Moses said to the Israelites, “See, the Lord has called by name on Bezalel son of Uri son of Hur, from the tribe of Judah. He has filled Bezalel with his Spirit, to give him wisdom, understanding, and knowledge, for all kinds of craftsmanship, to make artistic designs and to work in gold, silver, and bronze; also to cut and set stones and to carve wood—to do all kinds of design and craftsmanship. He has put it in his heart to teach, both he and Oholiab son of Ahisamak, from the tribe of Dan. He has filled them with skill to do all kinds of work, to work as craftsmen, as engravers, as embroiderers in blue, purple, and scarlet wool and fine linen, and as weavers. They are craftsmen in all sorts of work, and they are artistic designers” (Exodus 35:30–35).
God empowered Bezalel to be a master craftsman. He also empowered him to be a teacher. He then empowered his student, Oholiab. That was merely the beginning. “So Bezalel and Oholiab and every skilled person to whom the Lord has given skill and ability to know how to do any work in the construction of the holy place are to do the work according to all that the Lord has commanded” (Exodus 36:1). There is a lesson here. There is always a need for skilled craftsmen. If you want to produce something great, it is not sufficient to hire workers who understand only the basics. The Israelites understood the basics. They had served as builders in Egypt. That was not sufficient.
It is also not sufficient to have a detailed blueprint. God provided a detailed blueprint for the tabernacle. The craftsmen knew what was required. Chapters 36 through 39 describe in detail what the craftsmen did. This is the longest passage in the Bible that is devoted to a single historical topic. Few people read it carefully. They skip over the details. Yet there is an important lesson in this passage. No matter how detailed the specifications are for any project, it takes highly specialized, highly skilled people to complete it. Over time, algorithms and robots will replace millions of skilled workers, but it will take highly skilled programmers and robot designers to enable this replacement. Only if computer programs master the art of writing software will humans no longer be part of the process. But total replacement cannot happen. Why not? Because human beings are responsible before God for the fulfilment of their share of the dominion covenant. God did not make a covenant with impersonal digits. He does not hold robots responsible. Responsibility is inescapably legal and personal.
Next, there will always be a role to play by virtuosos. Digital mastery will never be sufficient. There will always be a short supply of virtuosos.
What is true of physical projects is equally true of intellectual projects. There will always be demand for master craftsmen in every academic discipline. These people are creative. They go beyond the mere blueprints. They create things of beauty.
I am inviting you to do the mental work to achieve journeyman status. Then go beyond to become a craftsman and then a master craftsman. Who knows? You may even become a virtuoso. But it will take years of hard work. You may not receive applause from men.
There is a familiar saying that we apply to every area of human action: “This is more art than science.” The person who says this may think he is making a profound observation about some human skill, whether physical or mental, but he is simply repeating what we call a commonplace. There is nothing unique about the observation. This would be a unique observation: “This field is entirely a science. There is nothing artistic about it.”
The scientific aspect of any discipline has to do with fixed laws: repeatable patterns. These patterns are so familiar that a brand-new student can usually learn a few basics. These are entry-level basics for entry-level students. These basics, when mastered, enable the student to go on to the next stage. He will learn about and then master more complex patterns. This pattern of learning is familiar in every field.
In every field, the level of mastery required to advance to the next stage proves to be too difficult or too uninteresting for some students to advance. They may stop trying. They may content themselves with performance levels that are associated with journeyman status. Others may become competent but undistinguished performers. Fewer still will become masters. At the top are virtuosos.
At every stage, there are skills that cannot be taught by conventional educational programs. The higher up the ladder of skills, the more that attainment is dependent on a mentor. The mentor can put into words, actions, and especially observations what a manual cannot. I often use the example of tying a pair of shoelaces. A video can show a newcomer how to do this when a written description cannot. Some learners will require literal hands-on instruction.
