On “The World Is Flat” by Thomas Friedman ****

Admittedly, I got Thomas and Milton mixed up. Milton is now next on my list. Thomas is an economic journalist; Milton is the actual economist. Still, I would have ended up reading this book no matter on this same economics list. It was the rage twenty years ago, just shortly after I moved to Georgia. I remember lots of NPR interviews and the like. Interviews with the author made me uncomfortable, because the topic is one to make one uncomfortable—namely, globalization's effect on each and every person on the planet, which can have some rather difficult implications for any single person who is looking to maintain a job. At thirtysomething, this was scary; at fiftysomething, I should be even more scared, insofar as it would be much harder to change focus and grab some new career. The fifties were many of my parents' generation lost jobs; some ended up getting better work, but others struggled along at odd jobs for the next decade until social security kicked in and never really recovered financially. Still, what give me some condolence is that globalization didn't come for me in the intervening twenty years.

It's interesting reading Friedman's book in the context of the new Trump administration. One can look at much of what he's doing as a reaction to just the sort of things Friedman writes about, and at least according to Friedman, they are just about the worst reaction one can have. Cutting one's self off from the world—with trade barriers and anti-immigrant policies—are more likely to slow the economy than protect the jobs one has. That would be Adam Smith's view too: trade barriers are good only to protect industries that are essential to protect for the national interest, like, say, military weaponry and the raw materials that go into that. But one can see why cutting the nation off from the world would seem to be the initial reaction.

Friedman makes clear the globalization is likely to lower the relative wealth of the United States, that is, wealth relative to other nations. However, it is also likely to “grow the pie,” as conservatives have in the past argued about income inequality. That is, it doesn't matter if the rich get richer faster if everyone is getting richer. There isn't a limit on riches one shares.

The first part of Friedman's book focuses on how globalization takes place and what sort of technologies have allowed that to happen, with numerous stories about businesses that have put such technologies into practice, things like offshoring and special software and so on. One of the most interesting developments to me was the case of UPS, which I had been totally unaware of. Apparently, some manufacturers have outsourced the repairs on their products to UPS. What I mean by that is instead of some Asian electronics manufacturer having us ship the defective product all the way back to the factory, it'll arrange for UPS to do not just the delivery but the repair itself. Numerous companies have apparently done this, such that UPS has facilities that are set up to fix stuff. This cuts down on shipping time and cost, for a fee that UPS reaps from the manufacturer, and makes things more convenient for the consumer.

So how are we to cope with things like accounting and taxes and constumer service and, well, just about anything one can think to outsource, and then even things one thinks can't be outsourced, to another nation with a labor force hungry for work and a cheaper cost-of-living? Friedman notes that the easiest tasks have been those that have tended to be farmed out, the standard accounting, for example. That allows those living in the older richer economies to focus on creative and more difficult endeavours. To do that, we need to be on our game in terms of maintaining education. (Something that seems, again, awful in terms of how it is precisely in education that the current administration has seen fit to start many of its budget cuts.)

But even this seems a difficult maneuver to me, when so many of the workers in a place like India actually have great educations. Who's to say an engineer has to be American? One could have the top-notch engineer overseas just as easily do the same work cheaper. In that sense, while Friedman's education argument makes some sense, it also doesn't seem a cure-all. Friedman talks of how some people he know have developed throughout their careers, moving from one thing to another in terms of starting off as, say, illustrators, then moving to medical illustration, then some very narrow portion of the industry—each time, making the change in light of the fact that the previous task became too easy for others (often overseas others) to do using software and training and thus lowering the price of the service. One of the things that made me so anxious when I heard about this book at thirtysomething was the way in which Friedman really pushed education—or really, reeducation. But the thing is, I like learning and study, but I didn't want to be in school constantly, chasing a new certificate or degree every five years because the previous job is no longer necessary. It's tiring enough working forty hours a week; add constant night classes on top of that just to keep a job, it just seems like a drudging way to live.

One interesting proposal in that regard, however, is Friedman's idea of underemployment insurance or transitionary employment insurance. Instead of paying people money when they lose their job or reward them for training, pay people for taking a job in a new-to-them industry, even if it means lower pay. It makes sense. So you're an engineer, but the product you worked on and specialized in goes defunct after twelve years; you were in the higher levels of the company and now you are out of work. You're chasing another job with equal pay, but there aren't many left in that sector of the industry anymore. Instead, employment insurance would pay you not just to go to school for retraining but rather for taking more of an entry-level position in another industry. It would make up the difference, and then, on the job, as you gain more experience and move up and earn more money, the insurance would kick off. This seemed one of the best ideas in the book, which if ever implemented, really would help people in a globalizing and fast-changing economy, one that we really can't recede from and expect to remain relevant or well off. (Indeed, Friedman criticizes the Bush administration for doing to some degree just that in reaction to 9/11, with its focus on closing borders and old gas technologies, rather than being forward thinking, and here we seem to be doing that again—but to a much greater degree.)

On “The Library of Eusebius of Caesarea” by Andrew Carriker ***

This is one of two books that I was reading near the same time that focus on writer's libraries and reading habits, using the various quotes and allusions they make in their book. The first, on Polycarp, provided some interesting asides and observations but largely was trying to make some larger points about Paul's influence; this one, on Eusebius, is set up more like a reference book, insofar as Carriker discusses each allusion in alphabetical order (split out by kind of source). In that manner, Carriker sets off to reconstruct what exactly was in Eusebius's library at Caesarea, when he wrote such books as his Church History, his Life of Constantine, and his Chronicle.

I read the book largely because I was interested in knowing more about the library at Caesarea (and at Jerusalem). Carriker tries, on some level, to reconstruct what those libraries, particularly the former, were like and how they originated, but in the end, the best we can do is theorize. We know the Eusebius had an eccesiastical library he used there in the city and that Origen some years earlier also used it (and perhaps even provided a large share of its books). Beyond that, it's really hard to say exactly when it was founded and by whom.

I was drawn to the subject because of a claim one writer made that the earliest complete New Testament manuscripts were deposited at this library, along with other important libraries, such as Alexandria (in the early 100s CE). It's an interesting theory, and certainly, as Carriker shows, this library had many Old Testament manuscripts and also was the source of the New Testament manuscript later sent to Constantine (in the 300s), when he requested copies of it, but there isn't, alas, absolute certainty about when such manuscripts were deposited in the Caesarean library—and thus, no certainty, in that regard, about when that first edition of the New Testament was completed. And that, of course, is why the canon debate (what did second-century writers really consider canonical of the New Testament writings) can continue. Still, the fact that Constantine could request such would suggest that, despite Eusebius's misgivings about certain New Testament books, as noted in his Church History, what was actually part of the New Testament had been well enough settled that one could request a copy of it.

