Edward Hadas

Has finance become a “false divinity in the world”? Pope Benedict XVI thinks so. “We see that the world of finance can dominate the human being,” he has said.  “[It is] no longer an instrument to foster well-being… [it] becomes a power that oppresses, that almost demands worship.”

As well as warming the hearts of banker-haters everywhere, the Pope’s criticism is well aimed. Not only did the finance industry’s arrogance help spur crisis and recession, but there’s something dangerous at the core of finance. The human good can all too easily be lost when people’s past work and future hopes are expressed in purely monetary terms.

In the Old Testament, the ancient Israelites were warned that too rigid a view of financial obligations is cruel and socially divisive. Aristotle added another essential objection. The ancient Greek philosopher pointed out that monetary wealth can keep on increasing forever — unlike our appetite for the things that money can buy. Yet while the worldly infinity of finance is alluring, it is ultimately false. Money has no human meaning on its own, but only when it serves a meaningful purpose.

The risks of inhumane finance may be eternal, but the Pope is also alluding to a more modern problem – the treatment of finance as a sort of god, and financiers as its priests. Consider four manifestations of the quasi-religious approach.

First, the magical expectations of finance. Too many people, and too many governments, imagine that some arrangement of the financial system — this monetary and fiscal policy mix, that sort of mortgage, this stock market, that collection of derivatives — will generate durable wealth or economic justice.

Second, think of the awe which surrounds the industry. The economic forecasts of financial professional are rarely right, but they receive the sort of respect once given to (equally inaccurate) oracles of divinity. The pronouncements of leading financiers, from George Soros to Warren Buffett, are taken seriously simply because these people have made lots of money in the financial markets.  Political leaders tremble at the judgements of financial markets.

Third, consider the treatment of central banking as an activity beyond normal human understanding. A few decades ago, these financial practitioners were considered too elevated to be politically accountable. More recently, faith in central bank independence has been shaken: but it has not been destroyed by their abysmal record before the financial crisis. Indeed, Ben Bernanke and his peers have been given more power — and only a little more supervision from the mere mortals who have won elections.

Finally, despite much anti-banker rhetoric, the world continues to shower its own rewards on the high priests of finance. Thomas Philippon, a professor at New York University, has shown that the share of U.S. national income dedicated to finance has fallen only slightly since the crisis, when it was at its highest since records began in 1865. The profession’s leaders are amazingly well paid. The average income per head at Goldman Sachs in 2011, a grim year for the leading investment bank, was $354,000, or about nine times higher than the national average. Philippon estimates that about a quarter of the financiers’ total income is unmerited. I suspect he is much too kind to the financial world.

In an ethical economy, none of this is right. Money can seem to make money for a while, but no amount of financial alchemy can generate real wealth. Financial professionals and financial markets are fallible. Central banking is inherently political. And the temple offerings to finance, in the form of inflated salaries, are excessive.

Still, finance should not be condemned as entirely evil. The modern industrial economy relies on money, credit and the hurly burly of investment to function. For all its flaws, the current financial system is more efficient and flexible than alternative means of gathering and allocating economic resources such as barter or rationing. At its best, and when it works, the business of banking and investment promotes the common good: it creates solidarity among savers and borrowers and rewards both daring and prudence. Lloyd Blankfein, chairman of Goldman Sachs was not entirely wrong to claim that his firm did “God’s work”.

Indeed, at the bottom of the economic ladder, people need more, not less, finance. Financial inclusion of the sort endorsed by the G20 finance ministers last week is desirable. But at the top of the ladder, the industry needs what students of religion call desacralisation.  The modern incarnation of the Israelites’ golden calf should be stripped of the trappings of holiness. It is better for finance to serve the genuine economic good on earth than to aspire to an unmerited place in heaven.

An American, a Frenchman and a physicist were talking about some unusual weather. “It was twice as hot this afternoon as this morning”, said the American, “the temperature went up from 40 to 80 degrees.” The Frenchman interjected: “That’s in Fahrenheit. In Celsius, it was six times hotter.” The physicist was scornful. “On the only really scientific measure, the Kelvin scale, the increase was a piffling 5 percent.”

Who’s right? Well, all the measures are accurate and it certainly was hotter. But no single ratio – whether twice, six times or 5 percent – captures just how much hotter it actually felt. The feeling of hotness, like the feelings of pain or anger, cannot be measured with genuine precision.

It is the same for the feeling of prosperity – any measure will be arbitrary and quite possibly misleading. Consider gross domestic product, the most common index of economic success. GDP is the sum of spending on everything in the economy, from shoes to shoe-shines, from cars to child care. In comparing countries with each other or over time, GDP is usually adjusted for inflation to calculate what is ambitiously called “real GDP”. It is then often divided by the population, creating “real GDP per person”. This is usually measured in “constant dollars” and, for 2011 in the United States, becomes $43,149 of 2005 dollars.