At every stage, a student must possess untaught and previously unknown aptitudes in order to advance to the next stage. The more proficient that the student must be, the more that observers call this an art. When we cannot explain verbally what the skill is or requires, we use the word “art.” It means this: unteachable by conventional training methods. In economic theory, the supreme example is entrepreneurship. Some people can foresee what future consumers will be willing and able to pay. This cannot be taught. This is why they can gain an above-average rate of return, called profit, but sometimes called entrepreneurial profit. We could just as accurately call this artistic profit.
The highest levels of performance in any field are more art than science. This means that they cannot be described verbally and taught by a formal system of instruction.
This applies to economic theory. There are basics in economic theory. They involve gaining an understanding of such terms as these: “supply and demand,” “scarcity,” “cost,” “incentives,” “profit and loss,” “ceteris paribus” [conditions remaining constant], and many others. The greater the intellectual skill of the student, the greater his understanding of these terms. He can get beyond the ability to define them. He can provide examples from the real world. In short, he gains the skill of casuistry: applying general principles of economic analysis to real-world conditions.
As students advance beyond their Economics 1 course, formal classroom instruction in economic theory steadily moves away from simple definitions and simple examples. It introduces higher mathematics and complex graphs. It requires the mastery of jargon. Example: “The marginal cost curve intersects the average total unit cost curve at the point of optimum productivity.” Problem: the idea of a cost curve is misleading. This is because human action deals with discrete purposes, plans, and decisions—discontinuities—not continuities that are mathematically indistinguishable from before and after, from “go/no go.” This is why Ludwig von Mises never used graphs. He also never used the calculus to explain human action. Graphs and lines apply to changes in physics, in which there is no decision-making by the things being measured, but not human action. Academic economists have adopted the model of physics, which Mises opposed. The academic guild has ignored him. Anyone who doubts me should look at the first page of any three articles in the scholarly journal, Econometrica. This is what happens when intellectuals attempt to make any social science a pure science with physics as the model.
The art of persuasion is called rhetoric. It has to do with images, symbols, metaphors, and analogies. There are rules of rhetoric going back to Aristotle, but it takes artistry to transform these rules into persuasive speech or writing. There are students of rhetoric who can list these rules in an examination, but most of them are unable to persuade audiences of much of anything, other than the desire to stop listening. I have never taken a course in rhetoric or read a book on it, yet I have had the ability to change the minds of large audiences ever since I was 16 years old. No one taught me how to do this. In the area of public speaking, I am an artist, not a scientist. This has in no way hampered me.
I am at the tail end of a dual career as an economic theorist and a professional writer. I have read many books on economic theory. I have written dozens of books on the topic, and thousands of articles. I understand the logic of economic theory. I understand how to structure an argument. Trust me when I say that economists follow no pattern in presenting the heralded science of economics. Textbooks have chapters on certain aspects of economics that other textbooks include, but not in the same sequence. The logic of some textbooks may be similar, but there is little unity of presentation. There will be some agreement on theory and policy. Most textbooks favor low tariffs and free trade. They criticize cartels, with one glaring exception: central banking. They criticize monopolies, but they do not consider the argument that almost all monopolies are produced by government intervention into the free market. They do not conclude that there is no need for anti-trust legislation. Rather, there is a need for the repeal of laws that promote monopolies and oligopolies. They call for more government regulation, not less.
We might conclude this: “If economic theory were really a science, there would not be such disagreement on basic laws. There would not be such variations in presentation.” That conclusion would be incorrect. In every scientific guild, there are irreconcilable disagreements. Textbooks deliberately conceal the extent of these disagreements. Also, within every scientific guild, there are variations of presentation, even in introductory textbooks. The more advanced the level of science, the more disagreements and variations there are.
There is a wider range of artistry than there is of agreement. The agreements are sufficient to establish the intellectual boundaries of a science or an academic discipline. This is true of every profession. But these boundaries are not rigid. There are creative academic practitioners who borrow from other disciplines. Some of these practitioners are virtuosos because of this creative borrowing. The field of behavioral economics, which began in the 1970's, was pioneered by a pair of Israeli psychologists, Amos Twersky and Daniel Kahneman. Twersky was more of a scientist. Kahneman was more of an artist. The story of their partnership was written by one of the most artistically gifted and financially successful non-fiction authors of the early twenty-first century, Michael Lewis: The Undoing Project (2016). The field of law and economics, which began in the late 1950's, was initially a joint effort between free market economists associated with the University of Chicago and legal theorists who were also associated with the University of Chicago. The most influential economist of the twentieth century was John Maynard Keynes. He received only a bachelor’s degree in mathematics.
