Group items tagged

Through social media, “sharing with friends” is rationalized to the point of relentless efficiency. The current apex of such rationalization is frictionless sharing: we no longer need to perform the labor of telling our individual friends about what we read online, or of copy-pasting links and emailing them to “the list,” or of clicking a button for one-step posting of links on our Facebook walls. With frictionless sharing, all we have to do is look, or listen; what we’ve read or watched or listened to is then “shared” or “scrobbled” to our Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, or whatever other online profiles. Whether we share content actively or passively, however, we feel as though we’ve done our half of the friendship-labor by ‘pushing’ the information to our walls, streams, and tumblelogs. It’s then up to our friends to perform their halves of the friendship-labor by ‘pulling’ the information we share from those platforms.

We’re busy people; we like the idea of making one announcement on Facebook and being done with it, rather than having to repeat the same story over and over again to different friends individually. We also like not always having to think about which friends might like which stories or songs; we like the idea of sharing with all of our friends at once, and then letting them sort out amongst themselves who is and isn’t interested. Though social media can create burdensome expectations to keep up with strong ties, weak ties, and everyone in between, social media platforms can also be very efficient. Using the same moment of friendship-labor to tend multiple friendships at once kills more birds with fewer stones.

sometimes we like the devolution of friendship. When we have to ‘pull’ friendship-content instead of receiving it in a ‘push’, we can pick and choose which content items to pull. We can ignore the baby pictures, or the pet pictures, or the sushi pictures—whatever it is our friends post that we only pretend to care about

I’ve been thinking since, however, on what it means to view our friends as “generalized others.” I may now feel like less of like “creepy stalker” when I click on a song in someone’s Spotify feed, but I don’t exactly feel ‘shared with’ either. Far as I know, I’ve never been SpotiVaguebooked (or SubSpotified?); I have no reason to think anyone is speaking to me personally as they listen to music, or as they choose not to disable scrobbling (if they make that choice consciously at all). I may have been granted the opportunity to view something, but it doesn’t follow that what I’m viewing has anything to do with me unless I choose to make it about me. Devolved friendship means it’s not up to us to interact with our friends personally; instead it’s now up to our friends to make our generalized broadcasts personal.

While I won’t go so far as to say they’re definitely ‘problems,’ there are two major things about devolved friendship that I think are worth noting. The first is the non-uniform rationalization of friendship-labor, and the second is the depersonalization of friendship-labor.

In short, “sharing” has become a lot easier and a lot more efficient, but “being shared with” has become much more time-consuming, demanding, and inefficient (especially if we don’t ignore most of our friends most of the time). Given this, expecting our friends to keep up with our social media content isn’t expecting them to meet us halfway; it’s asking them to take on the lion’s share of staying in touch with us. Our jobs (in this role) have gotten easier; our friends’ jobs have gotten harder.

The second thing worth noting is that devolved friendship is also depersonalized friendship.

Personal interaction doesn’t just happen on Spotify, and since I was hoping Spotify would be the New Porch, I initially found Spotify to be somewhat lonely-making. It’s the mutual awareness of presence that gives companionate silence its warmth, whether in person or across distance. The silence within Spotify’s many sounds, on the other hand, felt more like being on the outside looking in. This isn’t to say that Spotify can’t be social in a more personal way; once I started sending tracks to my friends, a few of them started sending tracks in return. But it took a lot more work to get to that point, which gets back to the devolution of friendship (as I explain below).

Within devolved friendship interactions, it takes less effort to be polite while secretly waiting for someone to please just stop talking.

When we consider the lopsided rationalization of ‘sharing’ and ‘shared with,’ as well as the depersonalization of frictionless sharing and generalized broadcasting, what becomes clear is this: the social media deck is stacked in such a way as to make being ‘a self’ easier and more rewarding than being ‘a friend.’

It’s easy to share, to broadcast, to put our selves and our tastes and our identity performances out into the world for others to consume; what feedback and friendship we get in return comes in response to comparatively little effort and investment from us. It takes a lot more work, however, to do the consumption, to sift through everything all (or even just some) of our friends produce, to do the work of connecting to our friends’ generalized broadcasts so that we can convert their depersonalized shares into meaningful friendship-labor.

We may be prosumers of social media, but the reward structures of social media sites encourage us to place greater emphasis on our roles as share-producers—even though many of us probably spend more time consuming shared content than producing it. There’s a reason for this, of course; the content we produce (for free) is what fuels every last ‘Web 2.0’ machine, and its attendant self-centered sociality is the linchpin of the peculiarly Silicon Valley concept of “Social” (something Nathan Jurgenson and I discuss together in greater detail here). It’s not super-rewarding to be one of ten people who “like” your friend’s shared link, but it can feel rewarding to get 10 “likes” on something you’ve shared—even if you have hundreds or thousands of ‘friends.’ Sharing is easy; dealing with all that shared content is hard.

t I wonder sometimes if the shifts in expectation that accompany devolved friendship don’t migrate across platforms and contexts in ways we don’t always see or acknowledge. Social media affects how we see the world—and how we feel about being seen in the world—even when we’re not engaged directly with social media websites. It’s not a stretch, then, to imagine that the affordances of social media platforms might also affect how we see friendship and our obligations as friends most generally.

Making friends can be hard—but there may be more opportunities than we think. Doing these interviews has taught me that connection can come from anywhere, at any time, if both parties are open to it.

“You have to look for friendship in places you would never expect it.”

Paying attention goes a long way when forging these unexpected friendships—noticing when you click with someone, being open to chance encounters.

as much as we may feel like our social networks are set and settled, it’s never too late to meet someone who will be important to you for the rest of your life. I spoke with more than one group who was surprised and grateful to have found one another in middle age, a period when work and family responsibilities tend to peak and keeping up with friends is not always easy.

I’m inspired by the people I’ve spoken with who imagined something different for themselves: the friends who bought a house together, who went to therapy together, who have raised their children together, who committed to an “arranged friendship,” whose friendship has fueled their fight for justice.

they won’t grow without intention. This is the hardest part of friendship. It takes energy and thought, and our mental and physical resources are often spread thin. In other words, friendships take work. But I have never liked framing our friendships as labor. Showing up for our friends takes effort, yes, but it shouldn’t be drudgery. It should be a joy.

One thing that seems to make keeping up with friends easier is ritual. I personally find that the effort of coordinating hangs (or even phone calls) is the biggest barrier to seeing my friends. It’s much easier when something is baked into my schedule, and all I have to do is show up.

Some have organized a book club, a monthly hike, or a regular dinner party. Others have committed to a group chat that runs all day every day, or a Dungeons & Dragons campaign that’s lasted for 30 years. In addition to keeping groups close, these traditions can fuel a friendship and give it a shared culture.

Imagination

Society has a place for friendships, and it’s on the sidelines. They’re supposed to play a supporting role to work, family, and romance. It takes imagination not to default to this norm, and to design your life so that friendship plays the role you really want it to.

Attention only gets you so far without action. When opportunity arises, you have to put yourself out there, and that requires courage, vulnerability, and a willingness to let things be awkward.

The man who gave his friend a kidney and the woman who gave birth to her best friend’s quadruplets remind me that there are friends who choose to love each other radically every day. Their love does not stand on the sidelines.

The beauty and the challenge of friendship is its diversity. A friendship can be whatever you want it to. Each one is a canvas whose only limit is our imagination.

Grace

All of the forces I’ve mentioned so far—accumulation, attention, intention, ritual, and imagination—are ideals. They’re impossible to fully live up to. Life often gets in the way.

I do love the concept of grace, of a gift so profound that it could never be earned or deserved. And so when I cite grace here as the final and most important force in friendships, I mean it in two ways. One is the forgiveness that we offer each other when we fall short. The other is the space that creates for connections—and reconnections—that feel nothing short of miraculous.

