Month: October 2014

If we wish to date the beginning of the end of the institutional church, a good argument could be made for Ghent, 1324, when, according to David Landes, “the abbot of St Pierre authorized the fullers ‘to install a bell in the workhouse newly founded by them near the Hoipoorte’” (D Landes 73). Originally installed to infallibly signal times of prayer, the workhouse clock, like all clocks in the fourteenth century would eventually serve double duty. For it would also allow savvy entrepreneurs to signal the beginning and the end of the work day and thereby infallibly measure the abstract time and, so, the abstract values, of the goods produced between these signals. For the entrepreneurs, the church bells were, quite literally, a godsend, since eventually they would relieve them of the nasty business of having to negotiate just wages, prices, and holidays with representatives of clergy, the guilds, and the nobility.

Herewith, too, nominalism, always a minority view among educated clergy, gained a fresh lease on life. For now practically it became increasingly difficult to mistake the material composition of things or people with their true, unseen, immaterial value or meaning. When, by the end of the fifteenth century, renegade priests were beginning to isolate faith from works, spirit from body, body from bread, blood from wine, and gospel from law, these nominalist distinctions suddenly found a ready audience among towns folk who, practically, already knew that this was the case. For the bells had already told them. (Note that M Luther’s distinctions would have made little sense to the diaspora-trained Jew Saint Paul by whom Luther believed his doctrinal reformation was originally coined.)

We can well imagine how the Holy Eucharist, not unlike the liturgical and visual ornamentation that Jean Calvin found so obnoxious, must have struck sixteenth century protestants with much the same embarrassment as the institutional church strikes twenty-first century Christians today: so fallible, so fraught, impure, defiled, and ugly. And perhaps we can understand then why these first Protestants fixed their gaze not only on the Word — which, after all, could still be confused with the Living Word, Christ Jesus, or His Body, which is to say, the Church — but on the words, the actual grammar and syntax, whose beauty lay in our capacity to isolate the written, material, script from its immaterial, transcendent meaning.

Over time this original embarrassment and discomfort has only grown. To be sure, in the heady Fordist days immediately following World War II, high modernism was permitted to prevail, at least until the economic downturn in the early 1970s. And perhaps we were led to believe that the spirit and the flesh might actually have truck with one another: big bloated institutions, expanding seminaries, new hires, expanding enrollments. And, yet, as David Harvey would remind us, for all of its expansionary bravado, the Fordist Church celebrated the ephemera of the spirit — sleek, crisp, empty architectural lines, Expressionist and post-Expressionist Christs, and a move liturgically away from fixed and frozen traditions — no less and perhaps even more than we are accustomed to today. Yet, as the saying goes, “I have been docetic with money and without money. And I prefer being docetic with money.” So that, when the downturn did hit in the 1970s and our institutions began to shed their bodies — liturgies, buildings, seminaries, students, hours, and, yes, their faculties (see #GTS8)— this pragmatic, neoliberal elimination of the Body of Christ could be framed as simply another step towards a higher, purer, truer form of Christianity.

Commuter priests, commuter parishioners, on-line liturgies, digital courses, digital faculties, electronic students, electronic libraries — what could be more spiritual, right?

To be sure, it would be equally, perhaps even more erroneous for us to flee to some kind of post-Modern Ebionitism. Bodies and spirits belong together. Institutions and histories are empty if not occupied by embodied practitioners walking in the Spirit. Liturgies must change as the Body is transformed. So too must architecture and aesthetics.

And, yet, it strikes me that we unnecessarily lacerate ourselves when with too broad brushstrokes we condemn the institutional church, the embodied church — with its all too evident limitations, missteps, weaknesses, and wounds — as such. Only when it forgets what it is, that it is flesh, does the institutional church overstep its bounds. That is to say, only when it comically masquerades as disembodied spirit — as the Spirit — does the institutional church deserve our rebuke. Seminaries without seminarians, without seminaries, without professors, without books, without chapels, without time for prayer and worship — all on-line, available with the click of a mouse. Now, that is comical! But it is also terribly tragic, precisely because it mistakes a regrettable vice for an unmitigated virtue: no body, no harm, spirituality by default.

