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The Economics of Monasticism Nathan Smith, George Mason University, March 15, 2009 The Hermitage of the Holy Cross began in 1986, when, as the story was told to the author, an Orthodox priest’s wife left him, and, finding himself alone, he decided to start a hermitage, and see whether anyone would join him He died in 1992, but the hermitage, still small, continued Seven years later, several monks joined, doubling the monastery’s size Short of space, and crowded by the city, the monks moved to a new site in West Virginia, where they received a grant of land The monastery is now over twenty years old, and with a membership of 16 converts, many of them young, it is likely to last a long time Holy Cross has already lasted longer than New Harmony, Brook Farm, Modern Times, Utopia, and many other secular utopian communities Holy Cross, one of about fifty Orthodox monasteries in the United States, is a recent example of a historical pattern that has been repeating itself for eighteen centuries or so Meanwhile in Israel, history’s most successful secular socialist experiment, that of the Israeli kibbutzim, was in decline The heyday of the kibbutzim lasted for about two generations, from their first flowering in the 1930s until they began transitioning away from a collective lifestyle in the 1980s They practiced agriculture at first, later manufacturing as well Property was held in common to the extent that, at first, even clothes were shared Children slept in “children’s houses,” rather than with their parents, in an attempt to undermine the parent-child link and the private life Early on, when Israeli politics was dominated by Labor, the kibbutzim had a special place in the nation’s identity and supplied a disproportionate share of the civil and military leadership of the country The kibbutzniks numbered as many as 130,000 By the late 1990s, skill differentials in pay, private budgets for food and electricity, guest workers to work in the fields, home sleeping for children, and other innovations were steadily changing the socialist lifestyle into something more like capitalism, as the kibbutzim struggled to achieve economic efficiency and stop the loss of members Many kibbutzim still exist, but the socialist way of life has largely been abandoned Most experiments with voluntary secular socialism have been much briefer than the kibbutzim None has lasted longer Holy Cross and the kibbutzim are examples of two social phenomena which are in some ways quite similar, yet have had quite different fortunes Many attempts have been made to establish utopian socialist communes in the past two centuries, generally in deliberate, self-conscious efforts to realize a collectivist ideal and show the world a new way to live These experiments generally fail The kibbutzim are the exception that proves the rule, for they, almost uniquely, overcame the challenge of establishing a new way of life and carrying it on for more than a generation, yet they still went into decline for many of the same reasons that other socialist experiments ultimately dissolved Moreover, while the kibbutzim are generally not explicitly religious, the shared Jewish identity of the kibbutzniks arguably gives the communities some religious flavor, as compared to purely secular communes like Brooks Farm or New Harmony Monasteries, though religious, are socialistic in their economic and governing principles In particular, monks are forbidden to own private property Yet monasticism has been far more successful than socialism, with many monasteries lasting for generations, and some well over a thousand years More subtly, monasticism was an organic development, an example, like markets, of Hayekian spontaneous order It was a social order which emerged from the actions, in a sense self-interested, of individuals who were not intentionally trying to create order It was a practice first, and only later was it conceived of as an idea and codified or modified into monastic ‘rules.’ Later monks naturally tried to learn from the successes and failures of earlier monks, just as happens in markets But the almost accidental origins of the Hermitage of the Holy Cross are typical Socialism, by contrast, began as an idea which the kibbutzim and other experimental communities tried to realize Monasticism and socialism share the rejection of property and the communal way of life, but monasticism is an emergent order which is highly robust, while socialism is a utopian ideal of which attempted realizations repeatedly fail or fall short This pattern seems persistent enough to constitute something like a social law The proximate explanation of the law is surely celibacy Whereas the kibbutzim and other socialist communes try to breed new generations of themselves from within, monks are celibate and recruit from the outside This results in a persistent favorable selection effect, sharply raising the average commitment of the members But this only pushes the question deeper, for if celibacy makes socialism work, why not secular communes adopt it as a rule? The explanation developed here for why monasticism works is that monasteries create environments conducive to a ‘specialized consumption activity,’ namely worship, the enjoyment of which depends on individual stocks of ‘spiritual capital,’ which is accumulated through ‘learning-by-doing,’ thus increasing the attachments of monks to the community Socialism fails because it lacks this peculiar self-reinforcing incentive for membership, making socialist communes vulnerable to dissolution through high turnover However, other specialized consumption activities could in principle play the same role as worship in providing a basis for a socialistic commune, and the fact that only worship seems to have done so historically suggests that no other human activity has the peculiar properties of worship, in particular the tendency to become alphabetically preferred to other goods as spiritual capital increases In particular, worship seems to be the only motive strong enough to trump the reproductive drive for large numbers of people While the model emphasizes utility theory, it has important institutional and constitutional ramifications Second, since monks have no property, and protection of property is a crucial function of most legal systems, the viable communal arrangements suggested by the model—and, it is argued, historically embodied in Christian monasteries for two thousand years—represent a fundamental alternative, perhaps even in some sense a moral challenge, to the capitalist state First, monastic vows represent an intriguing special case of contract theory Economists often take for granted the fulfillment of contractual obligations, without