Economics vs. Values

I read a newspaper article this weekend that explored the increasing disparity between the rich and the poor in the US, particularly how it related to the lack of downturn in the multimillion dollar residential real estate market.

It got me thinking about the root causes of this disparity. Does capitalism cause social injustice? It struck me that capitalism isn't the cause - it's neither good nor evil. What can cause injustice are the values that our society, as a whole, maintains. Capitalism is just a very efficient mechanism to distribute wealth according to those values. If we value movie-stars and baseball players above firefighters and social workers, the former will be rewarded more than the latter. If we value social status and "one-upping" our neighbors, the things that represent that status and flaunt our superiority over others become valuable and much more expensive than those things that merely allow us to survive.

Those who work to fix injustice in our society cannot do this by fighting our economic system. The injustices won't go away until the value system that supports those injustices is changed. Capitalism isn't the enemy here. A socialist economy still has injustices. It's just reflecting the values of a different set of people than in a capitalist economy. With a more equitable set of values, you could argue that capitalism is ideal, since it is an extremely efficient way of transforming those values into action.

So the real question becomes: how do you change the value set of an entire society? And what do you change it to? Who gets to decide? How did we arrive at our current value set?

The fact that it is the values of a society that has to change to cause real change in that society means that those with notions of revolution are just fooling themselves. You can't enforce change by changing the government or the economic system, at least, not for long. The real problem is much more difficult: changing how people view other people and the material world.

I suspect those people who want to merge religion and government know this. Too bad that most of the time they have injustice deeply embedded in their faith. Unitarian Jihad's are pretty rare!