Our institutions of higher learning need to recover their financial bearings. We need administrators who will tirelessly hit the road, bang on doors, shake the money tree, and make our seminaries work. We do not need administrators who roll over and celebrate their defeat as though it were a virtue. In short, we need the institutional church. We need bodies, buildings, chapels, libraries, professors, students, liturgies, histories, choirs, robes, and vestments. These are not immaterial to our faith for the simple reason that our faith is not immaterial. We need the institutional church. But we need an institutional church that fully recognizes its bodily character.

Amen veni Domine Iesu.

Yesterday citizens across Bosnia and Herzegovina went to the polls to elect regional and national representatives (see Bosnian Elections). No one, least of all Bosnians and Herzegovinians themselves, believe that the elections will solve any of the nation’s most intractable problems. Indeed, most feel that the elections are likely to make these problems worse.

Although I am by no means an expert on Bosnian and Herzegovinian politics, I do believe that my year traveling throughout the region, speaking, teaching, but mostly listening between August 2013 and August 2014, might shed some light on why today’s elections will likely exacerbate these problems.

Reports in the Guardian, the New York Times, and even Al Jazeera will focus on persistent ethnic divisions and upon the entrenched oligarchy. And all will dutifully report how it was the US-brokered Dayton Accords that brought peace to the warring factions in 1995. Yet none I suspect will mention either the true cause for these wars — not ethnic conflict — or the true, long-term solution to the ongoing hostilities in the region: abandoning the neoliberal economic policies in the 1970s, and undoing the destruction produced by the economic downturn in the 1980s.

The persistent focus on ethnic conflict in the region known as Bosnia and Herzegovina is a relic of the nineteenth century, when, as Benedict Anderson reminds us, the emerging bourgeoisie imagined the nation as a counterpoint to the multi-ethnic (and therefore illegitimate and unnatural) monarchies of Europe. National bourgoisies created the new fields of national linguistics to “recover” “lost” stories from the past “proving” that beneath the accretions of nobility and monarchs there rested true, natural, and legitimate popular sovereigns — the peoples — which, of course, naturally excluded multi-ethnic monstrosities such as the Balkans. The only question remaining then concerned the true character of that “natural” underlying community.

Although the majority of communities in Bosnia and Herzegovina were Muslim, for centuries there had also been strong Croat (Catholic) and Serb (Orthodox) minorities whose representatives always maintained that it was “unnatural” for a European nation to be ruled by non-Christians. Thus, Bosnia and Herzegovina, it was argued should “naturally” be ruled by either Croats (Catholics) or by Serbs (Orthodox). This changed in 1945 when a coalition of Serbs, Croat, and Bosnian Communists successfully defeated Germany’s occupying Nazi forces and forged the first truly secular constitutional republic under Jozip Broz Tito. The secular and independent character of Bosnia and Herzegovina was further reinforced in 1950 when, in defiance of Joseph Stalin, the ruling Yugoslav Communists set out on an independent path of what Yugoslavs called self-governing socialism, in effect creating democratically managed cooperatives that enjoyed the authority to manage their own production, set their own wages, set their own prices, and, eventually, even trade with non-communist states. This explains how Croats, Serbs, and Bosnians in Yugoslavia, particularly in industrialized regions, increasingly came to view themselves not as Catholics, Orthodox, and Muslims, but as Yugoslavs.