stating explicitly whether law or conscience accounts for the practice, or what legal institutions and/or moral habits must underlie the assumption Economists tend to regard contracts as typically monetary on one side, e.g., customer pays $X for good Y, and thus presuppose the existence of money Political theorists, by contrast, have sometimes built their theories of the state and of state legitimacy on notions of a ‘social contract,’ albeit one the typical citizen has never seen or consciously assented to The monastic vow is open-ended like the ‘social contract’ of political theory, but it is (typically) made voluntarily and consciously like a contract in the market Finally, it is suggested that monasteries represent consensual, open-access orders in a way that today’s liberal-democratic polities not, even though liberal ideology pretends to “consensual” government The strange viability of monasticism is of great historical importance, because the capacity of the monastic social order to sustain and extend itself in the medieval West and elsewhere, even or especially in chaotic times when few stable institutions existed, has been of tremendous service to civilization Medieval Western monks preserved learning and education, evangelized Europe, preserved, developed, and taught agricultural and industrial technologies, settled new lands, built churches, and supplied leadership for the church and sometimes for the state, and monks played a similar role in Russia No less importantly, monasticism, and the Church whose institutional integrity the monasteries undergirded, was a rival power center that provided a crucial check on Europe’s fledgling states, arguably making possible the emergence of limited government I Background and Literature The economics of monasticism, in the sense of the phrase here intended, has received, as far as this author is able to discover, virtually no scholarly attention to date This is not to say that no one has studied the ways in which monasteries satisfied the material wants of their members or dealt with money, property and production Many historians have done that But the methods of the discipline of economics have scarcely at all been applied to the phenomenon of monasticism (A dissertation by Richard Roehl in 1968 on the Cistercian movement is one of the few exceptions.) I believe an economics of monasticism is worthwhile for three reasons First, the individual monk seems, at least superficially, as near a case as history offers to a counter-example to homo economicus, and accounting for his behavior represents a stimulating puzzle for an economist Second, as I said before, the viability of the monastery as an institution, with its socialist principles, is a puzzle Third, monasteries are a sufficiently important part of economic and especially institutional history that it is desirable not to leave them a “black box.” Despite a lack of attention by economists to monasticism specifically, there are several literatures in economics that are relevant First, Gary Becker’s economics of the family and of “household production” is relevant, since a monastery is a special kind of household Becker was an early “economic imperialist,” that is, a scholar who applied core assumptions of economics, in particular rationality and maximizing behavior, to subject matter that had traditionally been the province of other fields Becker and Stigler (1977) made the controversial argument that, at a deep level, people’s tastes are, or can be regarded as, roughly the same, and observed differences in realized tastes reflect differences in “consumption capital.” The claim is little more than semantics unless we can go further and account for the dynamics of consumption capital accumulation and depreciation, but if we can, an empirical challenge that is far from impossible, we may be able to explain much that otherwise would have to be regarded as exogenous This idea was applied to religion by Iannaccone (yr?), who advocated “a human capital approach to religion,” treating beliefs, values, familiarity with rituals, etc., as forms of human capital that determine people’s “productivity” in practicing different forms of religion This idea, here labeled ‘spiritual capital,’ plays an important role in the model developed in this paper Second, Becker (yr?) was also the source of the concept of “household production” as a means of explaining individual choices The theoretical move was to assume that people maximize utility subject to a “full income” constraint of goods/money and time, where time is used both for earning money in the market and, in combination with goods, for “production” of “commodities” which enter directly into the utility function For example, for a couple to watch a movie at home requires goods—a TV, a DVD player, a rented or purchased DVD, a supply of electricity, etc.—and time—about two hours on, say, a Saturday night Since a monastery is a type of household, the household production approach to utility theory is used in this model Third, in addition to arguing for the “human capital approach to religion,” Iannaccone developed two other subtle and surprising arguments First, Iannaccone (1986?) developed a model of church and sect which shows how a typology of church and sect can emerge from an individual maximization problem in which people choose conduct to maximize the sum of ‘secular’ and ‘religious’ rewards Iannaccone showed how, given the assumptions that ‘secular’ and ‘religious’ rewards functions are single-peaked and bounded from below, the ‘production possibilities frontier,’ in religious-secular rewards space, can take two importantly different shapes If the religious and secular ‘poles,’ or behavioral norms, are close enough together, and not too ‘steep,’ i.e., if the religion and/or the secular society are sufficiently ‘tolerant,’ the frontier bends outwards In this case, slight changes in the shape of indifference curves, for an individual or between individuals, cause slight shifts along the curve, and there is a moderate equilibrium where people choose conduct somewhere between the religious and secular norms But if the poles are farther apart and/or the slopes of the curves are steeper, the middle of the frontier may ‘cave in,’ giving the curve an inward-bending shape In this case, the moderate strategy loses its appeal, and slight changes in indifference curves will cause conduct to jump from the secular to the religious norm or vice versa People are either in or out It turns out that the typology arising from this model matches closely with a well-established typology in sociology that distinguishes churches (which exist in low tension with the surrounding society) and sects (which exist in high tension with society) Iannaccone’s church-sect model, as an explanation of deviant religious behavior, may be applicable to monasticism, with the laity playing the role of the ‘church’ while the monastery plays that of a ‘sect.’ One intriguing implication of the model is that the sect must offer higher rewards than the church, in order to motivate deviant behavior Another paper by Iannaccone (1992) on “sacrifice and stigma” would seem to be even more applicable to monasticism In this paper, Iannaccone tries to explain the higher sectarian rewards implied by his church-sect model by arguing that religion is a “club good” subject to “participatory crowding”—the rewards an individual derives from participating in religion are an increasing function of the average participation of others in the group—and then giving an ingenious mathematical proof that a church (or sect) can raise utility by imposing on members observable costs that are purely wasteful, destroying resources (sacrifice) or damaging members’ social status (stigma), and thereby reducing “free-riding.” Obviously monks make great sacrifices and in some social contexts face substantial stigma, which undoubtedly increases the seriousness of the average monk Iannaccone’s “sacrifice and stigma” model is implicit in the assumption, used throughout this model, that individuals must choose between the commune or monastery, and the world A fourth relevant literature is the theory of the firm Coase (1936) observed that firms, a feature of capitalism so easily taken for granted, actually represented striking exceptions to the generalized market organization of capitalist economies They are islands of planning in a market sea, and the fact that they exist at all suggests pervasive market failure Coase argued that firms form in order to minimize transactions costs, and the new institutional economics of Oliver Williamson and others builds on this insight A monastery is like a firm, only more so It is hierarchical like a firm, but a monastery’s control over its monks, unlike a firm’s control over its employees, is not bounded by a 40-hour work week and their right of exit The model developed here does not deal explicitly with transactions costs, but the concept of “shareable goods,” crucial to the model, assumes that transactions costs sometimes make it inefficient, or infeasible, to assign property rights and allocate goods through exchange A fifth relevant literature is the debates about the feasibility and/or desirability of socialism Since monasteries have essentially socialist economies, with central planning, egalitarian distribution, and no property rights, the question of how and why monasteries work is related to the issue of whether socialism works Indeed, the failure of socialism makes it newly puzzling that monasteries succeeded as well as they did Finally, the literature on ‘constitutional economics’ is relevant to monasticism This literature is perhaps more a strand of political science, or even of political philosophy, than of economics, but economists of the ‘public choice’ school, pioneered by James Buchanan, have made important contributions The point of contact here is the idea of a ‘social contract,’ which was a convenient fiction of political philosophy for centuries, but a fact of life in the monasteries II Monastic Socialism Modern socialist ideas emerged in the late 18th and 19th centuries Socialists advocated a radically different economic organization of society There would be no private property Instead, the slogan was: “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need.” Productive resources would be owned, and economic activity would be planned and directed, by “the people,” or the state This was the utopian dream which the socialists hoped the future would see realized Yet an economic order of this kind—an order based on common property and central planning—had been laid out long before in The Rule of St Benedict,1 and practiced in the monasteries for centuries Here is St Benedict on private property: The vice of personal ownership must by all means be cut out in the monastery by the very root, so that no one may presume to give or receive anything without the command of the Abbot; nor to have anything whatever as his own, neither a book, nor a writing tablet, nor a pen, nor anything else whatsoever, since monks are allowed to have neither their bodies nor their wills in their own power Everything that is necessary, however, they must look for from the Father of the monastery; and let it not be allowed for anyone to have anything which the Abbot did not give or permit him to have Let all things be common to all, as it is written And let no one call or take to himself anything as his own (cf Acts 4:32) But if anyone should be found to indulge this most baneful vice, and, having been admonished once and again, doth not amend, let him be subjected to punishment Here is Benedict on “whether all should receive in equal measure what is necessary”: It is written, "Distribution was made to everyone according as he had need" (Acts 4:35) We not say by this that respect should be had for persons (God forbid), but regard for infirmities Let him who hath need Available online at: http://www.kansasmonks.org/RuleOfStBenedict.html#ch34 of less thank God and not give way to sadness, but let him who hath need of more, humble himself for his infirmity, and not be elated for the indulgence shown him; and thus all the members will be at peace St Benedict thus anticipates the kibbutzniks, who sought to “go beyond mathematical equality to ‘human equality,’ taking into account discrepancies in biological, familial, and other circumstances” (Muravchik, 322) Finally, here is Benedict on the strict obedience required of all subordinates in the hierarchical organization of the monastery: The first degree of humility is obedience without delay As soon as anything hath been commanded by the Superior they permit no delay in the execution, as if the matter had been commanded by God Himself without hesitation, delay, lukewarmness, grumbling or complaint Since the fall of the Soviet Union, it has become a truism that socialism does not work How is it, then, that monastic socialism has lasted nearly two thousand years? III Viable Voluntary Socialism: A Formal Model Among economists, the two most influential arguments why socialism does not work are: (a) a lack of incentive-compatibility, and (b) von Mises’ “calculation problem.” First, a socialist system lacks the proper incentives: individuals who will, in any case, receive “each according to his need” and no more, have no incentive to labor “each according to his ability.” At most, if harsh discipline is used, they have an incentive to pretend to so Second, under socialism