Forward

During the time I spent studying undergraduate economics, I took a course on personal finance. I don’t recall much of the course material, but there was one particular lesson that has rattled around in my head for almost 20 years now.

The professor spent the first class giving his general take on life, education, money, relationships, etc. He told students that if they did not want to be in school, they should be doing something else; you should follow your dreams and stuff like that. It was a good speech and I’m sure it inspired many students over the tenure of this professor.

The part I remember was a short idea he proposed. Like most of the things in economics, it was just a theory. It was a theory about the future development of our economic systems. He began by renewing the basic stages of our economic systems up to the present. As societies, we progressed from hunter/gatherers to agriculturalists, to industrialist, and then to our present information age.

Our earliest societies were hunter/gatherers. Value was added to the community by hunting or foraging for food. The best hunters or gatherers held positions of high prestige and likely had the best access to resources and mates.

Eventually we developed into agricultural societies. It was no longer about living directly from the land. We could now manipulate the land to produce what we needed. Then came industrialism. Huge titans of industry wielded capital for production of goods and services.

After this phase of development, we moved to an information-based society. Most would agree, this is the system that persists today. The more information you have, and the more information you can control, the more resources you can extract from society. The wealthiest in our society are those that have created useful information technology, or control the flow of information between people.

Up to this point, this was a basic history lesson. However, the professors prediction for the next phase of societal development was something new. He proposed a potential future stage called the wisdom age. The idea was that soon our society would be organized around wisdom. Those that had the greatest control over wisdom would wield the most prestige and resources in society. The specifics of what all this meant were left to the student to determine.

The development time between each period discussed has become progressively shorter. Our society took the longest to go from hunter/gathers to agriculturists, then shorter to become industrialists, and even shorter to become an information based society. Therefore, based on this development progression, the next phase should be just around the corner, possibly in our lifetimes.

This idea opened up a world of questions and possibilities for me. What even is wisdom? Where does it come from? Why would any industry or market care about wisdom? Can this be exploited for concentrated gains, like information and industry?

I have yet to fully answer these questions, but it hasn’t stopped me from searching. This idea sent me on a quest to read and learn from the great economic, political, and spiritual writers from throughout the ages. Traditional sources of economic education generally discuss how we organize and distribute resources in our society, and they can offer insight into the modern understanding of different economic systems. Additionally, a deep dive into the history of debt and monetary systems can show the real way resources developed and were utilized in different societies.

However, the real wisdom I found was in the spiritual traditions of the world. When I read in the Tao Te Ching, “A person is wealthy when they know they have enough,” my understanding of personal finance was forever changed. This was not what I was taught about wealth in my MBA classes.

My education continued through the different spiritual traditions and their holy manuscripts. Though not often discussed, almost all the well-known holy texts provide insights into ideas central to the economic discipline. The Bhagavad Gita tells us, “Work to the best of ones abilities without getting attached to the fruits of ones works.” The Quran tells us wealth can give us pleasure, but it can also be a distraction from what is truly important.

One of the most in-depth teachings I found on economics, however, came from an unexpected source: the development of the Israelite society and, subsequently, one of the best-known spiritual philosophers in human history, Jesus of Nazareth.

The Bible, which tells this story, is typically read as a spiritual guidebook for morality or salvation. It is filled with stories and lessons that translate into all aspects of our personal life. For millennia, people have met regularly to discuss the words in this book. One could speak for ages on the lessons about how to be a better human or even how to have better relationships with those around you.

Some have taken the ideas further and implemented biblical rules into their societies. They used governments or powerful religious organizations to restrict or guide behavior, or require certain actions. This has had mixed outcomes. Some were very positive. The first direct rules God gives to his newly forming society in the Bible were not to murder and not to eat animals that are still alive. These rules have been almost universally integrated into every society in the world.