Yet, for much the same reasons that heavy industry in western Europe, Great Britain, North America, and Japan began to suffer from declining rates of profit in the late 1960s and early 1970s, so Yugoslavs also began to suffer the consequences of global competition. In some regions of the globe, most notably in northwestern Europe, the public elected to reduce its overall consumption, production, and demand and spread the shock of deindustrialization socially across the entire population. This contrasts with Great Britain and the United States where in order to maintain relatively high rates of return for investors, elected representatives were willing to subject voters to higher than average un- and underemployment, lower wages and benefits, while deregulating financial institutions and relieving wealth of its fair share of tax burdens. Collectively these policies, known as neoliberalism, had the effect of bunching wealth increasingly upward (as Thomas Piketty has documented in his runaway bestseller). However, the same policies, when applied to Yugoslavia, had even more damaging consequences.

In an attempt to maintain consumer expectations, the ruling Communists in the 1970s were compelled to borrow ever larger sums from western governments and financial institutions. (Such loans and consumption, it was felt, held out the promise of pulling Eastern Europeans into the western capitalist camp and isolating the communists.) But when the dollar was strengthened under Ronald Reagan, leading to unprecedented unemployment in the US, the consequences for the former Yugoslavia were ten times worse. In order to pay off their now inflated foreign debt, the government began selling off huge swaths of public assets, reducing worker wages and benefits, and laying off large segments of the population. Bosnia and Herzegovina, which, prior to 1945, had been largely an agricultural region, had always lagged considerably behind Serbia, Croatia, and Slovenia. The region was now plunged into levels of economic turmoil unseen since the end of World War II.

Why did Yugoslavia’s leaders not adopt the northwestern European model and spread the effects of deindustrialization more broadly? Two answers. First, because the lion’s share of its debts were with nations that had now adopted neoliberal economic philosophies (the so-called Washington Consensus), their creditors would accept nothing short of privatization, deregulation, and austerity. Second, because of the unequal distribution of burdens in Yugoslavia, where Kosovo and Bosnia and Herzegovina had always been compelled to endure far more hardship than Serbia, Montenegro, Croatia, or Slovenia, any attempt to further redistribute the social product from these relatively more prosperous regions to Bosnia and Herzegovina would in all likelihood have provoked civil war much earlier than 1991, the year civil war in fact broke out.

Yet, it was actually not until 1995 and 1996 and the end of the conflict that neoliberal privatization, bolstered by the Dayton Peace Accords (and hastened by the chaos that reigned during and following the war), had the effect of creating a lasting Bosnian and Herzegovinian oligarchy in both of its entities and among all three of its ethnic communities; political and economic oligarchies ready to receive and bank on World Bank, IMF, EU, and US financial assistance. Western financial institutions, eager to promote the neoliberal dream in Bosnia and Herzegovina, channelled resources into the oligarch’s bank accounts, with or without assistance from state intermediaries. When assistance went to states, such assistance was sure to promote state corruption. When it went to “private” interests, here too the aid went directly into the accounts of the oligarchs.

For example, this Spring when the World Bank, the EU and the US organized meetings in Sarajevo to address Bosnia and Herzegovina’s financial woes, the organizers completely overlooked the civil sphere that had taken shape in February through the formation of Plenum throughout Bosnia and Herzegovina, extending invitations exclusively to Bosnia and Herzegovina’s entrenched and corrupt oligarchy. But it was the neoliberal dream, first forced upon Yugoslavia in the 1980s and then again in the late 1990s as a virtual condition of Dayton, that all but ensured a quarter century of political and economic dysfunction.

This helps to explain why democracy cannot succeed under present conditions in Bosnia and Herzegovina. No matter who runs, under whatever colors, it is the oligarchy and not the people who win.