On “The Brother of Jesus and the Lost Teachings of Christainity” by Jefery Butz ****

This biography of Just James, while fairly succinct, seems to cover most of the current research on the subject (at least through 2005). I was initially a bit skeptical of Butz's book, especially as in his preface, he pointed out how much he respects the work of Robert Eisenman, whose biography of James may qualify as one of the longest ever but is also one of the most kooky. But Butz doesn't quite try to tie James in with the Dead Sea Scrolls and make claims that the entire original Christrian movement was actually some kind of Essene movement revolved completely around Jesus's family and that it had only ever aimed at being some kind of worldly Jewish Messiah, though in some ways he comes close.

What I like about what Butz does is that he doesn't quite go so radically far. Rather, he tries to reclaim James and the early Christian movement as part of Judaism, and while he does fall into the common Protestant and often secular point of view that James and Paul were at cross-purposes, which colors many of the insights he manages to provide, he does still manage to show just how important James was to early Christians and how that early movement was signficantly Jewish in form and nature. (Plenty of newer works call into question the antinomial Paul who created some kind of new movement that had little in common with what Jesus actually taught.)

Some of the interesting insights include a correction of the common idea that James and the rest of Jesus's family did not support Jesus during his physical life—that is, that they were not convinced of his ministry until after his resurrection. Some of this interpretation comes from the way we have read certain scriptures out of context, and some has to do with how later generations want to portray Jesus. Butz argues, fairly convincingly, that the family probably had connections to Jesus's ministry well before his resurrection.

Butz also shows how James fit within Judaism, and while claims that James was a Pharisee seem a bit too far out to be believed to me, there is a case to be made that in many ways the early Christian movment had much in common with Pharisaism—and in that way, James, Paul, Jesus, and the whole lot would have been a kind of offshoot.

The book ends with a call to unite the Muslim, Jewish, and Christian faiths through a degree of compromise. It's not a strong ending to me, insofar as I don't think things like divinity of Jesus are really up for debate between the faiths. But the push to remind people of how Christainity started in Judaism is a worthy enterprise.

On “Polycarp and Paul” by Kenneth Berding ***

This is one of two books that I've been reading that are essentially a list or study of a given author's sources. Such does not make for very compelling reading, though no doubt it has some value to those looking to learn more about a particular person, and given that we don't really know that much about Polycarp, the second-century bishop of Smyrna, it's probably about the most one could hope from a book-length work on the guy that isn't just a rehash of well-known facts in large print.

Berding studies Polycarp's one surviving work—his letter of the Philippians. Among facts I learned is the theory that the letter is in fact two letters that were subsequently merged. In this idea, which Berding shares with others, Chapters 13 or chapters 13 and 14 are one letter, while the rest of the letter consists of chapters 1-12. Why the idea? Because the latter part doesn't seem to have much to do with the earlier part. It is in the latter part that Polycarp discusses Ignatius, and it was likely a cover letter for the Ignatian letters. The former part is a discourse on righteousness, which seems an odd thing to attach as part of a cover letter to other letters. This discourse was likely written in response to a request for such a document. As such, Polycarp modeled much of his work on Paul's own statements about the subject.

Typically, Polycarp has been dismissed as a theological lightweight. After all, mostly all he does is heavily sort of quote other sources; he doesn't really bring a lot of his own thoughts to the discussion. But Berding shows that this ability to allude to others and so fully actually would have shown one's astuteness at the time that Polycarp was writing; brains were not coming up with something original but imitating well what had been stated before. At this, Polycarp excelled.

Perhaps one of the most useful aspects of Berding's study is the tracking of Polycarp's citations to Paul's letters to Timothy, to which he alludes heavily and often in the context of other Pauline writings, suggesting that Polycarp considered 1 and 2 Timothy to have been written by Paul, contra the many modern critics who dismiss the work as pseudo-epigraphic. The fact also that he quotes from what would come to be the New Testament letters frequently as authoritative as if he were quoting from the Old Testament or the sayings of Jesus suggests that he saw such works as near canonical. Berding further suggests that Polycarp is not as intense regarding the near-term return of Jesus as Paul usually is, suggesting also the gradual bigger focus on present conditions of the Christian.

On "The Affluent Society" by John Kenneth Galbraith ****

I'm glad someone recommended that I read F. C. Hayek's Road to Serfdom, because this book, as it turns out, is in large part a response to that work, as well as an exploration of what one is to do when a society reaches a state where production outstrips the need for people to be constantly producing--that is, where there is a surplus of necessary goods.

Galbraith notes that he has some skepticism about the worship of free market instead of socialism proffered in books like Hayek's. Those truisms, he says, are not a given. Planned economies can do great things too, like launch Sputnik. Furthermore the challenge of modern society is not poverty as was the case throughout human history for most people. Why do some stay poor amid abundance for most in the moder world? How do we resolve? These are the questions Galbraith sets out to explore. It’s not just about the free market—free market simply offer you a difference in terms of who you serve: the blind free market instead of a government bureaucrat.

Conventional wisdom is what most speak; it is based on what we are comfortable with based on experience, but it is not based in current events. Sometimes situations have changed and conventional wisdom is outdated and wrong. Revolutions in thought occur at some point and become new wisdom. Examples: The liberal policies of the American revolution broke the national planning of colonizers. The welfare state broke the free market. Keynesianism broke the balanced budget. Are we on the cusp of another revolution? (Or at least, were we in the 1950s to the 1970s, when Galbraith was writing this?)

A main problem with the free market is a lack of equality; another is the lack of security in the business cycle. The hard working person is just as likely to fail by luck as succeed.

Galbraith then provides a short history of American economic thought, with special emphasis on a non-American with the strongest influence during the gilded age: Herbert Spencer and social Darwinism, out of which our special faith in the free markets perhaps derives and continues. With Spencer, the rich are the fit, the poor are the weak and are slated to drop off. It's no big deal if the weak drop off; in fact, it is poor form to help them because you’re allowing the less fit to survive.

The counter to Spencer is Marx who is just as much a pessimist and optimist but in other ways. Society will always produce too much, which drives down wages of the poor and kills jobs. When produce runs out and the poor go back to work, wages rise, which brings about higher production costs, which kills jobs and thus kills the continued productivity. And so on. The cycle repeats itself, getting worse and worse until revolution results. Even if disagreeing with Marx, he has had a great influence on economic theory.

There are three basic economic problems: productivity, inequality, and insecurity. These were what economists dwelt on till twentieth century and what Galbraith spends the rest of the book analyzing.