economic decisions are supposed to be made by a central planner, but no central planner can have all the information needed to plan an efficient and/or just direction of efforts and allocation of resources Information is inevitably decentralized, and often only the man on the spot is able to make efficient decisions Only market economies with property rights and an efficient and pervasive price mechanism, runs this line of argument, can create incentives to effort while leaving decisions in the hands of those with the information to make them But this argument against socialism is vulnerable to a reductio ad absurdum that was pioneered by Coase (1936) As Coase observed, real capitalist economies are full of islands of planning and hierarchy, namely, firms If markets are so efficient, why firms exist at all? Why the bosses, workers, etc who comprise firms not operate as free agents, trading with each other good by good and service by service? Coase attributed the existence of firms to transactions costs, which pure free-market theory does not take into account, and reduction of transactions costs could just as easily motivate the creation of small, voluntary communes, or perhaps even of full-fledged socialism This is not to say that incentives and calculation are not problems for socialism The Soviet system fell short of socialism, for money continued to be used, and small private property existed, and these shortcomings from the point of view of socialist ideology were critical even to the system’s limited economic success The Soviet Union did not claim, strictly speaking, to be socialism; rather, the Soviets saw themselves as trying to build socialism, an attempt which ultimately failed At the national level, the incentive and calculation problems seem to be fatal But socialism on a smaller scale, and on a voluntary basis, might be viable The experience of the kibbutzim and other voluntary socialist experiments shows that incentivecompatibility and calculation problems are serious, but not necessarily decisive The retreat of the kibbutzim from the socialist way of life after 1980 did reflect, in part, the need to align incentives properly To give households budgets instead of providing electricity and food for free encouraged people to economize, and differential pay scales helped to encourage overtime work and skill acquisition Yet the kibbutzim enjoyed many years of economic success prior to the 1970s Even in their declining years they were not unable merely to provide for their members; the difficulty was in providing a life that was attractive relative to the increasingly prosperous mainstream Israeli society which kibbutzniks were free to join The theory of repeated games, and experimental evidence that fairness and “other-regarding behavior” are important parts of behavior may shed light on why humans seem to be able to solve the collective action problems involved in a socialist way of life better than abstract “rational agents” could 10 extent by monks elsewhere The pilgrim’s pious impulse is one that has often led people to the monastic life We can draw a number of stylized facts from the pilgrim’s story First, the pilgrim gets ‘utility’ from worship, in the sense that utility is a source of enjoyment and a motive for action Second, the pilgrim’s capacity to enjoy worship, i.e., his ‘spiritual capital,’ increases in the course of the story Third, an important means by which spiritual capital is increased is ‘learning-by-doing’: the more he worships, the easier and more enjoyable it becomes Fourth, his preferences by the end of the story appear to be ‘alphabetic,’ with worship taking preference over all other desires Fifth, the environment matters, in two ways: (a) he benefits from spiritual instruction, but that aside, (b) in the end, he prefers solitude All of these stylized facts can be embodied in the following utility function: (7) U U C , X ,W ; A, B, S AX 0.5C 0.5 sBW W where C=shareable goods, X=non-shareable goods, as before, but now W=worship, s=spiritual capital, and A and B represent the conduciveness of the environment to enjoyment of material goods and to worship, respectively The variable B allows us to take into account that some environments are presumably more conducive to worship than others Monasteries, with their silence and their shrines, presumably offer, at least for some, a better environment for worship than crowded cities The last term, -W2, is included to represent the fact that individuals grow weary of worshipping after a while Thus, the pilgrim initially grew weary in the long monastic services, or while saying prayers Without this term, we would have the unwelcome result that everyone with nonzero spiritual capital desires unlimited worship, and will worship nearly all the time if their worldly opportunities are poor enough Equation (7) implies, instead, that low-s individuals will soon grow tired of worship even if they 23 have nothing else to As s and B grow larger, δU/δW will increase, and individuals will engage in more worship Finally, the functional form of equation (7) is chosen so that, for sufficiently high levels of s and B relative to A, an individual will abandon all activities other than worship If we assume that X and C represent consumption over and above subsistence, this is not an inaccurate description of the lives of many ascetic saints The pilgrim begs for dried bread to survive, but beyond that is clearly indifferent to worldly goods How will a utility function of the form shown in equation (7) affect behavior? The time/budget constraint is the same as before, except that the individual now dedicates some time to “producing” worship as well as shareable and non-shareable goods: (8) X C W TX TC TW Solving the utility maximization problem, we get: (9) 0 sB A W 2 1 1 / sB A C X 2 0 A / A A2 AsB sB U 4 16 sB Equation (9) shows, for each variable, two corner solutions and one interior solution If sB < A/2, the lower bound on worship is binding: the individual engages in no worship at all In fact, all individuals with positive spiritual capital would choose to engage in some worship in this model if there were no opportunity cost, but since there is an opportunity cost, low-s individuals will choose W=0 If sB > 2+A/2, the upper bound on worship is binding If A/2 < sB < 2+A/2, an interior solution will occur, and the individual will “consume” positive amounts of X, C, and W 24 We are interested in how individuals choose between environments when different environments are available That is, if there are two environments, one of which has a high A and a low B, and the other a low A and a high B, how does an individual decide between them? In particular, how does spiritual capital influence the choice? The