What is the solution? First, just as they imposed neoliberalism and an utterly dysfunctional Dayton Agreement (because it establishes an ethnically defined political system in BiH, Dayton automatically excludes BiH from membership in the EU) on Bosnia and Herzegovina, so now the international community needs to step in to undo both. This will not be easy. The Republik Srpska will accept nothing short of complete independence from BiH as a precondition. And many Croats feel the same way about Croatian areas of BiH. Which is why, second, the international community needs to identify and freeze the assets of members of BiH’s oligarchy. Of course, the international community has already identified the members of the BiH oligarchy. (These are the individuals they invited and continue to invite to the table whenever they claim they are meeting with BiH “leaders.”) Third, the international community needs to redirect its attention, energy and resources to the extensive network composing civil society in BiH, in particular to representatives and spokespeople of Plenum and of the independent (non-SDP) labour movement. Finally, the international community needs to strengthen and support public institutions, such as BiH’s public schools, that represent the future of multi-ethnic BiH. (We were baffled during our visit to find the US Embassy lavishing support on private, ethnically defined schools in BiH while completely neglecting public, multi-ethnic schools.)

Of course, the international community is likely to turn a blind eye to these concerns. After all, BiH is a small nation (3.4M people), with virtually no economy. Let the Bosnians work out their own problems. Just give it some time. However, members of the international community must know that its periphery is fraying, that the tinder is dry, and that the fuel of nationalism is quite potent. Letting these sores fester on Europe’s “shatter zone” is unwise and untenable. Better to intervene now than to let this wildfire go unattended.

(At latest report, the nationalist candidates are all winning in the polls.)

As a former seminarian, practicing Episcopalian, and sometime theologian, I am occasionally asked why or how I continue to use tools and insights I have learned from the mature social and historical theory of Karl Marx. And, obviously, I also am asked by social theorists and historians how or why I continue to practice Christianity.

There is plenty here and in my other writings (see Max Weber and the Persistence of Religion: Capitalism, Social Theory, and the Sublime London: Routledge, 2006) to answer these questions. Yet, in a preliminary way, I can say that from my vantage point since there is only a shade of difference from the Tanakh to Mark or Paul to the Church mothers and fathers to Saint Thomas, etc., there is also only a shade from these worldly writers to other worldly writers, including Karl Marx, all of whom are trying to grasp something important about us in the world.

More specifically, however, a half dozen or so methodological distinctions recommend Mr Marx. First, if I am correct and if capitalism as a social, not an economic, form is responsible for practically isolating abstract value from its material form of appearance in the fourteenth century, then this indicates the point where we can also begin to address the multiple bifurcations and splittings that differentiate modern theology and its unique problems from classical theology and its problems (e.g., Jesus’ wounds, Mary’s breasts, the Real Presence, Faith and Works, the status of the Body, the status of the institutional Church, etc.). Second, this also marks the point, obliquely referenced in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but openly in the eighteenth, where the hiatus irrationalis becomes an overwhelming problem for commentators. Much theology, tragically, from that point forward becomes mired in the subject-object dilemma and therefore reduces itself to epistemology, which, in my view, is unfortunate, since the community of faith ought, it strikes me, to be focused principally upon the body, which, in any concrete way, is lost to the Church from this point forward. Even where it is not fully elaborated, as, for example, in I Kant’s first critique, or when, as in GFW Hegel’s Phaenomenologie, thought on its own attempts to heal the temporal breach, the practical isolation of abstract value from its material form of appearance is all too painfully evident. I do not agree with, e.g., J Moltmann, that this problem can be collapsed into the similar problem of God’s death or God’s Body. But I do believe that each of these related problems sheds light on the other. K Marx, principally in the Grundrisse, but also in his Thesen über Feuerbach, does not heal this breach, but instead exposes its historical and social production, therein inviting readers to reflect critically on its practical supercession. Third, and related, by illuminating the social and historical production of the sublime value form of the commodity, K Marx also casts light on the real, historical, and social being of the Weltgeist, which GFW Hegel mistook for divine being unfolding in time, but which we can now recognize as Capital, which all too often also forms the heart and soul and mind of the community of faith, not only or even primarily in its beliefs and theology, but far more tragically in its practice and experience of God and the World. Fourth, by identifying the social and historical character of the breach between abstract value and its material form of appearance, K Marx also sheds light retrospectively upon the wonderful confluence and delightful mutual shaping of spirit and flesh evident in so much liturgy and iconography, as well as practice, prior to the fourteenth century. Since he stands at the crossroads of this transition, wrestling to preserve what is about to be lost, Saint Thomas, in TPQ73, “Of the Sacrament of the Eucharist,” perhaps best epitomizes what is at stake. Fifth, it strikes me that there is an implicit invitation in First Corinthians 1-2, to grasp the mystery of divine being and intention immanently, an invitation first and most visibly extended in Creation itself, but also therefore throughout the entire liturgical calendar, concluding with Triduum and Easter. But sixth, this could suggest that the hermeneutical error we are trying to expose should be ascribed less to K Marx than to the community of faith that appears eager, again and again, to isolate the body and the Body from its spirit and from its Spirit.

