On “The Giving Way of Life” by Manfred Arthur Fraund

I was given this privately published/printed book nearly a decade ago but only now got around to reading it. It was by the father of various kids I grew up with, a friend of our family's and of my parents. Alas, at this point, the author is no longer alive, nor my father, so I can't write him to thank him for the collection and his thoughts. In the closing years of his life, the author took to writing books of essays, poetry, and memoir. This is one of his books of essays. Truly, this is a man who thought a lot about his faith and about God. Once in a while, I'd get a more personal insight about his life or family, something that would have been wonderful to read more about. As it is, the five extended works in this book are made up each of twenty very short essays on a given spiritual subject. They read, in a way, like devotionals, though usually with the focus on a spiritual idea rather than one particular scripture. Written as it was, I suspect that there would be more to glean from reading this in small bits, picking up the book and reading one essay and then maybe returning some other time, meditating on the small passage, much as the author likely wrote the pieces. And that is how I'd largely read it until the last couple of months—though returning to it far too infrequently—when I decided I'd read it through, so that I could say I'd actually read it all.

What is there to say of our lives? We pass from one place to another. When I met Mr. Fraund at a church picnic where he handed me the book, he seemed excited to see me and to share his work with me, this kid who had grown up with his. Occasionally, he'd had contact with my dad, who still lived in the same town but who had taken a slightly different path when it come to his spiritual journey and ended up in a different fellowship, though they believed largely the same thing. The rest of Mr. Fraund's family, it appeared, had taken yet other paths. As family, of course, he was still involved in their lives, but outside of a Facebook contact list (that I rarely ever touch), I would no longer be likely to come across any of his children in real life, given our own diverging paths and places of abode and worship. It is wonderful that technology can put us in touch or keep us in touch with such people, in ways that were not possible twenty-five years ago, but at the same time, one is reminded constantly of how our lives converge for a time and then diverge, the blessing of a friendship for a few years and of the memories that go with it. I could write of such memories here (so many of them, indeed), but I will save those perhaps for some other venue, not focused as much on my reading, and some other time.

On "On Pascha" by Melito of Sardis, edited by Alistair Stewart-Sykes ***

I didn't come to this book for Melito's work on Passover, as I have read it before. I came to it to read what Stewart-Sykes had to say about it. I wanted something short, but if I wanted a fuller explanation, I probably would have been better off with his book The Lamb's High Feast. And then again, I wasn't sure I wanted to read that long a discussion of the work.

As an intro text, this one works fine. One learns who Melito was and what the basic context was and receives a short analysis of the text. Melito, Stewart-Sykes claims, was Jew with a strong background in Greek rhetorical tradition. The text itself has annotations that further explore the allusions. Following it is a collection of fragments having to do with Melito or with the Quartodeciman movement.

I think the main thing I learned is that there were, according to Stewart-Sykes, more than one type of Quartodeciman. While all kept the Pascha on the fourteenth, some kept it at the same time as certain Jewish people, while others kept it at midnight. There wasn't much discussion about whether that meant the fourteenth or the fifteenth, since there was also a controversy, among Jews, on whether to keep Passover at the start of the fourteenth or the end.

On "The Rise of the Creative Class Revisited" by Richard Florida ***

I had read Florida’s theories in various Citylab articles and so thought he would be a good writer to end my Econ list with. As a whole, the book I chose had much to offer, but it was also quite familiar to me, full of standard educated thinking of the past twenty years: diversity good, city good, etc. And much of the book seemed to be Florida pushing his theory on everything. It reminded me of how some scholars will create a theory and then write book after book using said theory. It becomes a personal industry. Despite my interest in the subject and Florida’s easy style, I found myself not as enthralled as I would have thought. What follows are my loose notes as I proceeded chapter by chapter.

Businesses move to where the talent, tech, and tolerance are. They don’t move to where there are ample office parks and infrastructure. Where the kind of people you want to employ live or want to live is where your company wants to be. Creative jobs make up a large portion of economy and tend to be best paying. We moved from manufacturing to service but it’s creative where the real growth is happening.

What goes into creativity? There is a contradiction between creativity and organization. The latter stifles the former, but without the latter creativity can’t progress far. It takes more than one person usually to make an idea successful, but often just the one person provides the spark. Creativity flourishes in open and diverse societies. It is often the product of a person’s focus—or ability to do so. Groups can take away from that focus. When organization is too strong, creativity ceases. But the stability of organization also provides the opportunity for creativity to thrive.

The creative class has grown as a percentage of the workforce over the past century. Its wages are higher than the working class or the service class. Its openness, however, is set back by the way it is dominated by Asian and white ethnicities. During economic crisis it experienced fewer job losses than the working class or service class. But what is the creative class? Florida’s definition is a bit hard to figure out. Anyone who has to think or make decisions, it seems, is creative class. Obviously someone who packs boxes all day based on a form denoting where each item should go is service sector; however, if someone has to figure out how best to pack those boxes, is that creative?