Many of the people I spoke with—who, in many cases, love each other so much that they nominated themselves to be interviewed about their friendship—told me that they don’t see each other that often, or that they don’t talk as much as they would like. I’ve come to believe that friendship doesn’t always have to be about presence; it can also be about love that can weather absence.

Sometimes, people have assumed that I must be a really great friend, given how much time I’ve spent thinking about this. And I’m not. I try to be, but I tend to retreat too much into myself and my romantic relationship and don’t prioritize my friends as much as I’d like to.

But absence doesn’t have to last forever. “The Friendship Files” includes many stories of second chances and rekindlings.

Accumulation

Attention

Intention

Ritual

Essentially, the “generalized friendship paradox” applies to all interpersonal networks, regardless of whether they’re set in real life or online.

Whenever we interact with other people, we glimpse lives far more glamorous than our own.

The study analyzed friendship ties among 84 subjects (ages 23 to 38) in a business management class by asking them to rank one another on a five-point continuum of closeness from “I don’t know this person” to “One of my best friends.” The feelings were mutual 53 percent of the time while the expectation of reciprocity was pegged at 94 percent. This is consistent with data from several other friendship studies conducted over the past decade, encompassing more than 92,000 subjects, in which the reciprocity rates ranged from 34 percent to 53 percent.

“Friendship is difficult to describe,” said Alexander Nehamas, a professor of philosophy at Princeton, who in his latest book, “On Friendship,” spends almost 300 pages trying to do just that. “It’s easier to say what friendship is not and, foremost, it is not instrumental.”

It is not a means to obtain higher status, wangle an invitation to someone’s vacation home or simply escape your own boredom. Rather, Mr. Nehamas said, friendship is more like beauty or art, which kindles something deep within us and is “appreciated for its own sake.

“Treating friends like investments or commodities is anathema to the whole idea of friendship,” said Ronald Sharp, a professor of English at Vassar College, who teaches a course on the literature of friendship. “It’s not about what someone can do for you, it’s who and what the two of you become in each other’s presence.”

“The notion of doing nothing but spending time in each other’s company has, in a way, become a lost art,” replaced by volleys of texts and tweets, Mr. Sharp said. “People are so eager to maximize efficiency of relationships that they have lost touch with what it is to be a friend.”

By his definition, friends are people you take the time to understand and allow to understand you.

Because time is limited, so, too, is the number of friends you can have, according to the work of the British evolutionary psychologist Robin I.M. Dunbar. He describes layers of friendship, where the topmost layer consists of only one or two people, say a spouse and best friend with whom you are most intimate and interact daily. The next layer can accommodate at most four people for whom you have great affinity, affection and concern and who require weekly attention to maintain. Out from there, the tiers contain more casual friends with whom you invest less time and tend to have a less profound and more tenuous connection. Without consistent contact, they easily fall into the realm of acquaintance. You may be friendly with them but they aren’t friends.

“There is a limited amount of time and emotional capital we can distribute, so we only have five slots for the most intense type of relationship,” Mr. Dunbar said. “People may say they have more than five but you can be pretty sure they are not high-quality friendships.

Such boasting implies they have soul mates to spare in a culture where we are taught that leaning on someone is a sign of weakness and power is not letting others affect you. But friendship requires the vulnerability of caring as well as revealing things about yourself that don’t match the polished image in your Facebook profile or Instagram feed, said Mr. Nehamas at Princeton. Trusting that your bond will continue, and might even be strengthened, despite your shortcomings and inevitable misfortunes, he said, is a risk many aren’t willing to take.

According to medical experts, playing it safe by engaging in shallow, unfulfilling or nonreciprocal relationships has physical repercussions. Not only do the resulting feelings of loneliness and isolation increase the risk of death as much as smoking, alcoholism and obesity; you may also lose tone, or function, in the so-called smart vagus nerve, which brain researchers think allows us to be in intimate, supportive and reciprocal relationships in the first place.

In the presence of a true friend, Dr. Banks said, the smart or modulating aspect of the vagus nerve is what makes us feel at ease rather than on guard as when we are with a stranger or someone judgmental. It’s what enables us to feel O.K. about exposing the soft underbelly of our psyche and helps us stay engaged and present in times of conflict. Lacking authentic friendships, the smart vagus nerve is not exercised. It loses tone and one’s anxiety remains high, making abiding, deep connections difficult.

Starting in early adulthood, our number of friends starts to decrease steadily.

we lose an average of two friends when we gain a romantic partner.

We are constantly shedding our friends,”

“We grow in one direction, our friends grow in another, and there isn’t much in common anymore.”

But it gets harder to make friends as we get older. We have less time to pursue friendships. It is tougher to find people with similar interests and emotional styles when you no longer have a ready-made pool of classmates to choose from. School also provides a steady routine for people to develop intimacy slowly and naturally.

We also become more inhibited

If you want new friends, you need to look with intention. And, just as you would when looking for a mate, you need to look for someone who has something in common with you, and who is emotionally available.

“Over 100 likes is good, for me. And comments. You just comment to make a joke or tag someone.”

The best thing is the little notification box, which means someone liked, tagged or followed her on Instagram. She has 604 followers. There are only 25 photos on her page because she deletes most of what she posts. The ones that don’t get enough likes, don’t have good enough lighting or don’t show the coolest moments in her life must be deleted.

Sociologists, advertisers, stock market analysts – everyone wants to know what happens when the generation born glued to screens has to look up and interact with the world.

“It kind of, almost, promotes you as a good person. If someone says, ‘tbh you’re nice and pretty,’ that kind of, like, validates you in the comments. Then people can look at it and say ‘Oh, she’s nice and pretty.’ ”

School is where she thrives: She is beloved by her teachers, will soon star as young Simba in the eighth-grade performance of “The Lion King” musical, and gets straight A’s. Her school doesn’t offer a math course challenging enough for her, so she takes honors algebra online through Johns Hopkins University.

“Happy birthday posts are a pretty big deal,” she says. “It really shows who cares enough to put you on their page.”

He checks the phone bill to see who she’s called and how much she’s been texting, but she barely calls anyone and chats mostly through Snapchat, where her messages disappear.

Some of Katherine’s very best friends have never been to her house, or she to theirs. To Dave, it seems like they rarely hang out, but he knows that to her, it seems like they’re together all the time.

Dave Pommerening wants to figure out how to get her to use it less. One month, she ate up 18 gigabytes of data. Most large plans max out at 10. He intervened and capped her at four GB. “I don’t want to crimp it too much,” he says. “That’s something, from my perspective, I’m going to have to figure out, how to get my arms around that.”

Even if her dad tried snooping around her apps, the true dramas of teenage girl life are not written in the comments. Like how sometimes, Katherine’s friends will borrow her phone just to un-like all the Instagram photos of girls they don’t like. Katherine can’t go back to those girls’ pages and re-like the photos because that would be stalking, which is forbidden.

Or how last week, at the middle school dance, her friends got the phone numbers of 10 boys, but then they had to delete five of them because they were seventh-graders. And before she could add the boys on Snapchat, she realized she had to change her username because it was her childhood nickname and that was totally embarrassing.

Then, because she changed her username, her Snapchat score reverted to zero. The app awards about one point for every snap you send and receive. It’s also totally embarrassing and stressful to have a low Snapchat score. So in one day, she sent enough snaps to earn 1,000 points.

Snapchat is where flirting happens. She doesn’t know anyone who has sent a naked picture to a boy, but she knows it happens with older girls, who know they have met the right guy.

Nothing her dad could find on her phone shows that for as good as Katherine is at math, basketball and singing, she wants to get better at her phone. To be one of the girls who knows what to post, how to caption it, when to like, what to comment.

