First thing I read this morning was this: Zero-sum economics keeps failing, a Substack post by econ blogger Noah Smith, who Substack is called Noahpinion. He wrote something recently that led me to click the subscribe button, and now I get an email from him two or three times a week. The full text of his posts is in the email -- he's not making money off me. I blame Paul Krugman, one of the few Substack accounts I do pay for, though again, most of his posts are mostly free. Back when Krugman wrote for the New York Times I read hime regularly because he, a Nobel Laureate in economics, had the gift of being able to explain macro- and microeconomics in ordinary language. This quality, nothing to sneeze at, is my intellectual love language.
This morning Noahpinion's post used empirical data, displayed in graphs and tables, to demonstrate that immigration is good (i.e., on the whole, doesn't take jobs from citizens) and tariffs are bad (i.e., they don't create manufacturing jobs in America). Taking stuff away from some people it turns out does not increase the good or goods that others get to own and enjoy. Pluses and take-aways don't zero out everywhere as they might in algebra.
(Simple math is predictive in other places, like when counting threads in dents and heddles on harnesses on a loom. I consulted the calculator on my phone multiple times yesterday afternoon. As well as Alexa -- give her a math problem and she's back with an answer in seconds. You do need to write down what she says. There's still a market for pens and sticky notes.)
The failures of zero-sum economics made for a great kick-off for a Sunday in Epiphany. As the kingdom of God is revealed in Jesus, zero-sum economics and everything else are turned upside down, inside out, and refuted, at least on a metaphysical level. I'm pretty sure I heard this expressed in a sermon as anti-zero-sum thinking at some point in the past. All the way back during Reaganomics? Or after a financial crisis in the early oughts? I know it echoed through all that hope and change we saw on the horizon when Barack Obama was president.
The thing is, it's true. Not just in religion but in the real world. Big picture, many things get even bigger and more generous as we all participate in them. We're not dividing a pie, we're sharing an expanding one. This is so much better than learning to live with less all around when the pie contracts because of circumstances or selfishness or bad policy. Or than some of us living with a lot less while others enjoy a lot more. (I'll leave it to Substack economists to pursue this theory into dealing with the federal deficit.)
I heard the refutation of zero-summing in the Old Testament lesson in church this morning, as Isaiah offered a bigger, more expansive vision:
“It is too light a thing that you should be my servant
to raise up the tribes of Jacob
and to restore the survivors of Israel;
I will give you as a light to the nations,
that my salvation may reach to the end of the earth.” (Isaiah 49:6)
And I heard it again this afternoon in a Bach Cantata, Alles nur nach Gottes willen (BWV 72). In English that would be "Everything according to God's will alone."
I stopped to think about it during the sermon. All is God's good will. I'm not always persuaded of this. I mean, some things absolutely suck and if that's God will, I'm on the losing end. How do I see beyond that?
"Alles, alles" -- "all, all" -- are the words that echo through the cantata's opening chorus. Singers are handed notes -- a sudden D-sharp, an unlikely B-flat -- that leave you with no idea of where the harmony is headed. Ha, ha, Herr Bach -- is God's will capricious? It felt that way, struggling to learn this chorus in just two rehearsals. Or is Bach telling us who we are, adrift, not knowing where things are headed and that God's will is more than we can understand, beyond the numbers we enter into an algebraic equation or the clicks that feed a social media algorithm? How did this all feel to the people in the pews in the 18th century, when the Leipzig occasionally had to worry about invading Turks and all the ordinary maladies that killed infants and small children?
I don't know. This year, 2026, is already a turbulent one, with a federal ICE agent murdering a mother of three in Minnesota and the rest of them rampaging on, bullying immigrants and wine moms in communities where citizens and non-citizens try to live together in peace. Where the president of the United States wants to take Greenland away from Denmark.
Perhaps I, bruised by life, should shrug my shoulders and acknowledge that this is a world where the strong inevitably consume the weak. But somewhere in my Lutheran education or a lifetime of churchgoing, in some reading about the Kingdom of God or in a light-dawning recitation of the Lord's Prayer, something took root. When I see charts and diagrams that show zero-sum thinking fails to explain the way the economic world is working, I smile and praise God.
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| 10 dents per inch in a 22-inch reed equals 220. Sleyed 2 threads per dent with 28.5 empty dents. That's 383 warp threads wound and soon to be threaded in 11 repeats of 32 threads plus 1 for balance and 15 threads either side for straight-draw selvages. It's math now, it'll be cloth someday soon. |
