Tag: Jay Richards
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“Money, Greed, and God” – Book Review
Doesn’t my wealth make someone else poor? Aren’t we exhausting the earth’s resources? Isn’t capitalism based on greed? Hasn’t Christianity always opposed capitalism? The answer to all of these questions is “no.” For centuries people believed odors carried diseases and were certain that the earth was a flat area surrounded by water. The surface evidence…
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Economic Fallacies: “No Scarcity”
Look at almost any economics textbook, and you will find a definition of economics similar to this one in Greg Mankiw's Principles of Economics: “Economics is the study of how society manages its scarce resources.” (Mankiw, 4) This seems straightforward enough to most economists, but many theologians take exception to this characterization. For instance, Douglas…
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Economic Fallacies: “Zero-Sum Game”
The Zero-Sum Game Fallacy views wealth as a fixed quantity meaning the only way someone gets wealthy is at someone else's expense. There are three possible types of games in the world. First, there is the lose-lose game. There are not many examples of this one. I always think of the 1983 movie War Games…
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Economic Fallacies: “The Piety Fallacy”
The Piety fallacy is uncritical action based on pietistic interpretations of scripture without regard to actual outcomes resulting from those actions. This fallacy has a variety of expressions. In the previous post, I pointed to the jubilee code in Leviticus 25 and its use in the debate over debt cancellation and wealth distribution in developing…
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Economic Fallacies Christians Believe
I've been wrestling with economic issues related to faith all my adult life, particularly over the last twenty years. I've been in deep with Mainline lefties, Neo-cons, Evangelical lefties, Religious Right types, libertarians, and even some honest-to-God Marxists. (Okay, that last one is a bit of an oxymoron, but you get the picture.) Over the…