Motivating factors in work are less money and more the challenge, stability, and flexibility. So is the claim, based on surveys. That’s why professions like machine operator lacked skilled employees but we have a surplus of hairdressers, which is considered more rewarding. But some of Florida’s statistics seem not to match his claims as much as he makes them out to be. He makes the point that money is less a motivation for type of work than a motivation for dissatisfaction. Highest paid employees tend to enjoy work more. As such, I’m not sure I completely buy his point.

Next is a chapter on flexibility and security and the way creative jobs offer the former but sometimes at the cost of the latter. Companies and employees both seem less inclined to partner for as long as in the past. People move around a lot. Often these are lateral moves rather than hierarchical ones. Bosses no longer know the jobs of their employees. Businesses are flat, with various experts who move from company to company.

Company cultures have changed to allow more flexibility and casualness in aiding creative types. Gone are dress codes. Offices are open, to encourage collaboration. But sometimes such changes are merely for show. Adding ping pong might be a way to make things casual, but if the office isn’t truly flexible and expects long hours, it’s not really conducive to long term creatives.

Time has become the most difficult resource to maintain. Creatives work more hours. And they merge work and home more. In that sense, the old factory worker often ends up with more leisure time than the so-called leisure class. Beyond that people in creative professions often multitask, making time seem even more scarce.

The creative class prefers active leisure to passive. They run, hike, rock climb. They stay in shape. They aren’t big on spectator sports. Passive activity is more the domain of the working class. The creative values experiences. They’re more likely to go to small clubs than huge concerts, which demand too much time and money and don’t mix experiences. (I couldn’t quite figure out Florida’s reasoning for why this is so. Personally I’d venture that many of the creative class jobs are sit-down jobs, whereas working class is more physical labor. Different kind of rest in one’s leisure time.)

The creative class is a strange mix of Protestant work ethic and bohemianism. In the past these two were antithetical. But the two categories have merged in the modern world, such that neither category really exists. The creative antisocial tech person is also the hard worker. Geekiness has gone hip.

Florida turns next to place, noting that while technologically the world has become flatter, places are actually becoming more specialized and less egalitarian. Cities keep growing even though tech allows for rural resourcing. Why? because people of the same creative sort like to be together to bounce ideas off in person. A diverse city offers more ways to get ideas and to work with others in similar fields. (This seems to contradict itself. If all musicians slowly gravitate to Nashville, then in some ways Nashville becomes less diverse—it’s all musicians, whereas writers go to nyc.)

Creative class regions often have higher wages than working or service class, which lends to inequality.

Creative class cities have high levels of technology, talent, and tolerance. But Florida talks mostly about the latter. Where foreigners, homosexuals, and bohemians are tolerated, creativity excels. His comments on foreign born were particularly interesting in our current state. Twenty-five percent of patents are made by foreign born, even though they make up just twelve percent of the population. In other words, hard immigration policies contribute to the brain drain and less economic development. communities that are open to people of all types make for more openness to new ideas as well—to creativity. Want to know where houses will go up in value? Follow where the artists go. They are the first step to gentrification. The one exception to tolerance and diversity? Integration. It seems that that works opposite to these other factors, which is strange, but shows the persistence of racism. My bet would be that a truly tolerant and integrated place would do even better economically through willingness to embrace new ideas, but the continued presence of racism means deep integration doesn’t lend to prosperity.

Florida spends half a chapter defending his theory versus others, most especially the human capital theory, which dovetails closely. But while that one measures raw wealth, creative class theory takes into account where that wealth comes from and thus better measures productivity. If all wealth is inherited it is not really producing anything versus if wealth is coming from wages. The latter is what creative class theory values.

Next, Florida looks at creative class around the world and which countries score high. He also addresses social inequality and notes that the United States is more an outlier than standard because many creative class economies are actually quite egalitarian, much more so than the United States.

Where do people want to live and what sort of relations do they want to have? Florida claims that modern society isn’t about independence and accompanying loneliness. Most people don’t want close communities. They want loose communities—only a few close friends but lots of acquaintances. Loose social ties actually provide more opportunities for work.

He then looks at what makes places attractive and lists these features: a thick job market (many jobs in a profession available, since few expect to stay with the same company), third places to hang out, dating opportunities, diversity, authenticity, and “scenes.” Basic services are important, but people want more than that. They want cultural opportunities and nice scenery.

If a city sets out to attract creative types and to thus grow, what should it do? Attracting a business isn’t enough. It needs to make itself attractive to a diverse set of people, including the less stable young and single. They may not stay, but they are not likely to return with families if there was nothing for them before.