Galbraith notes that there’s been a loss of interest in inequality since about 1950. Why is that so, even though it is still exists? Because of increases in productivity. In rich societies, everyone is getting a bigger amount, even if their shares aren’t equal. In poor societies landowners took all the surplus or growth; in addition, in the 1970s showing off wealth became gauche, so rich became less known. (That certainly doesn't seem the case in the 1980s or 2000s, but maybe it was a bit the case in the 1990s.) Likewise the rich are less powerful than they once were, as they are rarely any longer both entrepreneurs and owners (again, this seems less true now in our tech billionaire age); rather, faceless stockholders own the wealth. (Galbraith provides numbers for the share of wealth owned by the few at the time; they are small compared with today, even though they were egregious even then.)

As for security, that has been resolved for commoners by social programs like unemployment and social security. For the rich, corporations have diversified and grown huge such that they can sustain losses in one area to gain in another and are too big to fail. Poor communities have little heavy desire for security, as they are simply struggling to stay alive, but as society grows affluent, the desire for insurance and the like is a result of what might be lost. The idea that security might make us less productive is a false one, as productivity has increased more with unemployment insurance and social security than without. (Galbraith fails to take into account many economies where people are less inclined to work, if they can't find the job they want, when unemployment is generous.)

Productivity is the obsession of the modern economist. Yet we define it narrowly. We take public service as being unproductive while producing private goods is productive. Actually, though, unemployment and government work helps stabilize the economy by providing production in downturns and thus keeping the private sector busier than it would otherwise be.

Satisfaction is never gained by an increase of goods. So there is no end to production. Yet it is rare goods, not easily obtained goods, that people want. This seems contradictory. Simply producing doesn’t mean you’ll sell the product produced. You have to have demand. That demand for product is based on seeing what others have and on advertising. Compare something you truly need versus something wanted. You know when you are hungry without someone telling you. The fact that someone has to inform you of a product through ads or comparison shows you don’t have to have it—it’s not a true need.

Production has become the system through which the economy grows. This came out of the depression when the solution was to get people back to work through producing stuff via government input. But the government never stopped pushing production and so we have way more stuff now than we used to.

Production is not that important really except insofar as it is necessary for security, that is, to keep people employed. Most people would choose to have low productivity and consistent jobs than high productivity and fewer jobs (this is Schumaker's argument too, in Small Is Beautiful). Contributing to this concern is the amount of debt people take on, which outpaces increased wages. It’s trouble waiting to happen.

How do we bring inflation under control to keep prices stable? When we raise prices, inevitably labor prices must rise. That means prices rise. It’s a loop. The key is more production so that prices need not rise to account for higher labor costs.

We attempt to spur or confine production through available cash—that is, by monetary policy or fiscal policy. Neither is fully effective and both affect sectors of society differently. Adjusting interest rates (monetary policy) has little effect except on smaller businesses, which are less able to invest in the future when rates are high. Big businesses have enough market share to inflate prices and consumers will generally just take out longer loans to deal with higher interest. Fiscal policy (adjusting tax rates) tends to interfere with stable employment, which then contradicts the goal of stabilizing prices. It seems there’s little solution. Galbraith seems to argue for price controls to a small degree here, even though he says that we’re historically averse to them. (Price controls lead to shortages, however, so I am not sure they are a real solution.)

Galbraith next turns to what he calls balance—social and investment. Social balance involves the public versus private economy. Our tendency is to see the public economy as a drain on the private, but the two go hand in hand, with the public usually lagging. If the private economy builds more cars, the public economy will require more roads for example or more traffic cops. We should not see the public economy as a drain on productivity; it enables continued productivity. Also of note in this regard is inflation, which Galbraith says eats into public expenditures as taxes do not rise as quickly (this seems a dubious claim to me) and taxes themselves (or rather the manner in which taxes address inequality, as the public sector tends to provide more for the poor but require more of the rich, which the haves do not like).

Investment balance has to do with how society tends to invest most in that which produces most and makes the most, which in turn becomes self fulfilling. A successful industry will develop faster than a more mundane one, leading to an imbalance in sectors. But what Galbraith really focuses on is education. Education enables industries to advance, as modern innovation rarely derives from uneducated people. But education is typically a public expenditure and thus not seen as directly productive. One could put education fully in the private sphere, but that would actually decrease freedom. This is a major point of contention with Hayek’s claim that the private sector ensures freedom rather than the public. If private industry funded all education, then people would have little choice in profession; industry would determine what can be studied and by whom.

This gets us to the crux of Galbraith’s argument, which is that in an affluent society, production should no longer be the main or only goal. After all, much production is unnecessary other than to encourage consumption: without ads few would know they lack a certain leisure good. Do we really want to force people to move or whatever to enable production of things we don’t actually have to have? But how, without such production, are we to have jobs—that is, the means to make money to live off?

The real concern in the economy is not production but employment and the income that comes with it. To break the dependence on production, Galbraith suggests unemployment compensation be closer to real wages. He claims this will lower production but not affect people's willingness to work. (I would suggest, based on European economies and the old communist regimes, that he is wrong. People tend to become pickier about jobs or not work to advance their positions if forced into jobs they dislike.) Or since some cannot work, a minimum living allowance (as some have recently proposed and experimented with), a likely better solution. To control inflation he suggests price and wage controls but only on corporations and unions, which control larger sections of the economy. This seems dubious also but possibly useful, insofar as indeed a large market share of a given thing does give one more ability to set prices and wages compared with a small employer or laborer.

Inadequate social balance between expenditures on private versus public items is best addressed by taxes, says Galbraith, but not those less flexible with inflation like property tax. Rather income tax is preferred, but most of that at this point is taken up by military expenditures. So to compensate we should have more sales tax. The poor are more affected by it; however, if that tax is used primarily for the public and especially the poor then taking away from consumption in the private sector to allow more consumption in public sector makes sense. We could use that tax for schools and the like, eventually leading to greater production anyway. Such taxes are also key to helping address poverty, because there is not more production but instead a better use of resources. (I’m not sure I buy this argument, as consumption taxes tend to be regressive; so one would essentially be taking money from the poor and handing it back to them in the form of government services—in other words, the government thus would be telling the poor how to spend, as it would do the spending for them.)

Galbraith closes with a discussion of how greater productivity has led to fewer hours and more leisure time, but a better way to address better productivity is also to make work more pleasant. As such there’s a new class, not a leisure class, but a new class: a group of workers who labor not primarily for money but for love of the work they do. Education is key to allowing this and should be the goal to bring most people into this class.

In a world where production is ample and there is no need to spend all our days just scrounging to survive, new ways of measuring economic value are needed that don’t simply count what has been produced, ways that actually somehow take into account our humanity. On this basic point, I guess, I would agree with Galbraith, but many of his policy solutions seem dubious. No matter, he offers much to think about in a mostly lucid way.