Economists recognise that GDP is far from perfect. In 2009, a French government commission suggested that it should be augmented by measures of the distribution of wealth, environmental sustainability and “quality of life”. The Human Development Index, which is widely used by the United Nations, combines GDP with life expectancy and years of schooling.

These modifications are welcome, but they fail to correct GDP’s main weakness – that is what might be called the fallacy of precision. The human meaning of prosperity simply cannot be reduced to numbers. Supposedly exact measures generally confuse more than they illuminate.

My rejection of quantification is anathema to most economists, who fancy themselves to be hard scientists. It also goes against utilitarianism, economists’ favourite philosophy, which claims all decisions can be reduced to numerical comparisons.

But consider an example: real GDP per person in the United States is up 103 percent since 1971. That sounds basically right: overall, Americans are substantially richer than they were four decades ago. The improvements include a 12 percent increase in life expectancy at birth, the shift from clunky black-and-white to sleek colour television and the introduction of the Internet into more than 70 percent of households. The gains far outweigh the losses, such as a 26 percent fall in the number of highway miles per resident.

The exact number, though, is a fiction. There is no way to assign a weight to each of the gains and losses, and no reason to assume that GDP, which measures the inflation-adjusted price of the various goods and services, is a particularly meaningful summation.

Happiness economists try to dodge the problem by looking for a measurable and meaningful number in people’s feelings. They claim subjective satisfaction can be counted up, simply by asking people to rate their happiness on a scale of, say, 1 to 5. The approach has many problems, one of which is that it doesn’t make any sense to say happiness has increased by, say, 12 percent.

Emotions just don’t work that way. George may love his current girlfriend more than his ex, but it’s only a figure of speech to say he loves her twice as much. Similarly, it makes no sense to say we are twice as happy as our parents or 12 percent happier than we were a half a decade ago.

GDP and similar measures can be quite helpful rough indicators, especially for poor countries. For example, the Chinese government aims at 8 percent annual real GDP increase – that rate creates jobs without putting excessive strain on society. But the authorities in Beijing should be careful, for the precision is spurious. Sometime soon, the right GDP growth number will be lower. And when China gets rich enough, no measure of wealth will provide much insight.

Look at the International Monetary Fund’s calculation that GDP per person was 27 percent lower in France than in the United States in 2011. The exactitude is ridiculous and the basic conclusion, that Americans are substantially richer than French people, is silly. The countries are both rich and modern, just in somewhat different, incommensurate ways. France has cheaper medical care, longer holidays and better mass transit and bakeries. The United States has bigger houses and more cars per person.

Numbers are seductive, so economists, politicians and pundits tend to fret over every tenth of a percentage point of GDP. But it is easy to exaggerate the importance of incremental changes in measures of this sort. It would be better to stop striving for precision. Or at least to cut back by 92.4 percent.

Nothing stimulates anti-capitalist feelings like large sums of money changing hands in the hope of huge profits. A recent example: the prospect that Facebook could be worth some $100 billion to its shareholders. The website’s users might prefer less advertising and a lower valuation. But no one asked them. This inspired my Reuters colleague Paul Smalera to suggest that Facebook go co-op. Smalera won’t get his way, but he’s right to wonder whether the hunt for shareholder profits makes the world a better place.

In modern economies, most companies are supposed to be run for the benefit of the providers of equity capital, the shareholders, considered co-owners. Cooperatives and mutuals are owned by and supposed to be run for different groups: customers (the Cooperative Wholesale Society in the UK and American credit unions), suppliers (Sunkist citrus growers in the United States) or workers (the Mondragon group of companies in Spain and the UK retailer John Lewis).

The original thinking behind almost all these organisation was idealistic, even utopian: greedy capitalists had polluted the economy. Their exclusion would help promote the best aspects of human nature.

The idealism has not borne rich fruit. Co-ops and mutually owned enterprises (another name for this type of organisation) do not play a big role in the industrial economy. In the United States, the 100 largest employee-owned companies now account for only 0.5 percent of all workers, according to data from the National Center for Employee Ownership. Mutuality is doing less badly elsewhere – the largest dairy in India is a cooperative – but around the world, the movement’s boosters are losing their power.

The idealism and the lack of success are related. Cooperatives were designed without much thought about what would happen when managers and workers lose their initial energy and enthusiasm. Outside oversight was scanty. The founders promoted corporate cultures which became more complacent than collaborative. Managers were weak, and companies stagnated.