There’s talk of the move back to the city that is common now—or was until COVID. And there’s discussion of the need for density and the advantage of big population. Where density kills is when it starts to kill off variety at the street level. Question: if dense city cores are best for creativity and bold economy, how did suburbs take over for a time and why? I’ve got to think there was an economic advantage for such a system that it would become common for a while.

My question was almost immediately what Florida turned to next—namely by looking at why so many people actually like suburbs and what those suburbs bring to the creative class. His point seems to be that suburbs are an integral part of large metros, and the best suburbs actually find ways to mimic the advantages of that dense core within the suburb.

Next, Florida turns to inequality, which he notes tends to be greater in creative class areas, but then he makes the argument that even so, lower class people are still overall better off in such areas generally. This seems to be variation on the rising tide argument of conservative economics. But the anecdotes at the start of the chapter seem to weigh against it. When a city becomes too expensive for its artists, that creative core becomes the plaything of only the most successful. I mean I guess there are still creative scenes in those places, but I’ve never understood how those scenes hang on. Do they? 

I would think they don’t, or they somehow transform. I think of Deep Ellum in Dallas. It was a hip area when I lived in Fort Worth twenty-five years ago, but I’m told it’s all gone now, full of high cost businesses. It seemed headed that way even when I lived close by, wherein the funkiness was getting priced out and the hipness fading.

Florida seems to believe creative, working, and service class is more important than high, middle, and low class. Yes, those with money are generally happier, but once a base level is reached, creative class are happier than working class. Areas with more creative class are healthier, have lower gun violence, better dental care, and are less likely to drive to work (versus walk, bike, or use public transport).

In his conclusion, Florida makes the case for the creative class to become politically active and notes that we are in a process of revolution not unlike that of the Industrial Revolution. He provides various suggestions, including helping working and service class jobs pay more by making them more creative, making education emphasize creativity more, making cities denser,  encouraging diversity, providing better means to make workers more mobile with health care and retirement not tied to jobs, and recalibrating how we measure growth.

On “From the Lost Teaching of Polycarp” by Charles E. Hill ***

Like other works about Polycarp, this one suffers from the same lack of information we have about the man. Hill is, in fact, attempting to rectify that in this work, by claiming a couple of other texts for him. That said, even if we accept those texts as written by Polycarp, there just isn't as much as one might wish to have about this important ancient figure. But then, that is true of pretty much all ancient people.

The two works that Hill attempts to link to Polycarp are various comments that Irenaeus makes about Marcionism and Valentinianism and the work Ad Diognetum. Hill himself admits that the former is easier to do than the latter, and the end result fits squarely with that expectation. I came away convinced of the former and skeptical of the latter.

Irenaeus, in his writing, refers to a presbyter as the source of much of his information about and many of his argument against Marcionism. Who was the presbyter? By linking up said passages with a couple of other passages where Irenaeus refers to Polycarp by name and to a letter to Florinus that Irenaeus also wrote, Hill is able to make a strong argument that this unnamed source was Polycarp. In so doing, Hill also establishes that Ireneaus's memories of Polycarp probably extend to his teens or maybe even early twenties, not just his childhood. As such Ireneaus is a good source for information about the sort of things Polycarp believed and said. Given that the only writing we have of Polycarp is a letter the Philippi that is very much a basic doctrine, the idea that he preached heavily against Marcion fleshes out his teaching just a little.

The arguments that he was also the source for Ad Diognetum seem much weaker, based on some ideas that correspond to what we do know about Polycarp and the like. I felt like I learned more about the work, in this regard, then about Polycarp. Hill makes a good case that the work is a transcript of a speech rather than a letter or a formal piece of writing. It does, however, have an apologetic purpose, in trying to teach Diogenetus about Christianity. As such, if it is by Polycarp, we then have a letter, anti-heresy teachings (as recorded in Ireneaus), and an apology, which would be a well-rounded sample.

 

On "St. Paul in Britain" by R. W. Morgan ***

This older book is one I saw referenced in a few texts, so I figured I'd give it a go. I don't know many other books devoted specifically to this subject. Morgan's arguments, even in his time, were a bit criticized, and I can see why the entire idea of Paul traveling to Britain would get dismissed so easily. But the legends are out there, so it was good to read about where they come from and how the argument is made.

Morgan's book is written in overwrought nineteenth-century prose, making its short text seem much longer, more substantive, and more difficult probably than it really is or should be. He discusses a good amount about the Roman relationship/war with Britain during the first century BCE and CE, about which I knew little and realize I need to find out more about. So the material on Paul and Christianity really only makes up maybe half the slim volume.

The gist of the argument about Christianity in Britain preceding even the establishment of that in Rome (a bit dubious) is based on the idea that Joseph of Arimethea first made the trip only a few years after Jesus's death, along with perhaps some other Jerusalem Christians. Sometime later, Paul's companion Aristobolus made the trip. And then, finally, came Paul.