Katherine doesn’t need magazines or billboards to see computer-perfect women. They’re right on her phone, all the time, in between photos of her normal-looking friends. There’s Aisha, there’s Kendall Jenner’s butt. There’s Olivia, there’s YouTube star Jenna Marbles in lingerie.

The whole world is at her fingertips and has been for years. This, Katherine offers as a theory one day, is why she doesn’t feel like she’s 13 years old at all. She’s probably, like, 16.

“I don’t feel like a child anymore” she says. “I’m not doing anything childish. At the end of sixth grade” — when all her friends got phones and downloaded Snapchat, Instagram and Twitter — “I just stopped doing everything I normally did. Playing games at recess, playing with toys, all of it, done.”

Her scooter sat in the garage, covered in dust. Her stuffed animals were passed down to Lila. The wooden playground in the back yard stood empty. She kept her skateboard with neon yellow wheels, because riding it is still cool to her friends.

On the morning of her 14th birthday, Katherine wakes up to an alarm ringing on her phone. It’s 6:30 a.m. She rolls over and shuts it off in the dark. Her grandparents, here to celebrate the end of her first year of teenagehood, are sleeping in the guest room down the hall. She can hear the dogs shuffling across the hardwood downstairs, waiting to be fed. Propping herself up on her peace-sign-covered pillow, she opens Instagram. Later, Lila will give her a Starbucks gift card. Her dad will bring doughnuts to her class. Her grandparents will take her to the Melting Pot for dinner. But first, her friends will decide whether to post pictures of Katherine for her birthday. Whether they like her enough to put a picture of her on their page. Those pictures, if they come, will get likes and maybe tbhs. They should be posted in the morning, any minute now. She scrolls past a friend posing in a bikini on the beach. Then a picture posted by Kendall Jenner. A selfie with coffee. A basketball Vine. A selfie with a girl’s tongue out. She scrolls, she waits. For that little notification box to appear.

In our study, we presented hundreds of participants with stories like the one above and asked them questions about obligation, ability and blame. Did they think someone should keep a promise she made but couldn’t keep? Was she even capable of keeping her promise? And how much was she to blame for what happened?

We found a consistent pattern, but not what most philosophers would expect. “Ought” judgments depended largely on concerns about blame, not ability. With stories like the one above, in which a friend intentionally sabotages you, 60 percent of our participants said that the obligation still held — your friend still ought to drive you to the airport. But with stories in which the inability to help was accidental, the obligation all but disappeared. Now, only 31 percent of our participants said your friend still ought to drive you.

Professor Sinnott-Armstrong’s unorthodox intuition turns out to be shared by hundreds of nonphilosophers. So who is right? The vast majority of philosophers, or our participants?One possibility is that our participants were wrong, perhaps because their urge to blame impaired the accuracy of their moral judgments. To test this possibility, we stacked the deck in the favor of philosophical orthodoxy: We had the participants look at cases in which the urge to assign blame would be lowest — that is, only the cases in which the car accidentally broke down. Even still, we found no relationship between “ought” and “can.” The only significant relationship was between “ought” and “blame.”

This finding has an important implication: Even when we say that someone has no obligation to keep a promise (as with your friend whose car accidentally breaks down), it seems we’re saying it not because she’s unable to do it, but because we don’t want to unfairly blame her for not keeping it. Again, concerns about blame, not about ability, dictate how we understand obligation.

While this one study alone doesn’t refute Kant, our research joins a recent salvo of experimental work targeting the principle that “ought” implies “can.” At the very least, philosophers can no longer treat this principle as obviously true.

the trends persisted, across several years and a series of national surveys. The changes weren’t just in degree, but in kind.

The biggest difference between the Millennials and their predecessors was in how they viewed the world; teens today differ from the Millennials not just in their views but in how they spend their time. The experiences they have every day are radically different from those of the generation that came of age just a few years before them.

it was exactly the moment when the proportion of Americans who owned a smartphone surpassed 50 percent.

theirs is a generation shaped by the smartphone and by the concomitant rise of social media. I call them iGen

Born between 1995 and 2012, members of this generation are growing up with smartphones, have an Instagram account before they start high school, and do not remember a time before the internet.

iGen’s oldest members were early adolescents when the iPhone was introduced, in 2007, and high-school students when the iPad entered the scene, in 2010. A 2017 survey of more than 5,000 American teens found that three out of four owned an iPhone.

. I had grown accustomed to line graphs of trends that looked like modest hills and valleys. Then I began studying Athena’s generation.

More comfortable in their bedrooms than in a car or at a party, today’s teens are physically safer than teens have ever been. They’re markedly less likely to get into a car accident and, having less of a taste for alcohol than their predecessors, are less susceptible to drinking’s attendant ills.

Psychologically, however, they are more vulnerable than Millennials were: Rates of teen depression and suicide have skyrocketed since 2011. It’s not an exaggeration to describe iGen as being on the brink of the worst mental-health crisis in decades. Much of this deterioration can be traced to their phones.

the twin rise of the smartphone and social media has caused an earthquake of a magnitude we’ve not seen in a very long time, if ever. There is compelling evidence that the devices we’ve placed in young people’s hands are having profound effects on their lives—and making them seriously unhappy.

But the allure of independence, so powerful to previous generations, holds less sway over today’s teens, who are less likely to leave the house without their parents. The shift is stunning: 12th-graders in 2015 were going out less often than eighth-graders did as recently as 2009.

Today’s teens are also less likely to date. The initial stage of courtship, which Gen Xers called “liking” (as in “Ooh, he likes you!”), kids now call “talking”—an ironic choice for a generation that prefers texting to actual conversation. After two teens have “talked” for a while, they might start dating.

only about 56 percent of high-school seniors in 2015 went out on dates; for Boomers and Gen Xers, the number was about 85 percent.

The decline in dating tracks with a decline in sexual activity. The drop is the sharpest for ninth-graders, among whom the number of sexually active teens has been cut by almost 40 percent since 1991. The average teen now has had sex for the first time by the spring of 11th grade, a full year later than the average Gen Xer

The teen birth rate hit an all-time low in 2016, down 67 percent since its modern peak, in 1991.

Nearly all Boomer high-school students had their driver’s license by the spring of their senior year; more than one in four teens today still lack one at the end of high school.

In conversation after conversation, teens described getting their license as something to be nagged into by their parents—a notion that would have been unthinkable to previous generations.

In the late 1970s, 77 percent of high-school seniors worked for pay during the school year; by the mid-2010s, only 55 percent did. The number of eighth-graders who work for pay has been cut in half.

Beginning with Millennials and continuing with iGen, adolescence is contracting again—but only because its onset is being delayed. Across a range of behaviors—drinking, dating, spending time unsupervised— 18-year-olds now act more like 15-year-olds used to, and 15-year-olds more like 13-year-olds. Childhood now stretches well into high school.

In an information economy that rewards higher education more than early work history, parents may be inclined to encourage their kids to stay home and study rather than to get a part-time job. Teens, in turn, seem to be content with this homebody arrangement—not because they’re so studious, but because their social life is lived on their phone. They don’t need to leave home to spend time with their friends.

eighth-, 10th-, and 12th-graders in the 2010s actually spend less time on homework than Gen X teens did in the early 1990s.

The time that seniors spend on activities such as student clubs and sports and exercise has changed little in recent years. Combined with the decline in working for pay, this means iGen teens have more leisure time than Gen X teens did, not less.

So what are they doing with all that time? They are on their phone, in their room, alone and often distressed.

despite spending far more time under the same roof as their parents, today’s teens can hardly be said to be closer to their mothers and fathers than their predecessors were. “I’ve seen my friends with their families—they don’t talk to them,” Athena told me. “They just say ‘Okay, okay, whatever’ while they’re on their phones. They don’t pay attention to their family.” Like her peers, Athena is an expert at tuning out her parents so she can focus on her phone.