On “The United States and Britain in Prophecy” by Herbert W. Armstrong ****

I have not read this book since I was a teenager, and I was expecting to be somewhat underwhelmed, as I was with Armstrong's book on the millennium, but this one turned out to have a lot more heft than I anticipated. I remember, at the time I first read it, feeling like the author did an incredible job with the biblical material but that it wasn't too detailed when it came to the historical basis for the theory; that was my impression this time as well. But the book this time left me with a desire to go read up more on the subject historically to see the degree to which the biblical interpretation is accurate—and that's a good thing.

Having grown up being taught the these two countries forge the heart of ancient Israelite migrants, I find that my worldview, even today, to a large degree still falls back on that, even if I've had a few doubts through the years. I would say “it seems to be true,” but it's not a salvation issue. If the understanding is wrong, then in the end, it doesn't take away from the most important truths of scripture. (After all, I've heard other claims, that, for example, Japan is ancient Israel. I haven't looked into such with any seriousness, but I didn't grow up with such a theory either, so it's not where my mind first goes.) Rereading this book, however, made me see, as I noted, that there's a lot more reason to believe such might be the case biblically than perhaps I've recently thought much about.

The issue is, of course, that most modern scholars disagree with the historical thesis and that there are some good reasons for that. The number one reason is that the theory seemed to have found its greatest popularity during the height of British colonialism—that is, it was a way to justify certain racist views. It was, in other words, propaganda for Manifest Destiny and the like. So it is fair to be skeptical. At the same time, it is perhaps unfair to dismiss such ideas out of hand just because of their misuse. What one really has to do is go look at what really happened, insofar as that is possible. Most contemporary scholars are wary to do that in part because of the associated tropes. And so much of the history I've read through the years that ties the lost tribes of Israel to modern nations has been quite sketchy, based on similarities of names and the like—a possible coordinating fact but hardly strong proof around which to base an entire thesis–rather than really tracing the movements of peoples. More reading on the subject would go far in helping me see how such conclusions can be reached. But few serious scholars give the theory much time.

The last chapter of the book, alas, made me uneasy. It's the chapter where the author really lets readers know the troubles that are coming for these nations and pushes readers to join the church the author is associated with in order to escape. I suppose I can't argue with a sincere call to repentance, assuming that's what's going on, and as I see my country literally falling apart now, I can't help but think the author was right in that regard. But the chapter reminded me of many of the nightmares from my childhood, and the appeal to fear and to join one particular group is not something I am completely comfortable with now; it suggests to me these days a kind of insincerity. Repent, yes, but if it's just to save one's own skin and the key is joining one particular organization, something seems a bit off. I don't think a bunch of people just looking to save themselves is what God is after. I'm reminded of what someone said to me shortly after 9/11, namely that they were thinking of returning to church because they were scared of what was going to happen to them. I suppose fear can be a motivating factor for getting one back to doing the right thing, but if that's the whole motive and remains the motive, it's hardly a life of joy and such a choice is not likely to stick. And indeed, that person did not.

On “Theory of the Leisure Class” by Thorstein Veblen ***

I took a step back fifty years or so to add this text to my economics list, given that it shows up on so many lists of classic econ works. Veblen wrote at the height of the Gilded Age—and also at a time when evolutionary theory was making its way into social theory as well. The influence of evolutionary thought is all over this work, and in a way I think it rather harms much of Veblen's theory, which seems very focused on materialism, even though there are aspects of the theory that potentially enlightening.

The gist of the argument is that power and prestige is assigned within communities by the ability one has to live a leisurely life. This leisure is largely shown through one's ability to consume time and money conspicuously—indeed, wastefully. Only the lower classes, the less powerful, have to use their time and money to meet their basic needs. So far so good, but I have difficulty with who Veblen puts into this leisure class category, which is essentially anything having to do with government work or religion. In his view, it seems that unless you're actually making things or growing things, you are conspicuously consuming in terms of the work that you are doing. There is no value to helping to keep society on a moral keel. I guess in Veblen's view, such would take care of itself.

Chapter 1 begins with primitive humanity. Primitive society is more peaceful because people have no time to fight (right here, already, Veblen throws me—people fight over resources all the time; it's not like the poor are immune from such). As one moves toward barbarism, which is a step up from primitive life, one introduces social classes. The higher leisure class is made up of warriors, priests, government, and sport, and it is based around the idea of doing exploits, which give you esteem and power. Intellectual work also places one into this leisure class.

In chapter 2, Veblen notes how the importance of exploits is replaced by an importance in property ownership, as a society advances. Slaves and women are the first property, along with land and eventually goods. The more you own, the more respect you have. Interestingly, Veblen notes, this is why no amount of property is ever enough. I find this latter idea to make some sense. Even contemporary studies show that people tend to be satisfied with less as long as they have more than others around them. Since there is always someone with more somewhere, even the very rich compete to acquire more and stay on top.

The leisure class, that is, the upper class, chiefly engages in nonproductive activity, which can include studies of the occult, dead languages, and grammar, and upholding good manners. As one advances in class, conspicuous consumption is abedded by moving not only one's self into the nonproductivity but also one's spouse and even one's servants (becoming butlers, and so on).

Also as society advances, leisure time is replaced by consumption of goods, especially goods with less use and more expense (think, in modern parlance, brand-name goods). Even lower classes can get in on this action in an attempt to prove a higher status.

In chapter 5, Veblen discusses how hard people will work to remain in a higher class. It is harder, psychologically, to move down classes than up. Because everyone is trying to be like the higher classes, eventually upper-class standards move down into the lower—thus, manners and the like get transferred downward. Veblen especially criticizes scholars, who although usually poor like the lower classes, put on airs to attempt to fit in with the upper class.

Conspicuous consumption goes to the heart of such attempts. One will buy stuff to make one's self seem sophisticated—often stuff that is actually less useful than another option. Thus, handmade stuff is preferred to machine made. We like special editions of books rather than books that are just as good (in terms of info inside and quality of the production) but less expensive.

In chapter 7, Veblen looks at dress in light of this and at the way fashions change just so that we'll seem up to date and sophisticated.

In chapter 8, Veblen returns to evolution, arguing that the leisure class is actually more conservative. Because it does not depend on the society at large, it can be aloof to changes going on and thus doesn't evolve with society. (This seems somewhat counter to the chapters previously, as consumption would suggest actually sticking with trends. I think Veblen is more focused on political and environmental trends here, however. But one has to wonder where the political trends come from? Do they not derive from laborers/producers, who supposedly don't have time to think or to do anything but work?)

This argument sets up chapter 9, where Veblen notes that there are basically two kinds of people: peaceful primitives and barbaric predatory. The leisure class is largely the latter. It is selfish and indvidualistic, while the primitive is community oriented. I'm getting a kind of communist anarchist vibe from this argument, which again I think just misunderstand human nature.