By then, Paul was already in contact with many converts who had come from Britain. Those converts were of the royal household, which had been taken captive and forcibly removed to Rome. We find many of their names in the New Testament--Rufus and Pudens and Claudia. Indeed, when in Rome, Paul was either imprisoned with these captives or lived in their house. The arguments for these come from, of course, names in the New Testament shared with those in some epigraphs by Martial and some British records. The argument is intriguing, but one can also easily start finding all kinds of interesting historical finds if one simply goes by names. When we're talking millions of people, it's also entirely possible that there were more than one Rufus or Claudia. It's easy to start conflating people and events.

While I found that portion of Morgan's writing intriguing, it's clear that he has an ax to grind. One of his main goals is to prove that British Christianity predates Roman and is actually truer to it, never mind that British Protestantism doesn't derive from the ancient British church but from Rome (even if there was a British church that preceded the Roman church's takeover of the faith during Augustine's time). He ties British Christianity to Druidism, which he says had many Christian elements, including a belief in the eternal soul (which, well, isn't actually a Christian idea but one from Greek philosophy--but never mind, this is Morgan's view of what early Christianity was, which was Protestant). Thus, Brits were naturally inclined to take up the Christian faith, more than Romans. A real problem enters when he writes of how Constantine spent time in Britain and became emperor while there (both true--and facts I didn't know) and how it was there that he became familiar with Christianity. As such, his conversion was mitigated by his contact with British Christians. But if this was the case, I had to wonder, why all this fuss about Roman versus British Christianity, since it was obviously British Christians who thus forged the front under which Rome itself was converted; this would mean British Christianity was Roman Christianity. In other words, the argument seemed, well, a bit nonsensical.

Still as a work to become familiar with the possible links of Paul and Christianity to Britain, it's a nice summary, one that traces backward the various historical records insofar as they exist. While I don't think the case for Paul in Britain is definitive, I think it can certainly be made to seem plausible. Such would also explain the lack of other records regarding his supposed trip to Spain make a bit more sense, insofar as he likely would have just touched the southwest sector of Spain on his way toward Britain, where we actually do have at least these legends.

On “Freakonomics” by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner ****

I saw the film probably fifteen years ago. I was expecting, as such, the book to have a lot more than the film did, but I'm not sure that it did. My memory isn't that fresh, obviously, but many of the same stories show up in this book and don't seem told in particularly deeper ways. As such, this book was a little bit of a disappointment. In fact, as becomes obvious after reading the appendixes, the book is built upon a series of scholarly articles written by Levitt that were dumbed down for a popular audience by Dubner. One could say that each chapter is like one of those articles, rewritten for a popular audience (and gladly so, as is obvious from one blog post included in the appendix that is laden with tables and econ speak).

Still, Levitt has an interesting way at looking at the world and applying econ to it, and Dubner has a way with making that all accessible to noneconomists. As such, this book is really interesting, even if the movie seems to have actually been about as thorough as the book. Among the findings: Some teachers cheat for their students on standardized tests. We can tell because the same questions are often answered right and wrong by large swaths of a class that deviate from the general population. Some sumo wrestlers likewise “throw” contests toward the end of the season, since as with British soccer, a sumo wrestler on the edge could, with a loss, drop to a lower level. Suddenly, toward seasons end, some matches that should be givens end up being the other way around in terms of wins. Real estate agents are likely not to work as hard to make their customers an extra ten thousand dollars as we ourselves might be, because in the end, that ten thousand is only one-fifty to the agent. We can tell because agents tend to take a week longer to sell their own houses and make the extra money. Drug dealers, unless they are at the top of the pecking order, make less than minimum wage. Why bother? Because, as with aspiring actors and other hopefuls, the lower drug dealers hope/think they'll make it big one day. Why did crime go down in the 1990s and thereafter? Abortion was leglized in the 1970s, resulting in fewer unwanted children. Unwanted children, apparently, means crime. Such would suggest that parenting makes a great difference in a child's life, but the next chapter discounts that: apparently, parents don't really affect what children become much at all. What's more important is genetics. Educated, well-off, socially involved, older parents end up with more successful kids than those who spank or who live in a better neighborhood or are interested in the arts. Finally, names can help with people getting interviews (we're less likely to call back someone with a supposed “Black” name than a “white” name), but in the long term may not affect one's overall success. Name popularity moves from the high class to the low.

The edition I read ended with three appendixes: one with the article that inspired the book, one with various newspaper articles in response to the book; and one with various blog entries. Some of these were enlightening to the topics covered in the book, while others seemed like tangential material being used as an excuse to produce a new edition. In that sense, the book is not unlike the podcast, which for me seems hit and miss. Sometimes there are some real though-provoking gems, and other times, it just seems like someone is trying to fill radio time.