The number of teens who get together with their friends nearly every day dropped by more than 40 percent from 2000 to 2015; the decline has been especially steep recently.

Eighth-graders who are heavy users of social media increase their risk of depression by 27 percent, while those who play sports, go to religious services, or even do homework more than the average teen cut their risk significantly.

The roller rink, the basketball court, the town pool, the local necking spot—they’ve all been replaced by virtual spaces accessed through apps and the web.

The results could not be clearer: Teens who spend more time than average on screen activities are more likely to be unhappy, and those who spend more time than average on nonscreen activities are more likely to be happy.

There’s not a single exception. All screen activities are linked to less happiness, and all nonscreen activities are linked to more happiness

Eighth-graders who spend 10 or more hours a week on social media are 56 percent more likely to say they’re unhappy than those who devote less time to social media

If you were going to give advice for a happy adolescence based on this survey, it would be straightforward: Put down the phone, turn off the laptop, and do something—anything—that does not involve a screen

Social-networking sites like Facebook promise to connect us to friends. But the portrait of iGen teens emerging from the data is one of a lonely, dislocated generation. Teens who visit social-networking sites every day but see their friends in person less frequently are the most likely to agree with the statements “A lot of times I feel lonely,” “I often feel left out of things,” and “I often wish I had more good friends.” Teens’ feelings of loneliness spiked in 2013 and have remained high since.

This doesn’t always mean that, on an individual level, kids who spend more time online are lonelier than kids who spend less time online.

Teens who spend more time on social media also spend more time with their friends in person, on average—highly social teens are more social in both venues, and less social teens are less so.

The more time teens spend looking at screens, the more likely they are to report symptoms of depression.

It’s not only a matter of fewer kids partying; fewer kids are spending time simply hanging out

Teens who spend three hours a day or more on electronic devices are 35 percent more likely to have a risk factor for suicide, such as making a suicide plan. (That’s much more than the risk related to, say, watching TV.)

Since 2007, the homicide rate among teens has declined, but the suicide rate has increased. As teens have started spending less time together, they have become less likely to kill one another, and more likely to kill themselves. In 2011, for the first time in 24 years, the teen suicide rate was higher than the teen homicide rate.

For all their power to link kids day and night, social media also exacerbate the age-old teen concern about being left out.

Today’s teens may go to fewer parties and spend less time together in person, but when they do congregate, they document their hangouts relentlessly—on Snapchat, Instagram, Facebook. Those not invited to come along are keenly aware of it. Accordingly, the number of teens who feel left out has reached all-time highs across age groups.

Forty-eight percent more girls said they often felt left out in 2015 than in 2010, compared with 27 percent more boys. Girls use social media more often, giving them additional opportunities to feel excluded and lonely when they see their friends or classmates getting together without them.

Social media levy a psychic tax on the teen doing the posting as well, as she anxiously awaits the affirmation of comments and likes. When Athena posts pictures to Instagram, she told me, “I’m nervous about what people think and are going to say. It sometimes bugs me when I don’t get a certain amount of likes on a picture.”

Girls have also borne the brunt of the rise in depressive symptoms among today’s teens. Boys’ depressive symptoms increased by 21 percent from 2012 to 2015, while girls’ increased by 50 percent—more than twice as much

The rise in suicide, too, is more pronounced among girls. Although the rate increased for both sexes, three times as many 12-to-14-year-old girls killed themselves in 2015 as in 2007, compared with twice as many boys

Social media give middle- and high-school girls a platform on which to carry out the style of aggression they favor, ostracizing and excluding other girls around the clock.

I asked my undergraduate students at San Diego State University what they do with their phone while they sleep. Their answers were a profile in obsession. Nearly all slept with their phone, putting it under their pillow, on the mattress, or at the very least within arm’s reach of the bed. They checked social media right before they went to sleep, and reached for their phone as soon as they woke up in the morning

the smartphone is cutting into teens’ sleep: Many now sleep less than seven hours most nights. Sleep experts say that teens should get about nine hours of sleep a night; a teen who is getting less than seven hours a night is significantly sleep deprived

Fifty-seven percent more teens were sleep deprived in 2015 than in 1991. In just the four years from 2012 to 2015, 22 percent more teens failed to get seven hours of sleep.

Two national surveys show that teens who spend three or more hours a day on electronic devices are 28 percent more likely to get less than seven hours of sleep than those who spend fewer than three hours, and teens who visit social-media sites every day are 19 percent more likely to be sleep deprived.

Teens who read books and magazines more often than the average are actually slightly less likely to be sleep deprived—either reading lulls them to sleep, or they can put the book down at bedtime.

Sleep deprivation is linked to myriad issues, including compromised thinking and reasoning, susceptibility to illness, weight gain, and high blood pressure. It also affects mood: People who don’t sleep enough are prone to depression and anxiety.

correlations between depression and smartphone use are strong enough to suggest that more parents should be telling their kids to put down their phone.

What’s at stake isn’t just how kids experience adolescence. The constant presence of smartphones is likely to affect them well into adulthood. Among people who suffer an episode of depression, at least half become depressed again later in life. Adolescence is a key time for developing social skills; as teens spend less time with their friends face-to-face, they have fewer opportunities to practice them

Significant effects on both mental health and sleep time appear after two or more hours a day on electronic devices. The average teen spends about two and a half hours a day on electronic devices. Some mild boundary-setting could keep kids from falling into harmful habits.

He tries to break free of narrow specialization and cross the boundaries between scientific disciplines. Expeditions beyond economics’ borders and its connection to history, philosophy, psychology, and ancient myths are not only refreshing, but necessary for understanding the world of the twenty-first century.

Reality is spun from stories, not from material. Zdeněk Neubauer

Before it was emancipated as a field, economics lived happily within subsets of philosophy—ethics, for example—miles away from today’s concept of economics as a mathematical-allocative science that views “soft sciences” with a scorn born from positivistic arrogance. But our thousand-year “education” is built on a deeper, broader, and oftentimes more solid base. It is worth knowing about.

The study of the history of a certain field is not, as is commonly held, a useless display of its blind alleys or a collection of the field’s trials and errors (until we got it right), but history is the fullest possible scope of study of a menu that the given field can offer.

History of thought helps us to get rid of the intellectual brainwashing of the age, to see through the intellectual fashion of the day, and to take a couple of steps back.

“The separation between the history of a science, its philosophy, and the science itself dissolves into thin air, and so does the separation between science and non-science; differences between the scientific and unscientific are vanishing.”

we seek to chart the development of the economic ethos. We ask questions that come before any economic thinking can begin—both philosophically and, to a degree, historically. The area here lies at the very borders of economics—and often beyond. We may refer to this as protoeconomics (to borrow a term from protosociology) or, perhaps more fittingly, metaeconomics (to borrow a term from metaphysics).

stories; Adam Smith believed. As he puts it in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, “the desire of being believed, or the desire of persuading, of leading and directing other people, seems to be one of the strongest of all our natural desires.”

“The human mind is built to think in terms of narratives … in turn, much of human motivation comes from living through a story of our lives, a story that we tell to ourselves and that creates a framework of our motivation. Life could be just ‘one damn thing after another’ if it weren’t for such stories. The same is true for confidence in a nation, a company, or an institution. Great leaders are foremost creators of stories.”

contrary to what our textbooks say, economics is predominantly a normative field. Economics not only describes the world but is frequently about how the world should be (it should be effective, we have an ideal of perfect competition, an ideal of high-GDP growth in low inflation, the effort to achieve high competitiveness …). To this end, we create models, modern parables,

I will try to show that mathematics, models, equations, and statistics are just the tip of the iceberg of economics; that the biggest part of the iceberg of economic knowledge consists of everything else; and that disputes in economics are rather a battle of stories and various metanarratives than anything else.