If you think you are qualified, and you are determined to find the time, I want you to pursue the life of a scholar. If you do this, you should not imitate this book or any other treatise. Treatises are highly individualized. There are no fixed guidelines for the sequence of categories or topics. Rothbard’s Man, Economy and State presents much the same content that we find in Mises’ Human Action, but the chapter titles are different, and so is their sequence. George Reisman’s treatise, Capitalism, written by a student of Mises and a friend of Rothbard’s, is very different in structure from the other authors’ treatises. There is science here. There is also artistry.
You should strive to master the categories of economic theory, but you should then apply your own artistry.
It is difficult for people to think of a complex system without at some point relying on a metaphor or an analogy to clarify in their own minds what the system is all about. Metaphors and analogies are even more important in teaching. People do not follow long chains of reasoning. Even when they do, they can rarely remember each of the links in the chain. This is why we rely on metaphors and analogies to help people understand cause-and-effect. (Example: links in a chain of reasoning.)
1. “I, Pencil.”
If you have read Volume 2, Teacher’s Edition, you have been introduced to much of the scientific basis of economics. By this, I mean a journeyman’s understanding of patterns of human behavior that are based on economic incentives. But you have been introduced to more than a journeyman’s understanding. Volume 2 rests on a work of brilliant artistry: Leonard E. Read’s essay, “I, Pencil.” That was a deliberate metaphor: an autobiography of a pencil. It revealed the power of the division of labor. I then used an analogy to explain the market process: an auction. The market really is an auction, but it has not been discussed by economists as an auction. I came up with that analogy in the mid-1970's. It came to me unexpectedly when I was trying to explain the price effects of central banking’s injection of money into the commercial banking system.
As it turns out, Mises used this metaphor in 1949. I failed to remember this. I came across it in my just-in-case-I-missed-anything-important re-reading of Human Action in 2019. He wrote briefly of entrepreneurs as participants in an auction. “The entrepreneurs, eager to earn profits, appear as bidders at an auction, as it were, in which the owners of the factors of production put up for sale land, capital goods, and labor. The entrepreneurs are eager to outdo one another by bidding higher prices than their rivals.” He did not apply this insight to the market process in general. If he had, and if he had done this early enough in his book, his book would have been far more powerful both rhetorically and analytically. This is because the free market really is a gigantic auction. An auction would have been a far better metaphor than the most famous metaphor in economic theory, Adam Smith’s invisible hand. If Smith had understood that the market is a gigantic auction, The Wealth of Nations would have been a more powerful book rhetorically and analytically.
You should be aware of the power of metaphors to convey understanding. Parents use metaphors to help their children understand difficult topics. This does not cease when we grow older. Metaphors continue to shape our thinking. The imagery conveyed by the phrase Big Bang shapes the thinking of most humanists, yet what cosmologists describe as having taken place does not conform to anything on earth that explodes. How many intellectuals who have invoked the Big Bang have explained accurately what supposedly took place or how its supposed chronology is defended? Almost none.
2. Nisbet on Metaphor
Half a century ago, a book by my mentor Robert Nisbet was published: Social Change and History (1969). It dealt with a series of intellectually powerful metaphors. He began the Introduction with this section: “History and Metaphor.”