19 Do you not know that your bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God? You are not your own; 20 you were bought at a price. Therefore honor God with your bodies (I Co 6:19-20).

In a discussion surrounding the financial challenges facing seminaries, one participant asks whether I “can you explain your premise of how church buildings and institutions are bodies?” Sure.

Of course it is far from self evident that under the Stoic metaphysics that governed popular discourse in the first century, built structures and institutions were deemed to enjoy there very existence due to their relative proximity to or distance from the divine (Ro. 13:1-2). Nor is it self evident that even within apocalyptic discourse the divine held the authority to declare the nullify of things that exist or the existence of things formerly deemed null (1 Co. 1-2); herein annulling the dominant discourse, but not the substance metaphysics around which this discourse was organized.

With the emergence of capitalism in the fourteenth century, however, it became increasingly difficult to imagine sacred bodies or embodied spirits. This is because value in the new practical regime was isolated from its material form of appearance. The familiar notion of “disenchantment” (M Weber) seeks to grasp this development sociologically. But clearly it also achieves theological expression in the transformation and overturning of a wide range of previously settled theological understandings and experiences. Suffice it to say that prior to this point one could speak quite intelligibly of the sacred character of bodies — icons, relics, ground, textiles, buildings, etc. — whereas after this point it became increasingly difficult to do so without invoking the cloak of “mystery” and “inscrutability.” Disembodiment of divinity in the modern era owes itself to the rise of capitalism.

It is in this context that it makes sense not only to speak of buildings and institutions as bodies, but also to speak of sacred groves, mountains, rivers, and gardens. The degradation of bodies is a feature of capitalism, which can only grasp the utility of bodies, but not their divine character. No surprise here that we are more than ready to sacrifice the earth itself to the abstract value form of the commodity.

Yes, we must take care not to make an idol whether of bodies or of spirits. But I think it is a mistake to view either as strictly means to ends. They are also ends, though not the ultimate end. Because if viewed as mere means, this could imply that they can be sacrificed to achieve a higher end, which pits bodies against spirits, instead of challenging us to wonder why the two are found together — e.g., this cup and this loaf, etc.

Churches are places for people and are the people who make these places; the place needs to reflect the people who are also bodies and the Body, not in opposition or by contast, but also alongside. And not simply the Body for the past four hours or years or decades or centuries. Our places are occupied by words and the Word, by the dead, by ghosts and by their words and prayers. Which is why places are sacred (W Benjamin).

I hope that this is helpful.

Yesterday two energetic, well-dressed teens showed up my door campaigning against Measure D. Measure D is a local initiative, duplicated across the US, motivated by health care officials and parents worried by sky-rocketing diabetes among youth, and city officials concerned about the sky-rocketing costs of providing health care to citizens with diabetes. The Measure aims to increase the marginal costs stores have to pay on “oversized” high-fructose beverages under the sound economic theory that at a certain cost customers will prefer smaller and therefore lower fructose beverages, especially if those beverages per volume are less expensive than their super sized neighbors. The revenues generated by the added tax on oversized beverages will be placed in the general fund to be allocated according to the concerns of Berkeley’s elected city council members.

