Moral entrepreneurship not for the faint of heart
Saying “the market made me do it” doesn’t hack it for believers. Competing in today’s marketplace requires virtue
By Andrew Yuengert
(June 20, 2006)
Free markets have delivered tremendous material prosperity in the developed world and are bringing billions of people out of poverty in the developing world. In spite of this success, there is much in markets to make believers uneasy.
First, the anonymity of markets leave us socially fragmented and isolated. Second, some claim that the consumerism so prevalent today is there because of the market itself. Finally, free markets appear to increase inequality, even as they improve the material lot of the poor.
Although these concerns give rise to questions of public policy — regarding the appropriate legal limits and regulation of markets — there is a whole set of often neglected questions for individuals: How should believers act in free markets as currently constituted? Is it possible to meet your needs in markets without compromising your values?
The answer to the first question is to participate in free markets as a believer. Believers need to take their faiths into the marketplace. The perspective of faith is crucial to the enterprise of putting markets more fully at the service of human beings.
Individuals should not uncritically accept the theoretical account of how markets work. A “market,” with its decentralized workings and self-interested agents, is an abstraction that captures some but not all of the human reality it describes. Humans are not abstractions, and they need not conform themselves to the simplifying assumptions of theory.
Unlike the persons in economic models, real people are not entirely self-interested and individualistic. They belong to communities — family, church, workplace — and they care about all of those things and more. Believers who own businesses recognize obligations to their employees. They want their workers to succeed in life.
Participating in markets does not mean being swept helplessly along in their currents. People of faith should never resort to the common excuse, “the market made me do it.” In economic models of markets, individuals have little control over prices, wages and efficient production. Bear in mind, however, that this assumption is again a simplification of a more complex reality. Just as humans are not as self-interested as economics assumes, neither are they as helpless in the face of market pressures. There may be a way to keep those workers, to give that creditor another 30 days, to keep the relationship with that long-term supplier.
This is not a blithe denial of the reality of the constraints that competition puts on a business. Sometimes a business must let workers go, foreclose on a loan or restructure a supply chain. These may be the difficult but responsible things to do. The challenge of running a business humanly well is neither for the faint of heart nor for those who abandon their responsibilities in the face of difficulty. It requires a sort of moral entrepreneurship.
Participation in competitive markets requires more virtue, not less — particularly the virtues of courage and prudence. The opportunity to bring these virtues to bear in markets is a great calling, worthy of any believer.
Andrew Yuengert holds the John and Francis Duggan chair of economics at Seaver College, PepperdineUniversity. He is also president of the Association of Christian Economists.
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