No one has ever seen a civilization die, and it is unimaginable, short of cosmic disaster or thermonuclear Holocaust, that anyone ever will. Nor has anyone ever seen a civilization—or culture or institution—in a literal process of decay and degeneration, though there is a rich profusion of these words and their synonyms in Western thought from Hesiod to Spengler. Nor, finally, has anyone ever seen—culturally, empirically seen, as we see these things in the world of plants and animals—growth and development in the civilizations and societies and cultures, with all that is clearly implied by these words: change proceeding gradually, cumulatively, and irreversibly, through a kind of unfolding of internal potentiality, the whole moving toward some and that is presumably contained in the process from the start. We see none of these things in culture: death, degeneration, development, birth. All that we see are the mingled facts of persistence and change. We see migrations and wars, dynasties toppled, governments overthrown, economic systems made affluent or poor; revolutions in power, privilege and wealth. We see human beings born, meeting, child-rearing, working, worshiping, playing, educating writing, philosophizing, governing. . . . . But we do not see “death,” “decadence,” “degeneration,” or “sickness,” we do not see “genesis,” “growth,” “unfolding,” or “development.” Not in cultures and societies (p. 3).
Nisbet was a defender of the use of metaphors. His book is a profound defense of the use of such metaphors. He believed that it is not possible to understand the world around us without relying on metaphors. He wrote: “What is a metaphor? Much more than a simple grammatical construction or figure of speech. Metaphor is a way of knowing—one of the oldest, most deeply embedded, even indispensable ways of knowing in the history of human consciousness. It is, at its simplest, a way of proceeding from the known to the unknown” (p. 4). My position is this: scholars should avoid reliance on metaphors as substitutes for careful analysis. Causation is not based on metaphors. It would have been far better for the history of free-market economic theory if Adam Smith had never invoked the invisible hand. It would have been far better if he had invoked the providence of the Trinitarian God. But that is not a metaphor.
3. Humanism’s Twin Metaphors
Nisbet pointed out that social theory relies on two conflicting metaphors: the machine and the organism. The machine is a fixed construction. It can move internally, but it cannot develop. Its parts may grow rusty and break, and it may shut down. It cannot repair itself. It does not evolve. It is designed from the outside, and it is manufactured from the outside. It is predictable. It usually is reliable. It offers no surprises. In contrast is the organism. It changes constantly. It grows. If it is injured, it repairs itself. If we are to believe modern evolutionary theory, a species actually evolves over time. This process is fundamentally different from the machine. The first metaphor has been dominant ever since the days of Sir Isaac Newton: the late 1600's. The second metaphor has steadily replaced Newtonianism. It is associated with Charles Darwin (1859). Nisbet believed that the conceptual power of organism has been greater than that of mechanism. He explained why in his chapter on metaphor in his book, Prejudices: A Philosophical Dictionary (1982). Nevertheless, in economic theory, mechanism is by far the more dominant metaphor.
Both of these metaphors offer no hope to man. The machine eventually wears out and stops working. This is an aspect of the second law of thermodynamics, also known as entropy. There is no way that a self-contained machine can continue to operate indefinitely. This is also true of the cosmos in general. There will eventually be the heat death of the universe. All life will end. All progress will end. All meaning will end. I discuss this in Appendix B. Then there is the metaphor of the organism. All organisms eventually die. The only hope for those who believe in the organism is this: there can be species evolution. Species evolution implies that mankind may someday be replaced by something that has evolved out of mankind, or conceivably has evolved from another line of life, possibly extraterrestrial. Man will evolve. Man’s standards will evolve. By the time of the heat death of the universe, mankind will not exist. Mankind may not exist any longer within a million years or so. Some frightened analysts argue that digital evolution may replace mankind within a century. Everything that mankind has built will either fall to rubble, mechanically speaking, or return to dust, organically speaking.
I do not accept either as these metaphors as valid in economic analysis. The Bible does give a little credence to the organic metaphor. Paul writes of the church as being made up of members (Romans 12:4; I Corinthians 12:12–27). This is why we called those who belong to churches members. The Bible speaks of the church as Christ’s bride. But there is no hint of evolution. There is an absolute denial that the church will ever die. It extends into eternity, according to Revelation 21 and 22.
It is common for economists to speak of the free market as a mechanism. I have done my best in recent years to avoid speaking of the free market as a mechanism. I much prefer to speak of it as an auction. It is a developing process; it is not a mechanism.