Chapter 10 discusses sports as a leisure activity that shows off exploits while doing nothing of actualy consequence.

Chapter 11 focuses on gambling, which Veblen sees as more conspicuous consumption. The issue I have here, however, is that this is not an activity confined to the upper class. Indeed, the poor often have more reason to gamble, which again goes against his argument. Veblen then notes that those involved in sports and gambling also tend to be more religious, which again I take issue with. He halfway had me through the first seven chapters of the book, but as his argument continues on, the more absurd it seems.

Chapter 12 discusses religion as conspicuous consumption, as it renders no material product. Instead, it uses up resources for valueless items: church buildings, special clothes, and so on. In the mechanical age, the middle classes fall away (especially men), as it is a waste of time. The poor stick to it because they lack resources to change in response to modern circumstances. Meanwhile, the richest take on religion as a means of showing off their wealth—religion becomes bound up in spectacle (as in ancient Rome, I suppose: I sponsor some grand thing and put my name on it). But again, these ideas seem contradictory. If the higher classes are what everyone is aiming for, why would the middle class give up religion while the upper class continues in it? Wouldn't everyone be aspiring to be like the rich, as Veblen earlier argued?

In chapter 13, Veblen discusses the counterforces to the leisure class. As some grow tired of conspicuous consumption, they aim for a more substantive life, one that involves actually producing things. Women especially grow tired of being simply a conduit through which men show off their wealth.

Finally, chapter 14 ends the book with a discussion of how higher education is a form of conspicuous consumption, as it produces nothing but knowledge for knowledge sake. Veblen is especially critical of humanities. Science, based in the practical arts, has invaded this realm, bringing the laborng class into the colleges. Science advances society and moves away from the social order established among the leisure class, while humanities is inherently selfish because it produces nothing of value.

On "Wealth in Ancient Ephesus" by Gary G. Hoag *****

I found this scholarly volume immensely interesting. Hoag does a close reading for select passages from the first letter to Timothy alongside a review of Xenophon of Ephesus's Ephesiaca. By doing so, he provides a new way of interpreting many of the passages in the biblical letter. Some readings seem more convincing than others, but no matter, one comes away feeling as if one knows Timothy much better in its context.

Xenophon's work has historically been placed a century or two after Timothy, but as Hoag notes, more recent scholars now see it as being written at about the same time, which allows for the parallel reading. Hoag examples specifically attitudes toward wealth in Timothy and how those attitudes compare with those of the Ephesians and others who would have read Xenophon's tale.

The tale involves a young couple who meet at a festival for Artemis. Because they don't properly respect the goddess, the goddess banishes them to some hard times before they are allowed to return, more humbly, to Ephesus as the loving couple that they are.

In the most convincing of his arguments, Hoag examines how the work links up ideas about femininity in comparison to what the author of Timothy writes about women. Some odd statements are made in Timothy, but they fit very well when one reads them in light of the mythology surrounding Artemis. There seem to be very good reasons that the author of Timothy discusses childbirth and the creation, beyond just these being biblical stories.

Hoag's arguments regarding false teachers, benefactors, and wealth are a bit less convincing, but they are still intriguing ways to read the letter. I say they're less convincing not because they aren't good arguments but because the standard reading of the letter--that the author is dealing with some kind of proto-gnostic set of teachers--still makes sense. In other words, although Hoag makes a strong case that the enemies of the writer could be wealthy Ephesian worshipers of Artemis, he doesn't quite convince me that the other possibility doesn't make sense. So really, he simply adds to the way that one could read such passages. But this is by no means a bad thing.

On “The Road to Serfdom” by F. A. Hayek ****

This author was recommended to me by someone who found out I was doing an economics reading list. I was not really looking forward to this work, as it Hayek was someone I'd never heard of and he seemed more of a minor figure such that reading him would take from others I would otherwise read as part of this list. When I read a bit about him, I was even more put out; he sounded like a huge right-wing, free-market capitalism fan, for which I already had a few such books on my list. I figured Smith and Marx to be enough in terms of older classics, Keynes and Galbraith for moderns, and then the rest would be applied and contemporary.

And indeed, as I started out on this book, Hayek's hit me in a lot of wrong ways. He seemed just too big a fan of the free market without any sort of government oversight. But as I read further, he made more and more sense—and he also seemed at times to contradict himself. That is, he seemed very heavy on avoiding government intervention in the economy, but then would backtrack and say that some intervention was okay. In some ways, it reminded me of the way Elizabeth Warren claims to be a friend of capitalism—but only capitalism done the right way.

What Hayek's book is really doing is arguing against socialism—whether on the right or the left. He was writing near the end of World War II, when the troubles that had risen to the fore in Germany with the National Socialists were very apparent. And he was fearful, he notes, that too many other nations, such as the United States and Britain, were drifting toward the same sort of socialist frenzy under the inane idea that socialism solves problems and creates a more equitable society. (He notes that this is actually more a book on politics than on economics, which seems true, save the economics has much to do with his political views.)

Here's where Hayek's big critique of such thinking really gives one much to ponder. He notes that when the government imposes its will on the forces of the market in the name of providing equity, it denies freedom to the people it rules. A planned economy essentially means that certain people will not be able to do as they wish, be it start a particular type of business, sell a particular item, or do a particular job. In that sense, socialism leads inevitably to totalitarianism. In this way of thinking, I would have to agree. The problem, of course, is that simply letting the market dictate things doesn't necessarily lead to a greater amount of freedom; that's because when a private corporation corners a market, now it's just the private corporation that dictates one's ability to start a new business, sell a particular item, or do a particular job. Which are you going to ask to control your fate? Hayek doesn't spend much time on this latter possibility—except he does at some point note the problems with monopolies. In that sense, he seems to imply that ultimate economic freedom for people can only exist when we are talking about small-time capitalists, not multinationals that control the fate of millions. And in that, too, I would agree, save that some industries require such an outlay of capital that they are impossible to run with such a small footprint. The guy down the street cannot decide that he's going to start building commercial airplanes with a small savings or a small loan; there are reasons there are really only a couple of viable commercial airplane manufacturers. In those sort of endeavours, it seems we really do have to fall back on either government involvement or a near monopoly.

And just as one thinks Hayek is espousing total free markets, he pulls back, admitting in places that the government does have a role to play. It is there to keep markets fair (this is where I thought of Warren), so that fraud and monopoly don't twist the market in ways that remove opportunity for everyone. He even at some point notes that the government should be involved in health care, which seems very much more of a socialist kind of argument in many people's views. Once the government starts getting involved in such things, it seems, it warps the market—that's not necessarily a bad thing. It's really a matter of the tradeoff one is willing to make, where one is willing to cede authority and freedom in the hope that a central-planning bureaucrat will be able to do better. I wouldn't want to live completely at the whim of the free market, nor would I want to live totally under the thumb of a government decision maker. Where that balance is is hard to say.