cross-partial derivative of utility with respect to A and s indicates the change in the marginal benefit of more favorable worldly opportunities with a rise in spiritual capital: (10) 2U B As Since this expression is always negative, we know that the more spiritual capital a person has, the less he benefits from an improvement in his worldly opportunities The intuition is clear: since the individual is devoting some of his time to worship, he takes less advantage of such opportunities The cross-partial of utility with respect to B and s indicates the change in the marginal benefit of environmental conduciveness to worship with an increase in spiritual capital: (11) 2U A sB Bs We know the expression on the right-hand side of equation (11) is positive because it is only applicable if the individual is practicing some worship, that is, if sB > A/2 Therefore, any favorable shift in A will increase the appeal of a given environment more for low-s than for high-s individuals, while any favorable shift in B will the opposite, increasing the environment’s appeal for high-s individuals more than for low-s individuals For any two environments such that one environment has a higher value of A and the other a higher value of B, there is some threshold s above which an individual will switch from preferring the high-A environment to preferring the high-B environment An example is shown in Figure 3: 25 Figure 2: The choice between the world and the desert for World: (A,B) = (2,1); Desert: (A,B) = (1,2) Figure shows the case in which an individual is faced with a choice between two environments In one, which we call ‘the world,’ A=2 and B=1 The other, which we call ‘the desert,’ is less productive in terms of material enjoyments, with A=1, but more productive in worship, with B=2 If s < 1, this individual prefers the world If s > 1, like the pilgrim, he prefers the desert The process by which a monastery forms will now be evident There is some distribution of spiritual capital in the community The desert may be more attractive, spiritually, than the world, either because of persecution or prosperity: in times of persecution, hermits will seek safety from torture and death, or temptation to apostasy under duress; in times of prosperity, they will seek to escape the corrupting influence of worldlings, hypocrites, and cynics who penetrate the church for gain Some high-s individuals will flee to the empty desert, at the cost of severe hardship Others will follow them, and communities will form This stylized account roughly describes early monasticism and several later revivals and reforms Once formed, turnover in monasteries will be lower than in the secular communes whose transience was explored in Section IV, because their membership will be high in spiritual capital, which gives rise to 26 autocorrelation in their membership decisions, even if we continue to assume that worldly opportunities are randomly drawn in every period Monastic stability is strengthened further if we introduce favorable dynamics of spiritual capital Specifically, suppose that: (12) st 1 F st ,Wt , F F 0, 0 st Wt In this case, monks at time t will be more likely to wish to be monks at time t+1 both because they tended to be high-spiritual-capital individuals to begin with and spiritual capital is persistent, and because being in the monastery causes them to worship more and therefore to acquire more spiritual capital Finally, the conduciveness of the environment to worship is likely to be an increasing function of the average spiritual capital of its residents: (13) B B s0 , s1 , , sn , B 0 si Equation (13) implies that monasteries will become more attractive to their members as the latter engage in more worship and gain spiritual capital, but it also implies that monasteries might have problems with ‘free riders,’ who benefited from the spiritual capital of the others, but contribute relatively little themselves—the hypothesis of Iannaccone (1992) Two implications of this are (a) that monks may deliberately adopt costly ascetical practices to make their communities less attractive to free-riders, and (b) some high-s individuals may want to move still further into ‘the desert.’ Both of these predictions are consistent with the history of monasticism We showed in Section III why the incentive-compatibility and calculation problems, though serious difficulties for communal arrangements, are not necessarily insurmountable; and the evidence suggests that they are not In Section IV, we gave some reasons to expect the commitment problem to be very serious, as the evidence suggests that it is In this section, we have shown that a specialized consumption 27 activity can help to solve the commitment problem by creating a selection effect favorable to persistence of membership across successive periods What we have not shown is why does the specialized consumption activity has to be worship It is far from obvious that worship is the only activity that the variable W in (7) might describe Many other activities might have at least some of the same relevant properties Music, surfing, or smoking pot arguably resemble worship in that the enjoyment of them is increased by the accumulation of a certain specialized human capital, and that certain environments are more conducive to their enjoyment than others We could imagine musical communes full of music-lovers, with shelves of scores and rooms full of instruments, or surfing communes located on great beaches, and our model should expect these communes, too, to have a ‘commitment’ advantage Another important property of W in eq (7) is that W is potentially a large determinant of utility, to the extent that if sB is sufficiently high, preferences may become alphabetic, with worship preferred to all other activities The model suggests that a good that has the potential, given sufficient consumption capital accumulation, to become alphabetically preferred, should be able to provide the basis for socialistic communes History suggests that only worship, in fact, tends to provide the basis for such communes The argument tentatively points, then, to the conclusion that among the ends of human endeavor worship has a unique place VI Monastic Constitutions The basic supply-and-demand model of economics implicitly assumes a constitutional context that features alienable property rights For A to demand, and B to supply, one unit of good X at a marketclearing price of P, B must own his supply of X, A must own his means of payment, and A and B must have the right to transfer these rights The model begs the question of how property rights come about, and why, if A is stronger than B, he does not simply take the X, rather than buying it The model of monasticism we have developed here does