4. Continuity and Change
I raise this issue because of the ancient philosophical problem of continuity and change.
Human thought cannot escape the problem of continuity and change. To understand the world around us, we must use fixed logic. We must also perceive external reality, which is constantly changing. Our logic must apply to the changing environment. It must assess the change in terms of our logic. This means that there must be correspondence between our orderly logic and the orderly but changing external world. This is the central issue of epistemology.
The Bible says that God does not change. “I will not break my covenant or change the words of my lips” (Psalm 89:34). “Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above. It comes down from the Father of lights. With him there is no changing or shadow because of turning” (James 1:17). “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever” (Hebrews 13:8). The orderliness of God’s mind is the basis of the orderliness of our minds. We are made in His image. God runs the world providentially, so that our minds can understand the world around us.
Humanists reject the idea of God’s providence: cosmic personalism. They insist that the external realm of nature is governed by impersonal, meaningless chance. Yet they also insist that the external realm of nature is orderly. Therefore, science is possible. Technology is possible. Social theory is possible. This dualism goes back to Parmenides and Heraclitus. Parmenides believed in logic. What man’s mind determines is the only reality. This is the realm of pure law. On the contrary, said Heraclitus, everything changes. This must include logic. This is the realm of pure chance. These are two inconsistent realms. As men say, “never the twain shall meet.” But humanists insist that they must meet if we are not to go insane.
To help you understand these two positions, I now invoke humanism’s competing metaphors. It is legitimate to think of the philosophy of Parmenides as mechanistic. In his system, logic is a self-contained whole. It is like a machine with no broken parts. Heraclitus saw historical change as organic: a flowing river. In contrast, the biblical explanation of social change is neither mechanistic nor organic. It is covenantal/judicial. It is grounded in ethics. Neither an autonomous machine nor an autonomous organism is grounded in ethics.
In Part 3 of Student’s Edition, I presented the five categories of the practical agenda of Christian economics: providence, service, leasehold, entrepreneurship, and compounding. This agenda has to do with redemption: covenant-keepers’ repurchase of the world on behalf of God. This is the issue of stewardship. These categories are crucial for enabling covenant-keepers to think clearly about the agenda of Christian stewardship.
This agenda raises a question: “What are the five parallel categories of Christian economic theory that undergird this agenda?” In Part 2 of this volume, I presented what I regard as the five most general conceptual categories of Christian economics: purpose, allocation, boundaries, imputation, and inheritance. These categories structure analytically the many insights of economic theory. Non-Christian economists can and should use secularized applications of these categories in order to improve their versions of economic theory. Their reconstructions will still be covenantally incorrect, but more coherent than the approaches they use today.
Part 3 presents my self-consciously Christian reconstruction of the more familiar categories of humanistic economic theory. They are found in treatises and textbooks by humanistic economists, but always structured in terms of the presuppositions of human autonomy and mankind’s agenda. My conclusions are generally consistent with the conclusions of free market economists, especially Austrian School economists. But my epistemological presuppositions are radically different. I am neither a nominalist nor a realist. I am a covenantalist. I am neither a deductivist nor an inductivist. I am a presuppositionalist. These distinctions matter.
If you want to understand the strategic difference between Christian economics and humanistic economics, begin here: “No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and mammon” (Matthew 6:24, King James Version).
In order to conform to what I think is a fundamental and inescapable aspect of everyone’s life, namely, personal responsibility before God, I have focused on responsibility. It is best for Christians to explain the operation of the economy in terms of man’s responsibility, individual and corporate, before God. I link responsibility with ownership. The dominion covenant commands the extension of mankind’s corporate responsibility over the earth. This means, inescapably, the extension of individuals’ ownership of portions of the earth. Economic theory should begin with judicial principle of ownership, meaning God’s original ownership. To understand the economics of ownership, we must first understand purpose, for God had a purpose for the creation, and His creation of the universe established His original ownership. The greatest single benefit of the free market system is its legal link between personal responsibility, personal action, and personal self-interest. This is why the free market always triumphs over every other form of ownership.
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