The late superstar economist Milton Friedman once delivered himself of a world-weary judgment by reference to the late economist John Maynard Keynes, that “we” – Americans? – “are all Keynesians now.”
We weren’t, and we aren’t, and who are “we” anyhow?
But there was a point to his judgment, one worth looking at in a time when Keynesianism is so regularly bashed, battered and beaten-down in many approaches to the economic order. If it is not prevailing, what replaces it?
Chris Lehmann, in Harper‘s, has a novel, focused, cogent name for the new order, one which also has to stretch the concept of “we” significantly, as he judges: “We are all Mormons now.”
Read on: This column is not a Mormon-bashing, battering, beating-down attempt to be relevant because the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints is in political news these seasons.
I have and have had too many friends, University of Chicago colleagues, former Ph.D. students and scholar-acquaintances at large who are Mormon for me to paint them all with a large, smudging brush.
Instead, I will attend to Lehmann’s article on some often overlooked reaches of Mormon-influenced economics, themes that would be relevant even if there were no Mormons running for any office.
In fact, you don’t even have to be Mormon to be Mormon in economics.
In Lehmann’s vision, you could get the equivalent without having heard of the LDS world.
For some, it does help to have this voiced through Mormon convert Glenn Beck or Steven Covey, supersalesmen of supersalesmanship; from Pentecostals like Joel Osteen, Creflo Dollar or Horatio Alger of old; or most Libertarians, Tea Partiers and the like.
Don’t give one church all the credit or blame for the current evolution. Many moderns can get there from the heights of Adam Smith to the depths of Ayn Rand.
Sometimes, overlapping between the descendants of Joseph Smith and Adam Smith are purely coincidental.
You can get all this straight and direct from Mark Skousen, who says and is happy to say that Mormonism is the Protestant ethic on steroids.
He speaks of an “Old Testament prosperity principle” in the Book of Mormon, “a kind of Abraham covenant. If you live a righteous life, God will bless you. Over and over, you read about the cycle of prosperity – a business cycle, if you will.”
The Mormons who live by this reading of the Old Testament, one that demands a good deal of winking as one reads through 500 pages of the Major and Minor prophets, have a “distrust of debt and government; they tend to fetishize precious metals and land assets, do well with tithing at church, and express disdain for motivation-sapping entitlements and the welfare state.”
“Perhaps most important, Mormons, unlike adherents of most mainline Protestant denominations, have very little ambivalence about the acquisition of wealth.”
Therefore “not for Mormons the queasy business about the camel going through the needle’s eye before a rich man enters the Kingdom of Heaven.”
Lehmann’s brush is a bit broad and unfair if it is seen as a critique of the Mormon church in isolation.
Too many Mormons individually go their own way so one cannot fairly make a universal out of the “Mormon economics” of which Lehmann speaks.
Today, however, you can get its values on the cheap, without reading a page of the Book of Mormon.
An advantage of buying into the secular translations of these teachings? Unlike faithful Mormons, you do not even have to tithe.
Martin E. Marty is the Fairfax M. Cone Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus at the University of Chicago. His column first appeared in Sightings.