The key to good propaganda is not to get you to change your mind, but to use the mind you have to get you to DO something you might not otherwise do.

In the propaganda distributed at my house, sponsored by the American Beverage Association, an African American woman (a mom?) who evidently is not a victim of diabetes herself is contemplating the merits of Measure D. She knows that diabetes has sky-rocketed, particularly among African American youth. So she is concerned.

The American Beverage Association is not interested in getting her to abandon her concern. To the contrary, the American Beverage Association shares her concern. The health of beverage consumers is at the top of their agenda. But, what if the ordinance taxed Berkeley citizens, but did nothing to limit the consumption of high fructose beverages?

So, that’s the angle. Got it? What if I were to tell you, then, that Milkshakes and coffee drinks like Caramel Frappuccino and White Chocolate Mocha are not included? What if I were to tell you that small retailers like the ones who sell drinks to your kids will be exempted?

The American Beverage Association is committed to the proposition that no public institution, on whatever grounds, should interfere in the private marketplace decisions of sellers and buyers. They would be opposed to Proposition D even if it included Caramel Frappuccino and White Chocolate Mocha. And if the ordinance penalized small mom and pop outfits, instead of exempting them, the ABA would then place that provision in its cross-hairs. Good propaganda does not try to get you to change your mind. It aims to get you to use the mind you have to do something against your best interests.

Proposition D is a political product. It balances various interests, for example, the interests of small business owners, against the interests of parents of obese children, health officials, and city officials. Its not perfect. No proposition is.

But don’t be fooled by the “No on D” campaign. Its pure propaganda. Its sponsors are leading opponents of public institutions and public oversight of private wealth. Unrestricted free markets is their sole criteria.

Vote Yes on D. And enjoy that Frappuccino.

Wage inequality in the United States is at an all-time high. According to a frequently cited Congressional Budget Office Study, between 1979 and 2007, the top 1% of wage earners increased their income by about 275%. And in 2012, while incomes of the wealthiest 1% rose 20%, those of the remaining 99% rose only 1%.

The most common and probably the most broadly accepted theory for why these wages rose so precipitously revolves around marginal productivity. In any market — free or otherwise — wage earners will always bargain up to, but cannot bargain beyond, their last marginal dollar, the dollar beyond which an employer will say “you are this productive, but not a dollar more productive.” Should the employer then pay the employee one dollar more, the cost of hiring that employee would be greater than the earnings she or he brings in, and that employee would fall outside or beyond his or her marginal productivity.

In his study of Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Thomas Piketty argues that the dramatic increase in wage disparity since 1970 cannot be explained by any theory of marginal productivity (1) because the differences in skill levels of the top centile and the remaining top decile of managers is inconsequential; (2) because comparably skilled and equipped managers of equally productive companies in France and Germany earned incomparably less than their US counterparts; and (3) there is no demonstrable relationship between performance and earnings such that the increase in earnings could have been justified on the basis of increased performance or productivity (Piketty, Capital, chapters 9-10).

Piketty therefore credits the wage disparity to cultural factors, not to actual shifts in marginal productivity.

And, yet, if we follow Piketty’s argument, it could lead us to conclude that prior to 1970 or roughly from 1914 through 1970, when the capital-income ratios in all the world’s leading industrial nations declined to all-time lows, wages were based on marginal productivity. And it is this claim that deserves closer scrutiny.