A late chapter in the book discusses a kind of world government. There, he argues against a socialist world government, noting that were we to have such, certain nation-states would insist on cornering the market in certain areas. There would not be the sharing of resources as one would hope. Instead, there would be resentment, the keeping down of certain nations and of the development of their own industries. Instead, he advocates a kind of world government that instead of mandating things would simply prohibit certain things—what sounds to me in some ways what would become the United Nations. One nation, for example, cannot invade another, lest all the other nations then unite to keep such an invasion from happening. Thus, we would have peace. Of course, the issue with this is apparent from the lack of success the UN has had. I mean, it requires other nations to be willing to sacrifice to stop another nation from taking advantage of others. But beyond that, what's the difference between a prohibition and a mandate? On some level, are they not similar things? If we refrain from mandating that a nation provides a living wage to its citizens, but prohibit a nation from starving its people, what's the difference?

Anyway, in the end, I'm glad Hayek was recommended to me. I found it particularly interesting reading in our current times.

On “Cold-Case Christianity” by J. Warner Wallace *****

After hearing an interview with the author, I'd been looking forward to reading this for probably a few years and finally got ahold of a copy. It was worth the wait. Granted, the early going portions of the text were a bit disappointing, but as Wallace moves deeper into his arguments, the case gets more and more compelling. There isn't much that is necessarily suprising; it's all basic Christian apologist argument, but Wallace is pretty thorough.

What the author does here is essentially discuss how the manner in which one goes about solving a criminal case based on evidence and testimony actually fits well with what evidence has been left for us in the Bible about Jesus's life and work. He starts early on by discussing the basic argument that skeptics have against the Bible: namely, that miraculous/supernatural events do not compute with what we understand about the known world. Indeed, if one is a materialist, that is the end of the conversation right there. But Wallace claims that witness testimony of the supernatural can't be disregarded, especially when there are so many witnesses. For my own self, I've been somewhat skeptical of the idea that our five senses explain everything about the world around us; it seems a bit bold to try to claim that all knowledge can be gathered from the “physical” world; there might well be things that we can't see/hear/touch/smell/feel that are real and existent. As such, one can't necessarily dismiss all things that don't fit with our material limitations, even if there is nothing we can glean about things outside of them without some sort of revelation. But we can see, as Warner himself notes in one chapter, the material results of such supernatural power—that is, one chapter is devoted to the creation, wherein Wallace essentially runs down the various well-trodden arguments for creation versus some other less than satisfactory argument for the origin of life and the universe. But in that sense, the book, in its earliest chapters, where it's running through these well-rehearsed arguments alongside his police life, the book seems a little predictable.

The deeper in Wallace gets, however, the more intriguing the work becomes. That's because he begins to summarize some ideas that are somewhat less explored in standard apologetics and theological works, and he does it in a way that is very much easy for a lay reader to understand. I recognized some of the scholarly work that I've seen others write in Wallace's text, but made much more accessible. Some of that work is in books I've managed to check out of the college library, but said books are at such high academic prices I'll never likely purchase a copy; now, I have those arguments, scriptures, and quotes in Wallace's book, and it's nice to have those summations put into such easy to access form. I especially enjoyed section 2 of the book, where he is as much talking about being a detective as he is about examining the evidence. His main point in this section is that, yes, one can still argue other things about the evidence presented, but are those arguments the most logical? the simplest? I think Wallace presents a good point here. We can accept the evidence handed down to us; that is in fact the simplest explanation for all that we know about Jesus. Or we can, by contrast, settle on something that is much harder to defend, some sort of conspiracy theory. It doesn't fit the evidence as well or as simply, but if one is a materialist, such an argument fits with the world one knows. It's really a matter of which one you're going to choose.

On “The Economic Consequences of the Peace” by John Maynard Keynes ***

I was looking for a book by Keynes for my economics reading list and chose this one. It wasn't quite what I was looking for insofar as it didn't really seem focused on what folks call “Keynesian economics.” Then again, I didn't really want some really scholarly text, and that was one main reason I settled on this one: because it was, I read, intended for a popular audience. By that, however, the “popular” audience was very much that of its day. There wasn't much in here that I felt invested in in our day.

That said, the book is an interesting snapshot of one of the concerns of its day, and in it, one can see that Keynes had some foresight. The text largely criticizes the conditions of the peace treaty coming out of World War I, one that was very draconian in the manner in which it treated Germany and that was not in keeping with the assurances Germany had been given when it surrended. He shows how the punishment, the payment forced on Germany by the winners of the war, was unsustainable. It took away chunks of land that Germany had had, some indeed of the most productive land. It asked Germany to repay based on a degree of production that it was incapable of, especially without that land. And it rewarded nations that were not as damaged by the war as certain others and that could have likely sustained the losses—namely Britain and in turn the United States (which Britain was indebted to and thus was repaying), as opposed to nations like France, which suffered much more substantial losses and whose payment was likely more justified.

The result, Keynes hints, is one that is actually not going to resolve issues that it hopes to resolve and instead is likely to lead to the renewal of hostilities, because the German population is not going to be willing to be taxed into poverty for war debt with no end in sight. Such are the arguments, and such, of course, is what came to be.

On “A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy” by Karl Marx ***

Das Kapital isn't available in English on Project Gutenberg and is actually a three-volume work that I was kind of dreading reading on my economics reading list, given its length. I've read that it is actually at points enjoyable, with humor and anecdotes, but my guess is that it's similar to Smith's Wealth of Nations, insofar as the anecdotes were obviously of their time and so not necessarily easily referenced to things occurring in our day and also full of responses to economic writing of the day. So I settled on this shorter work, which is available for free at Project Gutenberg and is, in some ways, apparently, a kind of distillation of Marx's economic thinking. My fear that on some level its density would prove daunting proved to be somewhat true. I'd have had to spend a lot more time with it to really comprehend what Marx was saying, and I likely would have had to review Smith's work as well as read up on the work of a few other theorists.