That is the reason for this book: to look for economic thought in ancient myths and, vice versa, to look for myths in today’s economics.

is a paradox that a field that primarily studies values wants to be value-free. One more paradox is this: A field that believes in the invisible hand of the market wants to be without mysteries.

The History of Animal Spirits: Dreams Never Sleep

The more important elements of a culture or field of inquiry such as economics are found in fundamental assumptions that adherents of all the various systems within the epoch unconsciously presuppose. Such assumptions appear so obvious that people do not know what they are assuming, because no other way of putting things has ever occurred to them, as the philosopher Alfred Whitehead notes in Adventures of Ideas.

I argue that economic questions were with mankind long before Adam Smith. I argue that the search for values in economics did not start with Adam Smith but culminated with him.

We should go beyond economics and study what beliefs are “behind the scenes,” ideas that have often become the dominant yet unspoken assumptions in our theories. Economics is surprisingly full of tautologies that economists are predominantly unaware of. I

argue that economics should seek, discover, and talk about its own values, although we have been taught that economics is a value-free science. I argue that none of this is true and that there is more religion, myth, and archetype in economics than there is mathematics.

In a way, this is a study of the evolution of both homo economicus and, more importantly, the history of the animal spirits within him. This book tries to study the evolution of the rational as well as the emotional and irrational side of human beings.

I argue that his most influential contribution to economics was ethical. His other thoughts had been clearly expressed long before him, whether on specialization, or on the principle of the invisible hand of the market. I try to show that the principle of the invisible hand of the market is much more ancient and developed long before Adam Smith. Traces of it appear even in the Epic of Gilgamesh, Hebrew thought, and in Christianity, and it is expressly stated by Aristophanes and Thomas Aquinas.

This is not a book on the thorough history of economic thought. The author aims instead to supplement certain chapters on the history of economic thought with a broader perspective and analysis of the influences that often escape the notice of economists and the wider public.

Progress (Naturalness and Civilization)

The Economy of Good and Evil

from his beginnings, man has been marked as a naturally unnatural creature, who for unique reasons surrounds himself with external possessions. Insatiability, both material and spiritual, are basic human metacharacteristics, which appear as early as the oldest myths and stories.

the Hebrews, with linear time, and later the Christians gave us the ideal (or amplified the Hebrew ideal) we now embrace. Then the classical economists secularized progress. How did we come to today’s progression of progress, and growth for growth’s sake?

The Need for Greed: The History of Consumption and Labor

Metamathematics From where did economics get the concept of numbers as the very foundation of the world?

mathematics at the core of economics, or is it just the icing of the cake, the tip of the iceberg of our field’s inquiry?

idea that we can manage to utilize our natural egoism, and that this evil is good for something, is an ancient philosophical and mythical concept. We will also look into the development of the ethos of homo economicus, the birth of “economic man.”

All of economics is, in the end, economics of good and evil. It is the telling of stories by people of people to people. Even the most sophisticated mathematical model is, de facto, a story, a parable, our effort to (rationally) grasp the world around us.

Masters of the Truth

Originally, truth was a domain of poems and stories, but today we perceive truth as something much more scientific, mathematical. Where does one go (to shop) for the truth? And who “has the truth” in our epoch?

Our animal spirits (something of a counterpart to rationality) are influenced by the archetype of the hero and our concept of what is good.

The entire history of ethics has been ruled by an effort to create a formula for the ethical rules of behavior. In the final chapter we will show the tautology of Max Utility, and we will discuss the concept of Max Good.

The History of the Invisible Hand of the Market and Homo Economicus

We understand “economics” to mean a broader field than just the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services. We consider economics to be the study of human relations that are sometimes expressible in numbers, a study that deals with tradables, but one that also deals with nontradables (friendship, freedom, efficiency, growth).

When we mention economics in this book, we mean the mainstream perception of it, perhaps as best represented by Paul Samuelson.

By the term homo economicus, we mean the primary concept of economic anthropology. It comes from the concept of a rational individual, who, led by narrowly egotistical motives, sets out to maximize his benefit.

the Epic of Gilgamesh bears witness to the opposite—despite the fact that the first written clay fragments (such as notes and bookkeeping) of our ancestors may have been about business and war, the first written story is mainly about great friendship and adventure.

is a story of nature and civilization, of heroism, defiance, and the battle against the gods, and evil; an epic about wisdom, immortality, and also futility.

Even today we live in Gilgamesh’s vision that human relations—and therefore humanity itself—are a disturbance to work and efficiency; that people would perform better if they did not “waste” their time and energy on nonproductive things.

But it is in friendship where—often by-the-way, as a side product, an externality—ideas and deeds are frequently performed or created that together can altogether change the face of society.19 Friendship can go against an ingrained system in places where an individual does not have the courage to do so himself or herself.

started with Babylonians—rural nature becomes just a supplier of raw materials, resources (and humans the source of human resources). Nature is not the garden in which humans were created and placed, which they should care for and which they should reside in, but becomes a mere reservoir for natural (re)sources.

To be human seems to be somewhere in between, or both of these two. We

The entire history of culture is dominated by an effort to become as independent as possible from the whims of nature.39 The more developed a civilization is, the more an individual is protected from nature and natural influences and knows how to create around him a constant or controllable environment to his liking.

The epic captures one of the greatest leaps in the development of the division of labor. Uruk itself is one of the oldest cities of all, and in the epic it reflects a historic step forward in specialization—in the direction of a new social city arrangement. Because of the city wall, people in the city can devote themselves to things other than worrying about their own safety, and they can continue to specialize more deeply.

“The chief thing which the common-sense individual wants is not satisfactions for the wants he had, but more, and better wants.”47

If a consumer buys something, theoretically it should rid him of one of his needs—and the aggregate of things they need should be decreased by one item. In reality, though, the aggregate of “I want to have” expands together with the growing aggregate of “I have.”

the Old Testament, this relationship is perceived completely differently. Man (humanity) is created in nature, in a garden. Man was supposed to care for the Garden of Eden and live in harmony with nature and the animals. Soon after creation, man walks naked and is not ashamed, de facto the same as the animals. What is characteristic is that man dresses (the natural state of creation itself is not enough for him), and he (literally and figuratively) covers52 himself—in shame after the fall.53

Nature is where one goes to hunt, collect crops, or gather the harvest. It is perceived as the saturator of our needs and nothing more. One goes back to the city to sleep and be “human.” On the contrary, evil resides in nature. Humbaba lives in the cedar forest, which also happens to be the reason to completely eradicate it.

Symbolically, then, we can view the entire issue from the standpoint of the epic in the following way: Our nature is insufficient, bad, evil, and good (humane) occurs only after emancipation from nature (from naturalness), through culturing and education. Humanity is considered as being in civilization.

The city was frequently (at least in older Jewish writings) a symbol of sin, degeneration, and decadence—nonhumanity. The Hebrews were originally a nomadic nation, one that avoided cities. It is no accident that the first important city57 mentioned in the Bible is proud Babylon,58 which God later turns to dust.

is enough, for example, to read the Book of Revelation to see how the vision of paradise developed from the deep Old Testament period, when paradise was a garden. John describes his vision of heaven as a city—paradise is in New Jerusalem, a city where the dimensions of the walls(!) are described in detail, as are the golden streets and gates of pearl.

Hebrews later also chose a king (despite the unanimous opposition of God’s prophets) and settled in cities, where they eventually founded the Lord’s Tabernacle and built a temple for Him. The city of Jerusalem later gained an illustrious position in all of religion.

this time Christianity (as well as the influence of the Greeks) does not consider human naturalness to be an unambiguous good, and it does not have such an idyllic relationship to nature as the Old Testament prophets.