not require an assumption of alienable property rights, either in 28 the world, or in the monastery, since no trade occurs there What institutional or constitutional assumptions, if any, does it require? The “world” has been modeled merely as an exogenous distribution of outside opportunities It therefore lends itself to a wide range of interpretations, as I said before: feudal, anarchic, capitalist, etc All that is needed is (a) that at least some individuals are free to choose between the world and the monastery, and (b) that the world permits allows the monastery to exist, that is, monasteries are not destroyed from the outside, or not too often These conditions may hold not because of the world is particularly willing to allow its subjects to exit to the monastery, or to allow the monastery to operate, but rather because monasteries are located in remote places and are “invisible” to temporal powers However, usually monasteries have needed some support or at least toleration from the state Within a commune or monastery, “shirking”—producing an inefficiently large amount of non-shareable goods—is a dominant strategy for each individual, but Pareto-inferior for the community Up to this point, I have continually assumed that nothing is done about this shirking problem But since this outcome is Pareto-inferior, we might hope and expect that they could be induced to produce more shareable goods, making all commune members better off How can this be accomplished? There are actually three questions First, who is to decide (if not the individual monk) who does what in the monastery? Second, what should the decision-maker(s) make the monks do—or, if we assume that the goal is to maximize monks’ utility, how can the decision-maker(s) know what allocation of the monks’ effort will achieve this? Third, given that a decision has been made, how can individual monks be induced to behave in accordance with it? Coercion may or may not be an option St Benedict endorsed moderate corporal punishment against monks; in early medieval Irish monasteries (outside the sphere of influence of the Benedictine rule), harsher corporal punishments were used By contrast, it would probably be illegal for a monastery operating in the contemporary United States to use this method But coercion may not be necessary The 29 ‘folk theorem’ from repeated game theory suggests that there should be many cooperative equilibria to the commune’s problem, provided that two conditions hold: (a) each member has a positive probability of being in the commune in the next period; and (b) expectations can be coordinated so that members expect to be ‘punished’ by their fellows if they ‘defect.’ If conditions (a) and (b) hold, the monastery might be able to secure obedience to a monastic rule without using or threatening physical coercion, but only withholding the services, perhaps including religious services such as communion, from the disobedient St Benedict recommends the use of moral pressure rather than physical punishment on more spiritually mature monks who err Condition (a) underscores the importance of the commune being stable If p is the probability that the commune will continue, cooperative strategies that are individually rational when p = 0.8 may cease to be so when p = 0.6 A commune’s dissolution can be a self-fulfilling prophecy Condition (b) gives one reason to expect that communes might establish rigid rules If, for example, the community adopts a ‘grim trigger’ strategy, punishing any deviation by irrevocably shunning the offending member, it may be difficult for the monks to change a rule which becomes inefficient without risking exorbitant punishment In a market economy, with property rights designed in the spirit of the Coase Theorem, any rule that became inefficient would quickly be overridden by private agreements, as those desirous of engaging in behaviors with negative externalities would pay compensation to those who suffered from the externalities In a community without property rights, rules could be changed only by a perhaps cumbersome collective decision process While monks may, for many purposes, have less freedom than people in the world, they are typically in the monastery by their own choice, as a result of voluntarily taking a monastic vow It is by no means a universal rule that those who, historically, comprised the populations of monasteries, all participated by consent In Benedictine monasteries throughout the Middle Ages—the institution was abolished in the 30 13th century—there were “child oblates,” who were dedicated to the monastery by their parents This involves no less and perhaps a bit more consent than the process by which one is born to be an American citizen, or a member of the European nobility, or of the dalit caste in India But it hardly amounts to real consent Younger sons of noble families sometimes may have had to become monks, not standing to inherit When the Cistercians recruited lay brethren to work the monastic lands, many of these may have been bread-converts Certainly there were other causes and motives for an individual to enter the monastic life other than genuine religious vocation Nonetheless, it was not only the ideal but probably the typical case that a member of a monastic community came to be there by his own consent What of the converse? Could all men who were willing to consent to the monastic life so? Not always, certainly But in the High Middle Ages, when the Benedictines, Cistercians, Franciscans and Dominicans, among others, were all recruiting, with the Cistercians recruiting illiterate men from the ranks of the peasants to be lay brethren working monastic lands, some variant of the religious life was surely a practical option for most of the population, should they feel called to it Monasticism thus constituted, or at least approximated, an example of a consensual, open-access order— probably the first in history Of course, there had been voluntary associations before The Christian church was perhaps, briefly, a consensual, open-access order of sorts, but infant baptism compromised the element of consent in the Christian church, which was later removed entirely by the persecution and killing of “heretics.” In any case the Christian church was a looser association that left people largely free to pursue their own ends and did not generally employ or provide for its members economically Monasteries, by contrast, were social orders in a practical and comprehensive sense, governing and providing for their members from the time of joining until death And to the extent that monks joined as adults and took vows, monasteries were based on a social contract 31 The nature of the monastic social contract is interesting because the idea of a social