The book begins with a basic premise, which is that at base all compensation/money/production is based on labor. When we swap goods, we are swapping man hours. It takes person X 6 hours to buld a book shelf; it takes person Y 3 hours to put a new fuel injector system into a vehicle. I swap two fuel injector system installations for one book shelf. Of course, this sort of direct swap isn't really workable, so money gets involved as an intermediary. Most often this has been gold or silver, because these are stable production units, as opposed to, say, a bag of flour, which eventually goes bad. So then the commodity is swapped for money, which is then swapped for another commodity (C > M > C). As silver or gold become more rare or abundant, the amount needed to swap also goes up and down, just as with commodities, creating changes in prices. In time, rather than carrying gold or silver, paper began to be used as a stand-in for the gold or silver (after all, even gold and silver wears down with time, so it's safer to lock away an ounce of gold than to carry it around). (Interestingly, I hadn't thought of it before, but British money has terms like pound and sterling, which likely refer to the weight of the metal originally serving as money.) Theoretically, the paper can be turned in for the gold and silver. But of course, sometimes, with the rise or fall of the value of that gold or silver, the paper might end up being worth more than the actual gold or silver as a commodity (or even the coin); when that happens, it woud be tempting to melt down the silver dime, for example, and recoup the value of the silver rather than use the coin itself. Paper, as such, Marx seems to kind of frown on as essentially useless/pointless. (Another book, which I'll read later but which I have read a few chapters of previously, called Debt makes the point that there never really was a barter economy, that we've always had money of a sort, and that money is really a form of IOU. In that case, paper with a number on it is as workable as a monetary unit as anything else. You pay me 6 hours for the book shelf; I pay you 3 hours for the fuel injector installation, and I pay Jay, down the street, 3 hours for trimming my trees.)

Near the end of the work, Marx shows how commodities, distribution, exchange, and production are actually all just forms of production. I'm not quite sure I buy this argument. It's true, insofar as to produce something one has to distribute it and exchange it, and also as Marx notes, any given commodity is also often the source of production. That is, the book shelf is made from other commodities—the tree one planted and then cut down, the lumber that was manufactured from that tree, as well as the nails, paint, etc., that went into the shelf. But I could as easily say that production is just a form of commodity. In fact, as far as public economy goes, I'd be more inclined to say the latter. Why? Marx, of course, wants to come back to labor, which is production. But that puts the emphasis on the amount of time spent making something. Whereas, all that labor, to me, seems pointless if in the end no one wants the commodity. If we produce six book shelves but can only sell two, then we have excess production. We might as well just burn the extra book shelves, which means there as good as never existing. If we fail to distribute the shelves, we have production without commodification. Really, the labor is only worth something outside of the home if/when that labor is distributed and commodified via exchange. I can produce a lot of spittle, but I can't commodify it. As such, does the time spent producing spittle amount to any kind of applicable labor unit?

In a final appendix, Marx argues that the greatest artistic works come from baser societies—that is, ones in which production is more rooted in humans than in the machines they have created. He uses Greek literature as his example, saying that those were the greatest works of all, better than Shakespeare or anything since. In an age in which labor rests within a steam engine, it is harder to write about the real essence of life, than, say, when one is wrestling against so-called gods of the elements. It's another argument I don't buy.

On “An Essay on the Principle of Population” by Thomas R. Malthus ***

This famous work essentially espoused the idea that there was an upper limit to the degree to which the earth could sustain human population, one that Malthus felt was, even in his life around 1800, substantially already at the brink of being reached. That's the popular understanding of it, at least, that I'd always gleaned. And to some extent, the book is about that sort of thing, but to me it seemed really the musings of a consumant pessimist.

The basic theory/idea that starts off and informs everything else in the work is one in which Malthus claims that population increases at a faster than the ability of humans to find ways to supply food for that population. If we were to graph the two items, one could imagine the food supply increasing as a constant rate—a straight line going slowly upward; meanwhile, the population line would go up at an accelerating rate—a line like the right half of a parabola. This is because, essentially, people love sex. We just can't help ourselves. So whether there's food or not, we're going to keep making more people. (The issue, of course, is that when the two lines meet, that parabola will come to an end: population wouldn't keep going up; rather, a lot of folks will die of hunger. In a sense, overpopulation takes care of itself. Malthus never really addresses this.)

Beyond that, Malthus argues against various other writers who espouse various rosy ideas about humanity. We won't ever put off our reproductive desire or our wish to have more. We will continue toward greed and avarice. Society is ever headed toward a bad end. If and when things do improve (temporarily), that will just encourage more population and more desire. That is, even as we increase our resources, it's inevitable that our desires and our population will always outstrip capacity. Efforts to alleviate suffering of less fortunate only further the problem by encouraging more population among the less fortunate and thus more suffering. Is there a solution? Malthus doesn't really propose much that's workable. The essay seemed more a head exercise and set of opinions than anything substantiated in statistical anaysis.

On “The Antichrist” by Ernest Renan ***

I came across mention of this old book in Paul Trebilco's history of the church in Ephesus. He noted Renan as one of the few who heavily prognasticated the eventual move of much of the first-century Jerusalem church to Ephesus. Since that was a subject of interest to me, I figured I should read it. The connection between churches was something of a disappointment; Renan sort of asserts that, but there isn't a lot of concrete evidence, as really all there is anyway are implications (otherwise, there'd be more written about this subject).

This is actually volume 4 of 7 of Renan's huge work on the early history of Christianity. This is the one that focuses most on the time period I figured would be more applicable: the destruction of the Jersusalem and the work of John in Ephesus. There's good info here, but alas, one often doesn't know where Renan pulls it from, given that there are no notes attached. Furthermore, this work is old, and it shows, insofar as Renan wrote at a time when it was considered good form to wax poetic on subjects. As such, he often takes thirty words to say what could be said in ten, which can be irritating. There are quite a few comparisons to Europeans dynamics at the time he was writing in the nineteenth century, which can be interesting but usually aren't, and while no doubt such comparisons probably were of value to his contemporaries, they didn't serve much use to this reader more than a hundred years later.

Renan's work is apparently somewhat controversial. He was a proponent of Jesus being just a man, not divine. (And Wikipedia notes various antisemetic tropes and racism in his larger work.) But surprisingly, as this volume brings out, he did mostly accept the traditional authorship of the New Testament. He was a big proponent of the idea that the Apostle John wrote Revelation—and likely the other items attributed to him. He didn't stand much for the John the Presbyter idea. All this makes for an interesting contrast, since so many modern critics espouse ideas that much of the New Testament (sometimes as little as seven letters of Paul) was written decades after its supposed authorship by pseudonymous authors. Such makes it much easier to dismiss the facts of the New Testament and make whatever claims one wishes with regard to early Christianity and Jesus. Renan doesn't do so much of that, and yet still managed to reach the conclusions he did regarding Jesus.

Much of this volume is given over to Renan's explication of Revelation, which he sees as being written in response to events in the Roman Empire, and especially with regard to Nero's persecution of Christians in Rome. Reading Revelation “historically” rather than as prophecy gives it quite a different spin.

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.

