to sense that Christianity's conquering of paganism was almost inevitable.