Yet the limited success of the cooperative movement does not equate to a resounding triumph for its ideological opposite – the shareholder value cult. If profits were all that mattered for the economy, then more than a quarter of all American workers would not be employed by enterprises that function, often quite well, without profit motive – 17 percent by governments and another 11 percent by private, not-for-profit, organisations.

Indeed, something like the cooperative spirit can thrive within profit-seeking companies. Workers think more about doing a good job for their team, and for their customers, and don’t obsess about the bottom line. They may behave this way for unselfish reasons. But self-interest can also make them focus on the opinion of bosses, who like teamwork, more than on returns to shareholders.

So neither cooperatives nor shareholders hold the secret to modern economic success. Profits for shareholders are less important than either their enemies or their fans would like to believe.

But shareholders do matter. Facebook is a case in point. Without the ability to raise money from outsiders, the company wouldn’t have developed so fast. Without the discipline provided by the search for profits, its workers could have spent too much time developing user-friendly features, for example, at the risk of leaving the website clever but broke.

Still, Smalera has a point. Exaggerated profit maximisation has made social networking less social. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg seems to be aware of the danger of too much profit-seeking. Like many media magnates before him, he will take super voting-rights, in his case to ensure the company stays loyal to its “social mission – to make the world more open and connected”.

A more cooperative corporate structure might be preferable to the trust-Zuckerberg arrangement. But the need for less aggressive shareholders is greater in finance than it is in media. Mutuality is the most natural structure for banks and insurers. Since their funds come directly from depositors, they don’t need to raise capital from outside shareholders. Arbitrating the conflicting desires of savers and borrowers should be enough to keep management busy, honest and efficient. As recently as three decades ago the financial system in Europe was mostly not-for-profit, and mutuals also played a major role in the United States.

Promoters of demutualisation said private shareholders would bring capital and discipline, but there was no good reason to change the old structures. Indeed, the introduction of the culture of profits into formerly mutual institutions was a significant contributor to the recent financial crisis. Such banks proved easy prey to the schemes of greedy schemers.

In organising the economy, greedy schemers and utopian dreamers are not the only alternatives. Like well-run government agencies and prudent shareholder-owned companies, well-designed cooperatives can be efficient servants of the common good. Hard-headed bankers and regulators should catch on.

The financial markets rejoiced last week because the U.S. unemployment rate fell to 8.3 percent in January, 0.8 percentage points lower than a year earlier. Back in the real world, the gain looks less impressive. The proportion of the adult American population with a job has hardly changed since January 2011 – it is up from 58.4 to 58.5 percent. That number peaked in 2000 at 64.4 percent.

The decline in American so-called “participation rate” is a serious economic problem. Many blame the cyclical downturn or inadequate GDP growth, but they are too focussed on output. The real issue is input: the supply and the need for labour. This is not just an issue for the United States. But the current shortage of jobs in most rich countries is the latest leg of a long race between technological forces that lead to job destruction and socio-economic forces which provide new kinds of employment.

Over the last two centuries, the contest has been fairly even. The labour savings in field, factory and home have been nothing short of amazing. Imagine that today’s technology and labour skills were available when Adam Smith wrote The Wealth of Nations in 1776. If people today worked as many hours a week as they did then, and for as many years of their lives, and if they consumed roughly the same quantity of goods and services, the unemployment rate would more like 70 than 8 percent.

But the forces of job creation have been equally amazing. The work has been spread out. People work less – they have weekends and holidays off, and more years of education and retirement. They also consume much more, and this creates employment. And although rampant consumerism raises some ethical questions, increased leisure and consumption constitutes basically good news.

There have been periods both of labour shortages and excess unemployment, but up to now balance has always been restored. We are now in a new period of imbalance in rich countries. The job-destructive forces of technology have pulled ahead of the rebalancing mechanisms. That should be interpreted as a call for action on jobs.

Luddite calls to stop or reverse technological progress provide no answer. Even if mobile phones and the Internet destroy more jobs than they create – no one really knows – they certainly do much more good than harm. And every job lost in a dangerous mine or on a boring assembly line is a gain for humanity.

But many jobs could be created if the economic arrangements were more favourable. For example, the United States has dilapidated highways and an army of unemployed construction workers, but it has not been able to match the two. Such stalemates in the labour system can be broken, although rarely without changes in taxes, benefits, wage laws and training arrangements. But it worked for Germany. Thanks largely to some tinkering with the unemployment rules, its participation rate is higher now than in 2000.

Tinkering may be enough to get employment back in balance, but jobs could also be created in areas long seen to be of marginal importance, or no importance at all. This idea goes against the professional grain of most economists. Adam Smith wrote disapprovingly of “unproductive” labour and his followers have cheered whenever workers use less effort to produce more.

