THE THIRD WAY

Popular culture espouses two, competing narratives of American history, each evaluating the whirlwind of globalization, and America’s growing inequality. (An aside: Every individual combines and develops the various worldviews available to him uniquely; however, any coherent thought requires some level of generalization, to which we now turn.) The liberal-progressive sees the prime mover of history as a social struggle towards equality, and thus dismisses globalization, calling increased taxation to redistribute its benefits. The conservative-capitalist sees history as an economic struggle for wealth, and thus embraces the possibilities of globalization, calling only for a leveling of opportunity. The latter narrative offers powerful critiques of the former, but American culture has yet to produce a third way that might overcome the pitfalls of the conservative-capitalist vision.

In 2003, John Edwards neatly summarized the liberal-progressive stand, decrying "two Americas...one privileged, the other burdened...one America that does the work, another that reaps the reward. One America that pays the taxes, another America that gets the tax breaks." Indeed, trends in recent American history could make sense in that light. Over the past thirty years, the annual income of the poorest 20% has risen 10%; the top one percent has experienced 157% income growth in that time, and the average CEO’s salary (composing roughly the top .01% of the population) has risen nearly 3600%. In fact, that very .01, 13,000 individuals with an average income of $17.6 million, have earned almost 30% of the gains recorded by the top 10%. Indeed, America’s per capita GDP is far greater than Sweden’s, but so is its illiteracy rate, and infant mortality, while life expectancy here is shorter than in the socialist bastion. To the liberal-progressive, such inequality is the source of strife and misery; to right the world, he claims, we must redistribute the burgeoning riches of the wealthy to the poorer classes, by taxing a growing percentage of his income.

A second narrative at play in America offers some profound criticism of the liberal-progressive’s history. To a conservative-capitalist, such as Steven Landsburg of the Wall Street Journal, world history until about 1800 was a haze of squalor, misery, and oppression, with a few aristocrats living in palaces financed by the blood and sweat of peasants. Then, about 1800, a confluence of technology and liberty allowed millions to get rich, almost overnight. This overwhelming progress has only intensified over time, so that today, the average income increases by about 2.3% a year, meaning that incomes nearly double every half-century; even the “poor” in America enjoy luxuries beyond the imagination of any feudal lord: indoor plumbing, television, cars.

The conservative-capitalist sees growing income inequality as merely a new chapter in this story of boundless growth. Over the past thirty years, incredible strides in communications technology, particularly the information-sharing capacities of the Internet and fiber-optics, have created a global economy, one in which companies can extend their manufacturing- and supply-chains across continents, in which programmers in India and Palo Alto can seamlessly collaborate in real-time. A few visionary individuals—Bill Gates, Page and Brin of Google, Taguchi of Toyota—have seized the opportunities afforded by this new technology, and they have been rewarded fabulously for their efforts. Far from the source of the problem itself, these captains of industry are showing a new way forward, and even carrying the rest along with them: Windows’ uniform software platform, and Google’s database have allowed millions of others to innovate as well. Indeed, over the next ten years, America will likely gain 13.5 million new jobs, most of them in the technology and services sectors made possible (or profitable) by globalization. Of course, some Americans (as many as 800,000) will lose their jobs, as low-skill manufacturing and service work travels to cheaper labor markets. However, the capitalist-conservative would demand, not redistribution, but greater government spending in education, and some short-term financial assistance, to help the displaced workers develop new skills to engage the changing economy. Greater taxation, they insist, will only worsen matters by hobbling innovation and growth. In fact, the richest 1%, earning 17% of the GDP, pays 37% of all income taxes. Increasing their burden will not create more jobs to better American lives.

The conservative-capitalist offers a powerful critique of the liberal-progressive narrative, powerful principally because it seems mostly true: the world really is getting richer, and most Americans will likely catch up to the super-rich eventually. However, the conservative-capitalist, with his ultimate appeal to the quest for wealth, has little defense against the stark figures of American living standards. Yes, we are richer, we have more things, but we also die sooner, and work more than almost anyone in the West (the richest 10% of Americans work almost twice as much as the poorest 10%). In America, almost 1.2 million people a year die of heart disease; in Britain, one of Europe’s unhealthiest states, barely 120,000 people die from heart attacks yearly. America has more McDonald’s than any other nation, with nearly 1 franchise per 10,000 people. Americans also drink (on average) 216 liters of soda a year, more than anywhere else in the world. Could there be a connection here?

Free markets are not the disease afflicting America, but they do facilitate the disease, a cancer called consumerism. Consumerism is marketing-turned-religion, and its creed is, “More, and cheaper.” More food, cheaper, leads to McDonalds. More detergent, or blue jeans, cheaper, leads to Wal-Mart, and the death of Main Street America. Has Wal-Mart exploited the American people by selling them cheap underwear? Of course not—Americans have debased themselves by equating wealth with health, and thus sacrificing much that is wonderful to trivialities. More wealth, cheaper (e.g. faster) leads inevitably to Enron, and a culture of corporate corruption. The 20th century, with its gulags and Great Leaps Forward, proved the bankruptcy of Equality as an ideal; the 21st may well prove the bankruptcy of the idol of Wealth. As a culture, we need to articulate in vision of life in which men consist of more than the sum total of their possessions.

Perhaps the gospel, with its stunning alternative to consumerism, could show America a way forward. The gospel offers a better story; one of God’s restoring all of creation to shalom, or wholeness. The gospel calls for a new kind of society, one in which people give generously out of the prosperity they graciously receive, one in which forgiveness and mercy—not greed and malice—act as arbiters between men, one in which each thinks of others—his neighbors, his enemies, his environment—before himself. In the Kingdom, we can say, “Enough!” In the Kingdom, we do not hunger for things we don’t need, and that cannot satisfy. In the Kingdom, we do not poison ourselves, or pillage our home, for the expedience of the moment. In the Kingdom, our mantra is not, “More, and cheaper,” but, “Enough, and better.”