Zero-Sum Follies

I was reviewing liberation theology, and reconfirmed that creating one fixed definition for it is, oh, like trying to write a description of the shape of an amoeba that applies over the entire lifespan of the creature. Other than “fluid, but not entirely.”

Like so many pre-modern and Marxist economic ideas, most forms of liberation theology that I have encountered assume that the world has a fixed amount of wealth and resources. Thus, if one group is poor or in decline, it is because another group has taken the poor’s share of the wealth. Mercantilism also used that idea, which in the case of Europe between roughly AD 500 CE and AD 1520 CE was much closer to correct, when you looked at ruling states and the quantity of gold available. Don’t look at silver, because that grew due to the opening of the Kutna Hora mines in Bohemia. In that case, yes, the quantity of gold was almost fixed, limited by the loss of Rome’s access to African gold resources after the expansion of Islam. But mercantilism failed when 1) the New World mines began producing, and 2) technology and early mass-production developed in the 1600s-1700s. Adam Smith among others made that point quite clearly.

However, zero-sum is easy. It explains what people see in their every-day existence, especially in a world where the government decides who wins and loses, based on who can bribe their way to escaping regulations and confiscations. “Hans has two cows. I have no cows. In a just world, I would have one cow and he would have one cow.” Or more commonly “Our village was richer until those people over there took our best fields and bribed the authorities/noble/corrupt abbot to ignore the theft.” It also scales up easily. I’ve heard international aid workers fall into that trap. “Mission groups to the Congo and the government of the Congo would have more resources and money from the US if Americans and the US government didn’t spend it on luxuries like having five fast-food outlets in the international arrivals terminal at JFK.” No, I’m not kidding. He had completely absorbed the zero-sum assumption. He also complained because the Congo didn’t get aid from the US while Rwanda did. Just because Congo was still in the middle of a massive series of internal conflicts with no confirmed central government didn’t matter.

Marx assumed that capitalists got rich by impoverishing their workers. Some writers on liberation theology assumed that individuals got rich by charging too much for goods because they had a monopoly, and they hurt their suppliers as well as consumers – one example was a bread factory that underpaid farmers for wheat and charged too much for the finished bread. This leads to “just price” arguments (which go back to Late Antiquity and lasted through to today) and calls for the government to seize the factories, or for the poor to seize the factories and pass out the bread to all who need it. That the factory owner might have been the only one willing to risk his money on a factory in that region, or the government had decided that only one factory was needed and so prevented competition . . . Requires a shift in worldview that can be very difficult. Like Marx admitting that workers did indeed have power, and that perhaps labor is not the only reason things cost a certain amount, or that a rising tide can lift more than just one boat.

Zero-sum is envy. “I want his cow,” “Just because they don’t have a corrupt government is no justification for us being poorer than Germany.”

Liberation theology, when done well with a good amount of intellectual honesty, has valid points and critiques of society, especially in parts of Latin America and Africa. Alas, it seems to only rarely be done well, and was/is abused to justify horror in the name of “G-d loves the poor the best of all.”

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