contract became so important to later political philosophy Most famously, Thomas Jefferson wrote, in the Declaration of Independence, that: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal and endowed by the Creator with certain inalienable rights… that to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed In writing this, Jefferson was channeling the thought of John Locke, leading ideologist of the Glorious Revolution in England The polities established by these revolutions—parliamentary Great Britain and the democratic United States—have been among the most successful and powerful in the world for the past three centuries, and have served as models for dozens of other polities and for the ideology of liberalism to various tenets and aspects of which almost the whole world today pays lip service Before Locke, Thomas Hobbes, the leading political philosopher of absolutism, also based his theory on the concept of a social contract In the late 20th century, social contract theory was refreshed by James Buchanan, who, writing with Gordon Tullock in The Calculus of Consent, theorized about how a people might establish a rule-based constitution, pre-committing to accept some adverse decisions by the majority because they anticipated that their gains from having public decisions made in this fashion would outweigh their losses Rawls followed with his book A Theory of Justice which has been more influential, but I will focus on Buchanan because he is an economist Unlike Locke, who accepted the rather inadequately motivated idea that the relevant criterion of consent was the will of the majority (albeit constrained by the claims of individual rights and property), Buchanan insisted that: In discussing an original constitution or improvement in an existing constitution, we shall adopt consensual unanimity as a criterion That is to say, we are concerned with examining proposals that will benefit each member of the social group There are two reasons for adopting this criterion First, only by this procedure 32 can we avoid making interpersonal comparisons among separate individuals Second, in discussing decision rules, we get into the familiar infinite regress if we adopt particular rules for adopting rules (Buchanan and Tullock, 14) The motivation for Buchanan and Tullock’s insistence on unanimity is certainly strong enough But it is hard to figure out what is meant by “conceptual” unanimity Does every individual have veto power over the establishment of a constitution, or not? If not, lacking the evidence of revealed preference, how can we know whether it would be in their interest to establish a constitution? In practical terms, the unanimity criterion gives rise to hold-up problems If a private road-builder is trying to build a road across five farmers’ lands, and four have agreed to sell, the fifth can try to extract the entire surplus the road-builder hopes to earn from the project going forward, counting his previous costs as sunk The road-builder would rationally agree at that point, but foreseeing the hold-up problem, he will be likely not to undertake the problem at all Establishing a constitution by consent involves the same problem: if some of the prospective members are ready to agree, recalcitrant or opportunist members can try to extract unfair concessions from them It is not clear to what extent Buchanan, or Locke, conceived of the social contract as a historical event rather than a theoretical construct John Rawls made it clearer that what he had in mind was a thoughtexperiment, but it is not clear that Locke did not think a social contract had really been established sometime in the remote past, while Buchanan seems to have thought of his theory as roughly describing the creation of the US Constitution There are plenty of practical reasons why a populous nation could never really establish a social contract by unanimity Mere communication and voting would be a formidable obstacle And even in the unlikely event that a constitution could be designed that really did prospectively and in expectation benefit every member of society, some people would undoubtedly form the mistaken belief that it harmed themselves or others and oppose it on that ground 33 A genuine consensual—unanimous—constitution would have to form in a different manner Instead of everyone in a pre-defined population reaching agreement on a set of rules, which is impossible due to conflicts of interest, errors, and hold-up problems, rules would have to be established prior to consent, by an individual or a relatively small group, and then other individuals would have to consent one by one, with the population subject to the constitution being determined by self-selection, and presumably not including the entirety of any population which could have been identified prior to the introduction of the new constitution In short, it would have to emerge as monastic rules and monasticism emerged Second, the experience of monasticism sheds a surprising light on the relationship between property rights and consensual government In Thomas Hobbes’ conception of the social contract, individuals surrender everything to the sovereign and are left with no rights except bare survival By contrast, in Locke’s conception, property rights are a metaphysical fact which the state cannot alter, but rather is established to protect For Locke, then, people bring prior property rights with them into the social contract Buchanan and Tullock not explicitly make the metaphysical commitments Locke makes, yet they, too, take property rights as given: Individual consideration of all possible collective action may be analyzed in terms of the costsminimization model, but it will be useful to ‘jump over’ the minimal collectivization of activity that is involved in the initial definition of human and property rights and the enforcement of sanctions against violations of these rights Clearly, it will be to the advantage of each individual in the group to support this minimal degree of collectivization, and it is difficult even to discuss the problems of individual constitutional choice until the range of individual power of disposition over human and nonhuman resources is defined (Buchanan and Tullock, 44) Defining property rights is sufficiently difficult and potentially controversial that it is hard to imagine how one could even consider ‘jumping over’ this crucial question in a theory of constitutional origins, without some Lockean-style notion that property rights are somehow natural and pre-existing But are they? Is it plausible to think of property rights as a feature of a pre-constitutional situation? Or would any attempt to 34 establish a constitution ex nihilo need to accomplish the impossible task of settling, with