The Thrica Network

People from the time the law was given have looked at it as a series of categorical imperatives – things that one must abide by no matter what and regardless of the reason. It becomes more about the action itself than the spirit behind it. It was exactly this thinking that led Jesus to rebuke the Pharisees for adhering to the letter of the law while completely missing its spirit (Mark 2:23-28).

The law, as I have said before, is only an approximation of how the regenerate person acts. It approximates by detailing actions that correspond to values – values which are more fundamental than the actions. It is for this reason that Jesus said that the greatest commandment was “you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind”, and the second, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself” (Matthew 22:35-40): First, God is the highest value. And second, we are not special: if we value ourselves and our own happiness, then we must necessarily value others and their happiness just as much. These are the two most fundamental values under which the rest of the law can be placed as more specific manifestations of these general values: “on these two commandments hang the whole law and the prophets”.

1) You shall have no other gods before me / 2) You shall not make for yourself a graven image. God is the highest value, and we are not to value anything more highly than God.
3) You shall not take the name of the Lord in vain. The name of the Lord is valuable.
4) Remember the sabbath and keep it holy. Rest is valuable.
5) Honor your father and mother. Reproof and correction are valuable (c.f. Proverbs 15:32), or, the family itself is valuable.
6) You shall not murder. Human life is valuable.
7) You shall not commit adultery. Purity is valuable (compare images of the Church as the bride of Christ).
8) You shall not steal. Fairness is valuable (c.f. Jeremiah 22:13).
9) You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor. Truth is valuable.
10) You shall not covet. Material possessions are not valuable.

Looking at it in this way, standard moral dilemmas that pit one categorical imperative against another become soluble. Why is truth valuable, for example? Because people act based on knowledge, and to bear false witness is to cause them to act on misinformation. Lying is a lack of love for the person lied to. If then I am hiding Jews and a Nazi soldier comes to my door looking for them, the question is not “do I lie or tell the truth?”, as Kant would have it, but “do I value the life of my fugitives or the welfare of this soldier more?”. Most people would intuitively know to lie, but moral philosophers have a way of muddying the waters here. Categorical imperatives in these cases drive a wedge between “right” and “moral”. But within a system of values, there is no such thing as morally “taking one for the team”. There is no guilt in the higher valuation of life than welfare, and we don’t have to resort to consequentialism (the ends justify the means) as most would do to justify the action.

Ultimately, consequentialist morality is just as bankrupt as imperative morality: as the latter focuses on the nature of the action, the former focuses on the result. Neither gives any regard to the spirit of the law, nor the spirit of the doer. It is the spirit that Jesus was concerned about in questions of morality – the process of sanctification cleaning the outside by first cleansing the inside. A consequentialist morality produces ruthless pragmatists, and a categorical imperative morality can only produce whitewashed tombs. Only a morality from proper internal valuations may produce a Christian.

Rush hour traffic in Raleigh gives the mind a lot of time to idly wander, and so was born a thought along the lines of Daniel Klein’s Rinkonomics: the trafficonomy.

Traffic jams are in fact a lot like the free market. This is not a pejorative comparison, as if we could alleviate the jam. I say traffic jams and not traffic in general because most of us live in developed economies. An open road isn’t much of an economy; it’s more akin to picking up plenty which naturally exists all around you. In the market, a multitude of people compete with one another for scarce resources with the goal of achieving their own betterment. In a traffic jam, a multitude of cars are competing with one another for scarce road space with the goal of getting somewhere.

A common feature of all traffic jams is that open space doesn’t last very long. If it exists, a car from behind will move into it to better his own position. This has the result of equalizing all the lanes on the road: people take opportunities, which means you as an individual are about as likely to get ahead by staying in your own lane as you are meticulously moving around lanes, as experience nearly always corroborates. The wide opportunity-seeking spreads the benefits of moving forward over all those who seek them, which though there are some who move ahead a great deal and some who might even do worse than if they had stayed put, results in an average benefit that is rather small.

What this process does do, however, is optimize the pattern. Though traffic jams are often seen as the result of non-optimality, this is an exogenous non-optimality of the system. Given the roads, a traffic jam is always pareto optimally or near pareto optimally organized. There is no one who could be further ahead without someone being correspondingly further back, and no concerted effort among the drivers or ulterior design from above could improve the overall condition. The ambition of the individual drivers necessarily organizes it this way.

The economy works much the same way. People cannot cruise through life, picking their spoils and arriving at their destination without resistance, as through a highway at midnight. We encounter people after the same spoils we are after, and like a Hummer cannot legitimately plow over the Prius in front of him, we must settle such disputes without coercion.

A space in the economy, much like a space in traffic, is a practical invitation for someone to come in and take it. If it is a big and previously unnoticed space, many people can flow into it until the benefit of moving to that area is no longer worth the benefit. There is no more profitable space left. True innovation, much like finding extra space on the road, is comparatively rare.

But even where there are no spaces, a car can still better its position on the road. If the neighboring lane is moving faster than its own, the driver can force its way into the other lane. The movement of more ambitious drivers will tend to equalize the speed as well as the density of the lanes. But there are costs of doing so (risk of the new lane slowing down, ire of other drivers) which keep enough people out that lanes do indeed move faster than others at certain points.

In the same way, even when one has no capacity or inclination to innovate, one can still turn a profit by investment or speculation. If one sees that a certain commodity will be more expensive in the future than it is now – that is, if the neighboring lane seems to be moving faster than your own – then one can buy hordes of that commodity to sell later, moving into the other lane. This has the double effect of raising the current price and lowering the future price when it is sold – roughly equalizing the current and future price, as more people jump on. Thus, like shifting lanes in a traffic jam, expectation is already reality. By the time all but the first few speculators realize what has happened, the price is already at its expected level. Like any driver will tell you, moving around in a jam is usually useless and often detrimental. This is why index funds – unmanaged and constant bundles of stocks – do as well and often better than more meticulously managed funds. It’s exactly the same mechanism governing both traffic and the market.

As a last point to flesh out the analogy, the road itself is not the economy, nor is it the institutions that govern the economy. The road is the earth, and the physical state of its resources. Just as the road is exogenous to the driver, so the earth is exogenous to the economy. We can no more create more raw materials than a driver can create more road. Poorer countries will be more “jammed”, so to speak, than richer countries, as there are fewer resources to work with (though free trade can alleviate even this problem to some degree). But just as a traffic jam allocates road space optimally given the road, the free market allocates resources optimally given the earth’s resources.