My quest into the topic of this book, however, started a few years back when I became captivated by a story that Jesus tells in the Gospel of Luke. This story is sometimes referred to as the most difficult parable in the Bible, partly because it does not fit neatly into a narrative of personal morality or salvation, and it can therefore be very difficult to teach from.

Jesus tells his audience the story of a man who is put in charge of managing a rich man's accounts. The rich man is considering terminating this manager's employment because he believes the manager is wasting his possessions. The manager's solution is to call each of the people indebted to the rich man and forgive a portion of their debt. Paradoxically, rather than being angry with the manager, the master commends him for acting shrewdly.

By the end of the story the Pharisees, who were the rich and powerful leaders of the time, are glaring at Jesus, and he makes it very clear that this story was directed at them. This story and the lesson that followed enraged the leaders of the time. And why wouldn’t it? They were the ones that controlled the debts. They were the ones who people owed the resources too.

There are many interpretations of this story, and a good preacher can still find a lesson of personal responsibility in it. At one point the rich man calls the manager to account for his work, and if you believe the rest of the Bible, you would agree that everyone will need to give an account of ourselves to a higher power at some point. Some scholars have said that the manager was just forgiving his commission, which would again make the story one of personal morality.

However, the debts in the story were very large—much larger than what any regular citizen would control and larger than any one person in the audience would be capable of paying on their own. Also, it is unclear how many people were indebted to this rich man, but it seems likely that there were enough of them to cause a debt crisis similar to the countless debt crises that have plagued societies for ages.

I became enthralled with this story. However, I could not wrap my head around how it was meant to affect my life. This lesson appears to be for the leaders of society, explaining how to deal with the debt issues that plagued their businesses and society.

The strategy given in this story contradicts every piece of financial management education I ever received. Current mainstream economic perspectives see debt growth as natural. Some economic perspectives would argue for guardrails on how debt is structured, but the outright cancelling of debts is never taught as a reasonable move. Could you imagine if a CEO or the leader of a country just started erasing all the debts? The people in power would indict, if not outright execute him.

As anyone who has read the Bible knows, it often leaves you with more questions than you had before you read it. Was this really a story of personal morality, or could it be possible that Jesus was trying to tell the leaders how to solve a societal problem? Why would a holy man concern himself with the financial and political structures of the time? Why is he not taking the same position as the religious leaders and rulers? Am I just not enlightened enough to understand this parable?

It was clear that this would take further analysis. The story of Jesus and his ministry didn’t happen in a vacuum. The history of the Israelite society was written about extensively—more extensively than possibly any other society from that era.

While the Bible, which tells the story of the Israelites, is primarily a book of theology, but it also contains stories and lessons on almost all the topics of our modern economic disciplines: debt, production, employment, money, banking, investment, savings, health, politics, trade, industrial organization, inequality, and much more.

On the surface, theology and economics have a lot in common. At their core both subjects tell a story about societal development. Our economic systems and religious systems are basically as old as recorded civilization. They tell some of the earliest stories we have, and they tell of our early development as a species.

Additionally, both topics are heavily steeped in religiosity. In either discipline, going against established ideas or theories could potentially get you ostracized or kicked out of important institutions. Jesus was executed as an enemy of the state for the things he spoke about. He is not the only person in history to be severely punished for questioning the prevailing beliefs in these topics.

And while scholars and intellectuals often try to rationalize and sterilize these topics as much as possible, both economics and theology can have profound emotional impacts on individuals and societies. These topics affect important aspects of how we live our lives. They relate to our ideas about security and fairness and can have direct impacts on our physical well-being.

The stories and teachings contained in the Bible are the most published and probably the most analyzed pieces of literature ever created. However, my hope for this book is to accurately explore the economic wisdom that the world can receive from this great source. I have made it my goal to remain objective about this analysis, but I would encourage every single person to read and analyze the Bible personally. Thank you for taking the time to read along with me, and thank you to every person who helped me on this journey. I offer this book as a sacrifice to a Higher Power as I understand it. Holy be thy name.