But economists have an inadequate understanding of what is really productive. They ignore the reality that many jobs in a modern economy are useless – or close to it. The vast bureaucracies of government, finance, and marketing employ many people who add to GDP but whose work does little or nothing to make life better.

Pointless jobs could be created by making the tax code more complicated, by requiring teachers to do more paperwork, by developing new financial instruments. The possibilities are endless. If these ideas fail, we could emulate some of the bad habits of the past masters of full employment, Soviet-style communists. They excelled at wasted effort.

But there is a better way. And that is to rethink the value of jobs that economists have traditionally considered useless. Take a look at Smith’s collection of “frivolous professions”. He includes “churchmen, lawyers, physicians, men of letters of all kinds; players, buffoons, musicians, opera-singers and opera-dancers”.

Arguably, most of these bring spiritual richness to life while lawyers – in theory at least – make the world a fairer place. So let’s have more of them (well, maybe not more lawyers), and more employment in similar professions. Let’s have more people in the caring professions too, improving the lives of children, the old and the troubled.

A desirable shift in employment needs change in social attitudes and some technical ingenuity. But the recent fall in participation rates should be considered an opportunity. We could make the economy more genuinely productive and society more humane.

President Barack Obama thinks taxes can help the government achieve a precise policy objective. In last week’s State of the Union address he outlined a complex set of tax adjustments  to discourage companies from moving American jobs to foreign parts.  In the same speech, Obama also suggested that taxes can be made simple and clear:  “No side issues.  No drama”, he said. He applied that description to the extension of the cut in the U.S. payroll tax rate. It was followed by pushing for “common sense” on a minimum tax rate for the rich. “Washington should stop subsidizing millionaires”, the president said.

The rhetoric may not be entirely contradictory, but it points in quite different directions. If the tax code is written to reflect particular concerns, whether of the government or of influential taxpayers (and non-payers), it will never be simple. And if simplicity is the guiding principle, it is hard to understand why the president wants to add to a U.S. law which already has 9834 sections. 

The current president is not the first person to dream of improving a complex, arbitrary, inefficient and unjust tax system. On the contrary, the history of taxes in every country is replete with efforts at reform, although they come along far less often than desperate measures to squeeze more money out of unwilling subjects. Governments’ consistent need for more revenue and the governed’s equally consistent reluctance to pay helps explain why reformers find progress so difficult.

Obama’s inability to support simple tax principles for even the length of a single speech suggests another reason: irresistible temptation. Politicians love to give favours, to redress particular wrongs, to promote special rights. Obama and other would-be tax-reformers are more likely to succeed if they base their proposals on principles which are both idealistic and pragmatic.

First, the primary goal of tax systems should be justice. In one sense, that’s obvious; injustice has few defenders. But in discussion of taxes, justice is often sacrificed for expediency or the pursuit of efficiency.  This results in exemptions for important cases or special measures that promote  good causes — say home ownership or American jobs.

How does this fit with the principle of tax justice? In our social market economies, taxes should primarily serve the social side of the system. A just tax system will follow what Pope Benedict XVI called the “logic of public obligation”. He says that the compulsion of the law should be used to support the social fabric by making people do what they would want to do voluntarily — if they were perfectly good. Taxes should help but not pamper the poor and discipline but not break the rich.

This principle of justice will not end all arguments about tax policy. It can be used to argue for flat or rising tax rates; for levying taxes predominantly on wages or on prices; and for countless other arrangements. But if those who write the tax rules keep to this principle, the tax system is more likely to be just.

A second goal of tax systems should be to prefer imperfection to complexity. In this convoluted world, even a basically fair tax system will be unjust to some people. But additional rules designed to help the maltreated almost inevitably have unintended consequences. A common effect is the creation of loopholes through which the privileged quickly move, managing to pay less tax than they would otherwise. If a Save American Jobs tax benefit becomes law, companies will undoubtedly go through contortions to show they qualify. Obama would be more likely to do good if he dropped his own tax contortions to focus on simplicity. 

Third, taxes should not be used to guide social policy. Taxes are too crude and indirect to be effective for that. If bosses are paid too much, it is better to pay them less than to tax them more. If ordinary wages are too low to support families, raise the pay rather than cut the taxes. If governments want to subsidise investment, culture or some other public good, they should do so with grants rather than tax breaks.

Fourth, vigilance. From the tax exemptions of monasteries in medieval Europe and 11th century China to the “carried interest” of today’s private equity managers, the powerful have always twisted tax rules to their advantage. They should be held in check. More pertinently, since lawmakers are usually representatives of the elite, they should hold themselves in check.

In that respect, President Obama deserves praise for admitting that it’s “not right” when “I get a tax break I don’t need”. If his Democratic followers and Republican opponents showed some of the same humility, a better U.S. tax system might become more than an idle dream.