If a tendency toward good is not naturally endowed in people, it must be imputed from above through violence or at least the threat of violence.

If we were to look at human naturalness as a good, then collective social actions need a much weaker ruling hand. If people themselves have a natural tendency (propensity) toward good, this role does not have to be supplied by the state, ruler, or, if you wish, Leviathan.

How does this affect economics?

us return for the last time to the humanization of the wild Enkidu, which is a process we can perceive with a bit of imagination as the first seed of the principle of the market’s invisible hand, and therefore the parallels with one of the central schematics of economic thinking.

Sometimes it is better to “harness the devil to the plow” than to fight with him. Instead of summoning up enormous energy in the fight against evil, it is better to use its own energy to reach a goal we desire; setting up a mill on the turbulent river instead of futile efforts to remove the current. This is also how Saint Prokop approached it in one of the oldest Czech legends.

Enkidu caused damage and it was impossible to fight against him. But with the help of a trap, trick, this evil was transformed into something that greatly benefited civilization.

By culturing and “domesticating” Enkidu, humanity tamed the uncontrollable wild and chaotic evil

Enkidu devastated the doings (the external, outside-the-walls) of the city. But he was later harnessed and fights at the side of civilization against nature, naturalness, the natural state of things.

A similar story (reforming something animally wild and uncultivated in civilizational achievement) is used by Thomas Aquinas in his teachings. Several centuries later, this idea is fully emancipated in the hands of Bernard Mandeville and his Fable of the Bees: or, Private Vices, Publick Benefits. The economic and political aspects of this idea are—often incorrectly—ascribed to Adam Smith.

Here the individual does not try anymore to maximize his goods or profits, but what is important is writing his name in human memory in the form of heroic acts or deeds.

immortality, one connected with letters and the cult of the word: A name and especially a written name survives the body.”77

After this disappointment, he comes to the edge of the sea, where the innkeeper Siduri lives. As tonic for his sorrow, she offers him the garden of bliss, a sort of hedonistic fortress of carpe diem, where a person comes to terms with his mortality and at least in the course of the end of his life maximizes earthly pleasures, or earthly utility.

In the second stage, after finding his friend Enkidu, Gilgamesh abandons the wall and sets out beyond the city to maximalize heroism. “In his (…) search of immortal life, Gilgamesh

The hero refuses hedonism in the sense of maximizing terrestrial pleasure and throws himself into things that will exceed his life. In the blink of an eye, the epic turns on its head the entire utility maximization role that mainstream economics has tirelessly tried to sew on people as a part of their nature.81

today remember Gilgamesh for his story of heroic friendship with Enkidu, not for his wall, which no longer reaches monumental heights.

the eleventh and final tablet, Gilgamesh again loses what he sought. Like Sisyphus, he misses his goal just before the climax

The very existence of questions similar to today’s economic ones can be considered as the first observation. The first written considerations of the people of that time were not so different from those today. In other words: The epic is understandable for us, and we can identify with it.

We have also been witnesses to the very beginnings of man’s culturing—a great drama based on a liberation and then a distancing from the natural state.

Let us take this as a memento in the direction of our restlessness, our inherited dissatisfaction and the volatility connected to it. Considering that they have lasted five thousand years and to this day we find ourselves in harmony with a certain feeling of futility, perhaps these characteristics are inherent in man.

with the phenomenon of the creation of the city, we have seen how specialization and the accumulation of wealth was born, how holy nature was transformed into a secular supplier of resources, and also how humans’ individualistic ego was emancipated.

For small acts (hunting together, work in a factory), small love is enough: Camaraderie. For great acts, however, great love is necessary, real love: Friendship. Friendship that eludes the economic understanding of quid pro quo. Friendship gives. One friend gives (fully) for the other. That is friendship for life and death,

less a civilized, city person is dependent on nature, the more he or she is dependent on the rest of society. Like Enkidu, we have exchanged nature for society; harmony with (incalculable) nature for harmony with (incalculable) man.

human nature good or evil? To this day these questions are key for economic policy: If we believe that man is evil in his nature, therefore that a person himself is dog eat dog (animal), then the hard hand of a ruler is called for. If we believe that people in and of themselves, in their nature, gravitate toward good, then it is possible to loosen up the reins and live in a society that is more laissez-faire.

For a concept of historical progress, for the undeification of heroes, rulers, and nature, mankind had to wait for the Hebrews.

Because nature is not undeified, it is beyond consideration to explore it, let alone intervene in it (unless a person was a two-thirds god like Gilgamesh). It

As early as the “dark” ages, the Jews commonly used economic tools that were in many ways ahead of their time and that later became key elements of the modern economy:

Gilgamesh’s story ends where it began. There is a consistency in this with Greek myths and fables: At the end of the story, no progress occurs, no essential historic change; the story is set in indefinite time, something of a temporal limbo.

For a nation originally based on nomadism, where did this Jewish business ethos come from? And can the Hebrews truly be considered as the architects of the values that set the direction of our civilization’s economic thought?

PROGRESS: A SECULARIZED RELIGION One of the things the writers of the Old Testament gave to mankind is the idea and notion of progress. The Old Testament stories have their development; they change the history of the Jewish nation and tie in to each other. The Jewish understanding of time is linear—it has a beginning and an end.

The observance of God’s Commandments in Judaism leads not to some ethereal other world, but to an abundance of material goods (Genesis 49:25–26, Leviticus 26:3–13, Deuteronomy 28:1–13) (…) There are no accusing fingers pointed at

There are no echoes of asceticism nor for the cleansing and spiritual effect of poverty. It is fitting therefore, that the founders of Judaism, the Patriarchs Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, were all wealthy men.12

about due to a linear understanding of history. If history has a beginning as well as an end, and they are not the same point, then exploration suddenly makes sense in areas where the fruits are borne only in the next generation.

however, the idea of progress itself underwent major changes, and today we perceive it very differently. As opposed to the original spiritual conceptions, today we perceive progress almost exclusively in an economic or scientific-technological sense.

Because care for the soul has today been replaced by care for external things,

This is why we must constantly grow, because we (deep down and often implicitly) believe that we are headed toward an (economic) paradise on Earth.

Only since the period of scientific-technological revolution (and at a time when economics was born as an independent field) is material progress automatically assumed.

Jewish thought is the most grounded, most realistic school of thought of all those that have influenced our culture.17 An abstract world of ideas was unknown to the Jews. To this day it is still forbidden to even depict God, people, and animals in symbols, paintings, statues, and drawings.

economists have become key figures of great importance in our time (Kacířské eseje o filosofii dějin [Heretical Essays in the Philosophy of History]). They are expected to perform interpretations of reality, give prophetic services (macroeconomic forecasts), reshape reality (mitigate the impacts of the crisis, speed up growth), and, in the long run, provide leadership on the way to the Promised Land—paradise on Earth.

REALISM AND ANTIASCETICISM Aside from ideas of progress, the Hebrews brought another very fundamental contribution to our culture: The desacralization of heroes, nature, and rulers.

Voltaire writes: “It certain fact is, that in his public laws he [Moses] never so much as once made mention of a life to come, limiting all punishments and all rewards to the present life.”21

As opposed to Christianity, the concept of an extraterrestrial paradise or heaven was not developed much in Hebrew thought.19 The paradise of the Israelites—Eden—was originally placed on Earth at a given place in Mesopotamia20 and at a given time,

The Hebrews consider the world to be real—not just a shadow reflection of a better world somewhere in the cloud of ideas, something the usual interpretation of history ascribes to Plato. The soul does not struggle against the body and is not its prisoner, as Augustine would write later.