On “Plato's Shadow” by Gary Petty ****

 

This book traces the changeover in Christianity from the first century into the fourth, as it moved from being chiefly a Jewish sect to being a new version of Greco-Roman religion, adopting many beliefs and practices from the latter along the way. There wasn't much new here to me, but Petty writes in a very simple manner that would make for easy reading and understanding among the most general of readers looking for an introduction (I wish I'd come across the book ten years ago, when I first started heavily reading in the subject). The period covered is a very long one, including not just the first four centuries of the Christian era but also the basics of Greek philosophy and the Jewish faith going back to their founding (and constituting almost half the book). As such, one can glean a clear sense of where Christianity comes in, but the history of the four centuries that are the book's focus is even more compacted as a result. The Bible is used heavily as a source, as are Bible helps; other sources include various classics on classical, Jewish, and Christian history, and there is a general smattering of quotes from various primary sources outside scripture. The most cogent argument Petty makes comes near the end of the book, when he notes how Paul could not be the source of so many of the changes to the faith established by Jesus and the original twelve apostles, but rather such changes were really the influence of later incorporation into classical Greek thinking. The argument is laid out succinctly and clearly, as with so much of the rest of the book; however, such would be unlikely to satisfy most diehard critics, who have laid out whole books on small aspects of the subject (usually, showing just the opposite of what Petty does but in more recent times increasingly appreciating Paul in his Jewish setting and beginning to understand that he was not the antinomian or anti-Petrine figure many earlier scholars have made him out to be).

On “The First Urban Christians” by Wayne A. Meeks ****

This book reminds me a bit of watching The Godfather. The two works, of course, have nothing to do with one another. But the comparison is the experience of reading Meeks's book and watching that movie. When I saw The Godfather, this classic of cinema, I was in my thirties, and the film was about the same age as I was. I'd heard for a long time about how important the film was and how great it was. Seeing it, however, I found to be underwhelming. I could see how the film was likely a great film in its time, but watching it thirty-years on, the picture seemed a cliché. All the gangster movie stereotypes were present. However, not having seen the film in the 1970s, when it first came out, I could not say whether in its time the film might have been extremely original. The problem, of course, is that so many (better) films and TV shows since then had used the same plot devices and characters. Arguably, those films were all drawing on The Godfather. So when I went back to watch this older movie, it seemed stale, when in fact as the origin of so much since, it might well be as important as I'd always heard.

Such is the care for Meeks's The First Urban Christians. This book is a classic, one of the first, apparently, to draw sociology so heavily into conversation with the first century of Christianity, and specifically with reading Paul's letters. The subject is covered better in many other works I've read, including by Rodney Stark. But the thing is, as I read, I realized the degree to which these other authors were likely drawing on Meeks. They just wrote better and added to the findings that he made, which made of course the original, coming to it after the more recent works, all that much less intriguing. And so, I'm left in the same position as I am with The Godfather. Was this a great book in its time? Almost certainly, but because I came to it later, after reading other stuff, it doesn't seem as revolutionary as it likely was in its time or as it would have been had I read it before those other works.

By looking closely at Paul's letters and at the social nature of Roman society, Meeks notes that most early Christians were likely from cities. That's because that's where most diaspora Jews were, which is among whom most Christian teaching began. Christians drew from a range of classes (though the idea of low, middle, and upper class is not a terribly effective way at looking at Roman society, which wasn't really based around the same sort of concepts as modern society): a slave might be richer or even have more power, for example, than a free man; a person of noble birth might be looked upon better than free man but not be as well off, and so on. The most prominent members were those with just such social inconsistencies in status: rich women, freed men with special skills, wealthy Jewish people. A particularly interesting chapter focuses on names, as they show up in the letters. Meeks then goes on to examing worship practices and governance in the church, using similar means, though the observations don't seem like anything beyond what I've read elsewhere. Meeks largely accepts the mainstream critical position that only seven of Paul's letters are genuine and that Paul was largely opposed to James and Peter in his views of the new faith, which to a degree colors his observations.

On “After Acts” by Bryan Litfin ****

Liftin reviews the various legends that have accrued around the apostles and a few other important New Testament figures and provides an evaluation of their likelihood. Liftin is a conservative scholar, which means he more typically accepts biblical accounts for what they are, rather than arguing against their accuracy, though he does sometimes note what secular and liberal scholars believe on such subjects. The book is written at a basic level, such that someone with only a little biblical knowledge and very little knowledge of postbiblical Christian history should have no difficulty with understanding it. For me, the work was a bit more basic than I anticipated and so proved mostly a useful review rather than a work that provided new insight. (Sean McDowell's Fate of the Apostles does similar work, though he focuses solely on the apostles, whereas Liftin looks more at prominent people, giving just one chapter over to the lesser known apostles. McDowell's work is more thorough, however, and as such more informative, but Litfin's book is a reasonable price whereas McDowell's is inordinately expensive given its length.) Like William McBirnie's classic The Search for the Twelve Apostles, Litfin spends quite of a bit of ink on relics and gravesites, often less with written documents, many of which are of such later dating that they're unreliable anyway. Litfin's work is not as detailed at McBirnie's either, but it's easier to follow. I'll come back to it, likely, as a reference.

On “Treasure Island!!!” by Sara Levine ****

This one came recommended to me from various websites that listed great recent novels. In addition, I was familiar with Levine's name—likely through various stories I've read of hers—and the premise sounded cool, so I decided, why not? I don't read much fiction anymore, so this would be a good break, and it was.

The premise? A woman reads Robert Lewis Stevenson's Treasure Island, a “boys' book,” and decides to change her life accordingly, living by its various morals and standards. It's been forty-plus years since I read Treasure Island, though I do remember somewhat enjoying it as a kid, insomuch as I could enjoy a “long” book back in those days (I wasn't much of a reader before my teen years), but I remember liking the live-action Disney technicolor movie from the fifties or sixties. I mean, pirates, after all (the subject still seems of great interest to people, but as a kid, I realized after trying to read some nonfiction about them, they were hardly as intriguing as theme park rides).

As I knew going in, the book was supposed to be funny, and the narrator and central character an incredibly awful woman. These turned out to be true. Turns out modeling one's life after pirates isn't so great an idea. That said, one gets the feeling that the narrator wasn't terribly stable to begin with—a decent-looking woman who uses those looks to hold down jobs and boyfriends, neither of which she appreciates, as she believes herself to be above them. Living by the dictates of a 150-year-old novel means not letting manners get in the way of how highly you think of yourself, which means taking advantage of other people at every turn.

My wife found the book reminiscent of Don Quixote, but shorter and easier to read. It's not entirely predictable, but the narrator's brain seems similarly addled by fiction such that she makes dreadful decisions for all around her. One of the blurbs makes note of its memoir-esque features and, indeed, one can read the book as a sort of parody of self-help memoirs, where someone makes some sort of decision to live by some new standard and change one's life accordingly. This narrator doesn't really change much; she's awful to start, and the book simply gives her an excuse to continue on the same path. Some might question, as such, whether the book is even really a novel, as the main character does not develop. But it's a fun read no matter.