As early as 1870, I would argue, when the “marginalists” shifted economic modeling away from the classical land-labor-rent-money-interest paradigm and toward a new paradigm that treated all factors as simply so many margins seeking aggregate equilibrium, economists recognized that the value composition of any of these factors was relative to each and all of the other factors within markets where the short-term values of all factors were recognized to be in constant flux. The value of any commodity, therefore, let’s say corn, at any market, on any given day, would bear a stronger relationship to long-term changes in transportation costs, climactic changes, migratory patterns, changes in international taxation, and so on, than it would, say, to the amount of labour time at any given wage devoted to each unit of corn on sale at the market. As the father of neoclassical theory, Alfred Marshall, noted in 1890: “The value of a thing, though it tends to equal its normal (money) cost of production, does not coincide with it at any particular time, save by accident” (Principles, Book V, Chapter 7, page 401).

This is because the relationship that any good bears to its value is a social relationship, however, which, although also cultural, is much more general than its cultural value. To appreciate this distinction, we might consider the wage difference between a migrant laborer in the central valley of California and a skilled line worker at Toyota. Let us say that the wage differential between the two is 50 to 1. And let us say further that this differential can be accounted for, as above, on the basis of marginal productivity. But what does this mean?

Let us assume that the bunch of grapes that I purchase at Andronico’s for $3.00 returns $2.95 for transportation, distribution, rent, and profits for the employer of the migrant laborer, leaving $0.05 for the laborer; which, I think, is a very generous estimate. Now, let us suppose that for an equivalent unit of the finished Toyota, a worker at the Toyota plant could claim $25. Presumably, the worker in the central valley field enjoys just as much or greater intelligence, skill, manual dexterity, and so on, as the Toyota worker. And, yet, presumably the market for Toyotas differs somewhat from the market for grapes. Would anyone pay $25 for a bunch of grapes? Almost certainly not. And, yet, if you did, the migrant laborer would then be pulling in a salary and benefits, caeteris paribus, comparable to the Toyota line worker. Fair enough.

But, someone will doubtless note, the grape worker needs a basket, a truck, plenty of water, latrines, health facilities, and so on, while the Toyota line worker is laboring on a line worth billions of dollars whose cost must, like the migrant laborer, be covered by his or her marginal productivity. To which someone else should reply: but the grape picker is working just as hard or harder; to which someone else should reply: but there is a large gap in the cost of training, etc., etc.

Certainly one way to capture the different variables contributing to these different wage structures is to look at the factors themselves and their costs. But, except at the margins, this is not at all the way that neoclassical modeling works. The way that neoclassical modeling works invites us to consider the marginal returns on the $3.50 bunch of grapes, the $4.00 bunch of grapes, the $7.00 bunch of grapes, and so on. Could employers of migrant laborers charge $7.00 for a bunch of grapes they surely would. But at some price — presumably close to $3.00 per bunch — the employer begins to see declining marginal returns. So that the actual wage, $0.05 per bunch, is determined by the socially agreed upon demand price of the bunch of grapes, plus the socially agreed upon supply price of the employer; that is to say, the amount per bunch below which the employer says the she or he is seeking a new line of business, minus the marginal wage of the employee.

But, in each of these cases, the margins are socially determined. That is to say, they have very little to do with the actual costs of production, except at the margins. We agree upon them together, socially, collectively, through our sales and purchases.

Returning then briefly to our question of wage inequality, why do super-managers earn 500-1000% more than their employees? They earn that much, first, because these sums still fall under or within the marginal costs of their product. Second, they earn these sums because shareholders have concluded, perhaps rightly, that a sum less than these amounts will bring super-managers to market themselves elsewhere. And, third, they earn these sums because, socially and politically, they can. For we can clearly imagine social and political circumstances under which those who earn these sums would be accused, as Piketty puts it, of being caught with their hands in the tills, especially given the difference between their wages and the low end of the wage scale in their firms. Yes, this is cultural. But it is more than cultural. It is social.

Moreover, it has always been social. Even when top wages were not so out of line with average wages.

Power differentials are always social. And they are always political and cultural as well. But this means that our economic modeling, which tends to overlook the social, the cultural, and the political, must itself be taken as a social and cultural artifact, reinforcing or contesting norms and practices whose “objectivity” is constituted in practice.