The land, the world, the body, and material reality are for Jews the paramount setting for divine history, the pinnacle of creation. This idea is the conditio sine qua non of the development of economics, something of an utterly earthly making,

The mythology of the hero-king was strongly developed in that period, which Claire Lalouette summarizes into these basic characteristics: Beauty (a perfect face, on which it is “pleasant to look upon,” but also “beauty,” expressed in the Egyptian word nefer, not only means aesthetics, but contains moral qualities as well),

THE HERO AND HIS UNDEIFICATION: THE DREAM NEVER SLEEPS The concept of the hero is more important than it might appear. It may be the remote origin of Keynes’s animal spirits, or the desire to follow a kind of internal archetype that a given individual accepts as his own and that society values.

This internal animator of ours, our internal mover, this dream, never sleeps and it influences our behavior—including economic behavior—more than we want to realize.

Anthropology knows several archetypes of heroes. The Polish-born American anthropologist Paul Radin examined the myths of North American Indians and, for example, in his most influential book, The Trickster, he describes their four basic archetypes of heroes.

The Torah’s heroes (if that term can be used at all) frequently make mistakes and their mistakes are carefully recorded in the Bible—maybe precisely so that none of them could be deified.32

the Hebrew heroes correspond most to the Tricksters, the Culture Bearers, and the Twins. The divine muscleman, that dominant symbol we think of when we say hero, is absent here.

Undeification, however, does not mean a call to pillage or desecration; man was put here to take care of nature (see the story of the Garden of Eden or the symbolism of the naming of the animals). This protection and care of nature is also related to the idea of progress

For the heroes who moved our civilization to where it is today, the heroic archetypes of the cunning trickster, culture bearer, and sufferer are rather more appropriate.

the Old Testament strongly emphasizes the undeification of nature.37 Nature is God’s creation, which speaks of divinity but is not the domain of moody gods

in an Old Testament context, the pharaoh was a mere man (whom one could disagree with, and who could be resisted!).

RULERS ARE MERE MEN In a similar historical context, the Old Testament teachings carried out a similar desacralization of rulers, the so-called bearers of economic policy.

Ultimately the entire idea of a political ruler stood against the Lord’s will, which is explicitly presented in the Torah. The Lord unequivocally preferred the judge as the highest form of rule—an

The needs of future generations will have to be considered; after all humankind are the guardians of God’s world. Waste of natural resources, whether privately owned or nationally owned is forbidden.”39

Politics lost its character of divine infallibility, and political issues were subject to questioning. Economic policy could become a subject of examination.

44 God first creates with the word and then on individual days He divides light from darkness, water from dry land, day from night, and so forth—and He gives order to things.45 The world is created orderly— it is wisely, reasonably put together. The way of the world is put together at least partially46 decipherably by any other wise and reasonable being who honors rational rules.

THE PRAISE OF ORDER AND WISDOM: MAN AS A PERFECTER OF CREATION The created world has an order of sorts, an order recognizable by us as people,

From the very beginning, when God distances Himself from the entire idea, there is an anticipation that there is nothing holy, let alone divine, in politics. Rulers make mistakes, and it is possible to subject them to tough criticism—which frequently occurs indiscriminately through the prophets in the Old Testament.

Hebrew culture laid the foundations for the scientific examination of the world.

Examining the world is therefore an absolutely legitimate activity, and one that is even requested by God—it is a kind of participation in the Creator’s work.51 Man is called on to understand himself and his surroundings and to use his knowledge for good.

The Book of Proverbs emphasizes specifically several times that it was wisdom that was present at the creation of the world. Wisdom personified calls out:

The last act, final stroke of the brush of creation, naming of the animals—this act is given to a human, it is not done by God, as one would expect. Man was given the task of completing the act of creation that the Lord began:

MAN AS A FINISHER OF CREATION The creation of the world, as it is explained in Jewish teachings, is described in the Book of Genesis. Here God (i) creates, (ii) separates, and (iii) names [my emphasis]:

Naming is a symbolic expression. In Jewish culture (and also in our culture to this day), the right to name meant sovereign rights and belonged, for example, to explorers (new places), inventors (new principles), or parents (children)—that is, to those who were there at the genesis, at the origin. This right was handed over by God to mankind.

The Naming itself (the capital N is appropriate) traditionally belongs to the crowning act of the Creator and represents a kind of grand finale of creation, the last move of the brush to complete the picture—a signature of the master.

Without naming, reality does not exist; it is created together with language. Wittgenstein tightly names this in his tractatus—the limits of our language are the limits of our world.53

Reality is not a given; it is not passive. Perceiving reality and “facts” requires man’s active participation. It is man who must take the last step, an act (and we

A real-ization act on our part represents the creation of a construct, the imputation of sense and order (which is beautifully expressed by the biblical act of naming, or categorization, sorting, ordering).

God connects man with the task of guarding and protecting the Garden of Eden, and thus man actually cocreates the cultural landscape. The Czech philosopher Zdeněk Neubauer also describes this: “Such is reality, and it is so deep that it willingly crystallizes into worlds. Therefore I profess that reality is a creation and not a place of occurrence for objectively given phenomena.”61

The Jews believed the exact opposite. The world is created by a good God, and evil appears in it as a result of immoral human acts. Evil, therefore, is induced by man.66 History unwinds according to the morality of human acts.

GOOD AND EVIL IN US: A MORAL EXPLANATION OF WELL-BEING We have seen that in the Epic of Gilgamesh, good and evil are not yet addressed systematically on a moral level.

the epic, good and evil are not envisaged morally—they are not the result of an (a)moral act. Evil was not associated with free moral action or individual will.

Hebrew thought, on the other hand, deals intensively with moral good and evil. A moral dimension touches the core of its stories.65

discrepancy between savings and investment, and others are convinced of the monetary essence

The entire history of the Jewish nation is interpreted and perceived in terms of morality. Morality has become, so to speak, a mover and shaker of Hebrew history.

sunspots. The Hebrews came up with the idea that morals were behind good and bad years, behind the economic cycle. But we would be getting ahead of ourselves. Pharaoh’s Dream: Joseph and the First Business Cycle To

It is the Pharaoh’s well-known dream of seven fat and seven lean cows, which he told to Joseph, the son of Jacob. Joseph interpreted the dream as a macroeconomic prediction of sorts: Seven years of abundance were to be followed by seven years of poverty, famine, and misery.

Self-Contradicting Prophecy Here, let’s make several observations on this: Through taxation74 on the level of one-fifth of a crop75 in good years to save the crop and then open granaries in bad years, the prophecy was de facto prevented (prosperous years were limited and hunger averted—through a predecessor of fiscal stabilization).

The Old Testament prophesies therefore were not any deterministic look into the future, but warnings and strategic variations of the possible, which demanded some kind of reaction. If the reaction was adequate, what was prophesied would frequently not occur at all.

If the threat is anticipated, it is possible to totally or at least partially avoid it. Neither Joseph nor the pharaoh had the power to avoid bounty or crop failure (in this the dream interpretation was true and the appearance of the future mystical), but they avoided the impacts and implications of the prophecy (in this the interpretation of the dream was “false”)—famine did not ultimately occur in Egypt, and this was due to the application of reasonable and very intuitive economic policy.

Let us further note that the first “macroeconomic forecast” appears in a dream.

back to Torah: Later in this story we will notice that there is no reason offered as to why the cycle occurs (that will come later). Fat years will simply come, and then lean years after them.

Moral Explanation of a Business Cycle That is fundamentally different from later Hebrew interpretations, when the Jewish nation tries to offer reasons why the nation fared well or poorly. And those reasons are moral.

Only in recent times have some currents of economics again become aware of the importance of morals and trust in the form of measuring the quality of institutions, the level of justice, business ethics, corruption, and so forth, and examining their influence on the economy,

it is not within the scope of this book to answer that question; justice has been done to the question if it manages to sketch out the main contours of possible searches for answers.