general (unanimous!) consent, the question of what belongs to whom? The experience of monasticism suggests the opposite, namely, that the basis for a consensual order must be the renunciation of individual property rights in favor of egalitarian poverty Of course, since the order is consensual, those who have property may stay in the world and try to keep it, if they can No one is compelled to give up his property against his will But those who wish to enter the monastic order must abandon property claims In their lack of individual rights, monastic constitutions like that of St Benedict resemble the Hobbesian constitution in the absolute power that they give to the abbot However, importantly, they differ from Hobbes on the legitimacy of the use of force Hobbes argued that contracts extracted by force are valid According to Hobbes, such contracts consist in bargains where one party gets obedience, the other, life A Lockean would reply that a coerced individual had a right to his own life prior to any such negotiation, and so cannot be legitimately offered it in return for obedience Monasticism, in its Cistercian or its contemporary form, gives the abbot absolute powers a la Hobbes, but governs with consent of the governed in the fashion of Locke It may seem ironic that monastic practice anticipated liberal ideology, considering that monks have a reputation, sometimes deserved, for being reactionaries and allies of the most archaic traditions of divineright monarchy It is no more ironic than the fact that much of the intelligentsia of the liberal democratic West in the early 20th century supported communism In any case, the Church, particularly in the medieval West, was no uncritical ally of Europe’s various kings On the contrary, Church-State rivalry arguably opened the way for liberalism, as Fareed Zakaria has argued: The rise of the Christian Church is, in my view, the first important source of liberty in the West—and hence the world… The Catholic Church… never saw itself as furthering individual liberty [but] from the start it tenaciously opposed the power of the state and thus placed limits on monarchs’ rule… [It] was the first 35 major institution in history that was independent of temporal authority and willing to challenge it By doing this it cracked the edifice of state power, and in nooks and crannies individual liberty began to grow (Zakaria, 31-4) So the consensual order of monasticism made possible the institutional integrity of the Church which, though itself illiberal, engaged in power struggles with the state which created room for the emergence of political liberty Such is the many-layered irony of monasticism Conclusion Monasticism is an important historical phenomenon which is characterized by unusual economic arrangements In aspiration and to some extent apparently in practice, the ordinary self-seeking behavior that economists have long assumed as a matter of course motivates people’s economic behavior is completely and deliberately abolished in the monk The monastery is thus a sort of socialist commune or miniature socialist republic specialized in worship The puzzle is why monasticism has been so successful when socialist experiments have repeatedly failed The answer proposed here begins with the standard explanations for why socialism fails—a lack of incentive-compatibility, and the problem of calculation—are serious but not insurmountable The real problem with socialist communes is commitment: people’s preferences and outside opportunities are variable, and they will cause high turnover which will cause communes to dissolve Monasteries solve this by offering an environment conducive to the enjoyment of a specialized ‘good,’ worship, whose value to an individual increases with the accumulation of ‘spiritual capital,’ which in turn increases through learning-by-doing This gives monks a reason to stay, and reduces turnover The unique efficacy of worship in providing a basis for a socialistic communal way of life seems to reflect the unique place of worship in the human utility function, which allows it to crowd out all other desires A model of this kind can explain why monasticism emerged spontaneously and has persisted for centuries and millennia 36 While monasticism took shape as a spontaneous order, and formal ‘rules,’ like that of St Benedict, were only introduced later to codify or modify traditional practices, monasteries were always based on a ‘social contract,’ unlike most social orders, which are based on accidents of birth and on coercion, even when, as in the case of modern liberal states, they claim to be based on consent While the monastic social contract resembles those of Locke’s and Jefferson’s theories in being consensual, in its absolute, hierarchical character, and its lack of individual rights and especially property rights, it rather resembles, or even goes beyond, the social contract of Hobbes One conclusion that becomes evident in examining the contrast between monastic practice and social contract theory is that if social contracts are to be regarded as real or potential historical events, they must emerge like monastic rules, governing only the population of those who specifically consent to them Also, the contrast confirms doubts about the possibility of preconstitutional property rights The success of monasticism in medieval times, and their disproportionate contributions to civilization, may in most cases reflect little more than economies of scale and gains from cooperation, along with the surplus resulting from celibacy and freedom from childrearing costs; but it was the consensual, collectivist lifestyle of the monasteries that enabled them to achieve these gains at a time when they were difficult to achieve through private contract Later history has shown that monasticism is not the only solution to problems of cooperation and institutional stability, but it is doubtful that civilization would ever have arrived at the institutional technologies that the West enjoys today if its development had not been accelerated by monasticism While no activity other than worship seems to have enough of a place in the human utility function to provide a basis for collectivism as a complete way of life, university faculties may be another example of an institution based on a specialized consumption activity (studying obscure subjects), the enjoyment of which is enhanced by a form of consumption capital (knowledge and research skills) which is acquired through learning-by-doing They bear some resemblance to monasteries, being places of pilgrimage supported in large part by charitable donations from the outside, within which motives other than profit are dominant 37
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