THE ECONOMICS OF GOOD AND EVIL: DOES GOOD PAY OFF? This is probably the most difficult moral problem we could ask.

Inquiring about the economics of good and evil, however, is not that easy. Where would Kant’s “moral dimension of ethics” go if ethics paid? If we do good for profit, the question of ethics becomes a mere question of rationality.

He remains righteous, even if his only reward is death. What economic advantage could he have from that?

morals cannot be considered in the economic dimension of productivity and calculus. The role of the Hebrews was to do good, whether it paid off or not. If good (outgoing) is rewarded by incoming goodness, it is a bonus,99 not a reason to do outgoing good. Good and reward do not correlate to each other.

This reasoning takes on a dimension of its own in the Old Testament. Good (incoming) has already happened to us. We must do good (outgoing) out of gratitude for the good (incoming) shown to us in the past.

So why do good? After all, suffering is the fate of many biblical figures. The answer can only be: For good itself. Good has the power to be its own reward. In this sense, goodness gets its reward, which may or may not take on a material dimension.

the Hebrews offered an interesting compromise between the teachings of the Stoics and Epicureans. We will go into it in detail later, so only briefly

constraint. It calls for bounded optimalization (with limits). A kind of symbiosis existed between the legitimate search for one’s own utility (or enjoyment of life) and maintaining rules, which are not negotiable and which are not subject to optimalization.

In other words, clear (exogenously given) rules exist that must be observed and cannot be contravened. But within these borders it is absolutely possible, and even recommended, to increase utility.

To Love the Law The Jews not only had to observe the law (perhaps the word covenant would be more appropriate), but they were to love it because it was good.

the principle of doing good (outgoing) on the basis of a priori demonstrated good (incoming) was also taken over by the New Testament. Atonement itself is based on an a priori principle; all our acts are preceded by good.

THE SHACKLES OF THE CITY Owing to the Hebrew’s liberation from Egyptian slavery, freedom and responsibility become the key values of Jewish thought.

Laws given by God are binding for Jews, and God is the absolute source of all values,

The Hebrew ideal is represented by the paradise of the Garden of Eden, not a city.116 The despised city civilization or the tendency to see in it a sinful and shackling way of life appears in glimpses and allusions in many places in the Old Testament.

The nomadic Jewish ethos is frequently derived from Abraham, who left the Chaldean city of Ur on the basis of a command:

This way of life had understandably immense economic impacts. First, such a society lived in much more connected relationships, where there was no doubt that everyone mutually depended on each other. Second, their frequent wanderings meant the inability to own more than they could carry; the gathering up of material assets did not have great weight—precisely because the physical weight (mass) of things was tied to one place.

One of Moses’s greatest deeds was that he managed to explain to his nation once and for all that it is better to remain hungry and liberated than to be a slave with food “at no cost.”

SOCIAL WELFARE: NOT TO ACT IN THE MANNER OF SODOM

regulations is developed in the Old Testament, one we hardly find in any other nation of the time. In Hebrew teachings, aside from individual utility, indications of the concept of maximalizing utility societywide appear for the first time as embodied in the Talmudic principle of Kofin al midat S´dom, which can be translated as “one is compelled not to act in the manner of Sodom” and to take care of the weaker members of society.

In a jubilee year, debts were to be forgiven,125 and Israelites who fell into slavery due to their indebtedness were to be set free.126

Land at the time could be “sold,” and it was not sale, but rent. The price (rent) of real estate depended on how long there was until a forgiveness year. It was about the awareness that we may work the land, but in the last instance we are merely “aliens and strangers,” who have the land only rented to us for a fixed time. All land and riches came from the Lord.

These provisions express a conviction that freedom and inheritance should not be permanently taken away from any Israelite. Last but not least, this system reminds us that no ownership lasts forever and that the fields we plow are not ours but the Lord’s.

Glean Another social provision was the right to glean, which in Old Testament times ensured at least basic sustenance for the poorest. Anyone who owned a field had the responsibility not to harvest it to the last grain but to leave the remains in the field for the poor.

Tithes and Early Social Net Every Israelite also had the responsibility of levying a tithe from their entire crop. They had to be aware from whom all ownership comes and, by doing so, express their thanks.

“Since the community has an obligation to provide food, shelter, and basic economic goods for the needy, it has a moral right and duty to tax its members for this purpose. In line with this duty, it may have to regulate markets, prices and competition, to protect the interests of its weakest members.”135

In Judaism, charity is not perceived as a sign of goodness; it is more of a responsibility. Such a society then has the right to regulate its economy in such a way that the responsibility of charity is carried out to its satisfaction.

With a number of responsibilities, however, comes the difficulty of getting them into practice. Their fulfillment, then, in cases when it can be done, takes place gradually “in layers.” Charitable activities are classified in the Talmud according to several target groups with various priorities, classified according to, it could be said, rules of subsidiarity.

Do not mistreat an alien or oppress him, for you were aliens in Egypt.140 As one can see, aside from widows and orphans, the Old Testament also includes immigrants in its area of social protection.141 The Israelites had to have the same rules apply for them as for themselves—they could not discriminate on the basis of their origin.

ABSTRACT MONEY, FORBIDDEN INTEREST, AND OUR DEBT AGE If it appears to us that today’s era is based on money and debt, and our time will be written into history as the “Debt age,” then it will certainly be interesting to follow how this development occurred.

Money is a social abstractum. It is a social agreement, an unwritten contract.

The first money came in the form of clay tablets from Mesopotamia, on which debts were written. These debts were transferable, so the debts became currency. In the end, “It is no coincidence that in English the root of ‘credit’ is ‘credo,’ the Latin for ‘I believe.’”

To a certain extent it could be said that credit, or trust, was the first currency. It can materialize, it can be embodied in coins, but what is certain is that “money is not metal,” even the rarest metal, “it is trust inscribed,”

Inseparably, with the original credit (money) goes interest. For the Hebrews, the problem of interest was a social issue: “If you lend money to one of my people among you who is needy, do not be like a moneylender; charge him no interest.”

there were also clearly set rules setting how far one could go in setting guarantees and the nonpayment of debts. No one should become indebted to the extent that they could lose the source of their livelihood:

In the end, the term “bank” comes from the Italian banci, or the benches that Jewish lenders sat on.157

Money is playing not only its classical roles (as a means of exchange, a holder of value, etc.) but also a much greater, stronger role: It can stimulate, drive (or slow down) the whole economy. Money plays a national economic role.

In the course of history, however, the role of loans changed, and the rich borrowed especially for investment purposes,

In such a case a ban on interest did not have great ethical significance. Thomas Aquinas, a medieval scholar (1225-1274), also considers similarly; in his time, the strict ban on lending with usurious interest was loosened, possibly due to him.

As a form of energy, money can travel in three dimensions, vertically (those who have capital lend to those who do not) and horizontally (speed and freedom in horizontal or geographic motion has become the by-product—or driving force?—of globalization). But money (as opposed to people) can also travel through time.

money is something like energy that can travel through time. And it is a very useful energy, but at the same time very dangerous as well. Wherever

Aristotle condemned interest162 not only from a moral standpoint, but also for metaphysical reasons. Thomas Aquinas shared the same fear of interest and he too argued that time does not belong to us, and that is why we must not require interest.

MONEY AS ENERGY: TIME TRAVEL AND GROSS DEBT PRODUCT (GDP)

Due to this characteristic, we can energy-strip the future to the benefit of the present. Debt can transfer energy from the future to the present.163 On the other hand, saving can accumulate energy from the past and send it to the present.

labor was not considered degrading in the Old Testament. On the contrary, the subjugation of nature is even a mission from God that originally belonged to man’s very first blessings.