Dilexi Te: Moving the Goalposts

Without land tenure systems that work, economies risk missing the foundation for sustainable growth, threatening the livelihoods of the poor and vulnerable the most. It is simply not possible to end poverty and boost shared prosperity without making serious progress on land and property rights.""The poor you will always have with you" (Matthew 26:11)

13. Looking beyond the data — which is sometimes “interpreted” to convince us that the situation of the poor is not so serious — the overall reality is quite evident: “Some economic rules have proved effective for growth, but not for integral human development. Wealth has increased, but together with inequality, with the result that ‘new forms of poverty are emerging.’ The claim that the modern world has reduced poverty is made by measuring poverty with criteria from the past that do not correspond to present-day realities. [emphasis added] In other times, for example, lack of access to electric energy was not considered a sign of poverty, nor was it a source of hardship. Poverty must always be understood and gauged in the context of the actual opportunities available in each concrete historical period.” [10]

~Pope Leo XIV, Dilexi Te

TLDR: The Church must continuously redefine the meaning of the word "poverty" so as to make sure someone, somewhere, is always in poverty. 

This is fundamentally absurd, but it is also fundamentally unavoidable. Life expectancy in the 1st century AD Middle East was generally low, averaging between 20 and 35 years at birth. 90% of the population died before they turned 55 or 60. Today, life expectancy in the same region is 77 to 80. 

By first century standards, no one in the world today is poor. There is no more smallpox, rinderpest or polio. Leprosy is essentially unknown. Malnutrition and famine have been wiped out. 

If we judged physical poverty according to the standards of the world Jesus lived and preached in, Jesus would be wrong. The poor, by his definition, are gone. We don't have any of them with us and haven't for centuries. Obviously, that's not a conclusion that can be permitted. 

27. For this reason, works of mercy are recommended as a sign of the authenticity of worship,

Sure. But what are these works of mercy? "Literally half of the work of the Church is either already irrelevant or on the verge of being rendered irrelevant." Similarly, the Church has actively worked to destroy the very families She claims to desire:

71. Many female congregations were protagonists of this pedagogical revolution. Founded in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Ursulines, the Sisters of the Company of Mary Our Lady, the Maestre Pie and many others, stepped into the spaces where the state was absent. They created schools in small villages, suburbs and working-class neighborhoods. In particular, the education of girls became a priority.

Apparently, the Popes do not realize that educating women destroys total fertility rates and family formation. [cf., for instance: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5] The very thing the Church lauds, female education, actually undermines and actively destroys the "original cell of social life." (CCC 2207) The very thing the Pope celebrates in his first apostolic exhortation obliterates what the Church describes as the foundation of society, the family. But he moves on from logical contradictions to outright fabrications: 

90. The bishops stated forcefully that the Church, to be fully faithful to her vocation, must not only share the condition of the poor, but also stand at their side and work actively for their integral development. Faced with a situation of worsening poverty in Latin America, the Puebla Conference confirmed the Medellín decision in favor of a frank and prophetic option for the poor and described structures of injustice as a “social sin.”

The Puebla Conference was held in 1979, over 45 years ago. While poverty may have been worsening in 1979, during a world-wide economic crisis, that crisis is also long-since past. Invoking it now, as if it were a present danger or a present reality, is simply a bald-faced lie. This is how poverty has changed since 1980. Maybe the Pope hasn't heard.

The problem is precisely that the Pope doesn't appear to have heard about any of the advances made against poverty in the last 50 years.

95. As it is, “the current model, with its emphasis on success and self-reliance, does not appear to favor an investment in efforts to help the slow, the weak or the less talented to find opportunities in life.” [100]

The Pope complains of a growing gap between the rich and the poor, but seems oblivious to the growing gap between his apostolic Catholic poverty porn fantasy and the reality of the world that these same Catholics inhabit: 

What caused this extraordinary change in the number of people experiencing extreme poverty? Hint: it wasn't the Catholic Church. Yet the Pope seems not only completely oblivious to this, he actively denies that there exists a demonstrated process which does help the poor:

114.  At times, pseudo-scientific data are invoked to support the claim that a free market economy will automatically solve the problem of poverty.

It is telling that the papal claim lacks any footnote to back up his bald assertion. But how could he back up his claim? What he asserts is simply false. It was capitalism, and the legal structures which favor the protection of private property, which lifted the poor from their poverty. World Bank data estimates that titling programs in Latin America increased household incomes by 20-50% for participants. [cf., 1, 2, 3, 4] : 

"Without land tenure systems that work, economies risk missing the foundation for sustainable growth, threatening the livelihoods of the poor and vulnerable the most. It is simply not possible to end poverty and boost shared prosperity without making serious progress on land and property rights."

And keep in mind, the Pope is arguably and actively contradicting Scripture. After all, even the Apostles recognized the right to private property:

While it remained unsold, did it not remain your own? And after it was sold, was it not under your control? Why is it that you have conceived this deed in your heart? You have not lied to men, but to God. (Acts 5:4) 

Notably, Peter did not take the line Leo takes. Peter did not chastise Ananias and Sapphira for refusing to share their private property with the community's poor. Instead, Peter, the first Pope, expressly recognized  and affirmed their right to do with their own property whatever they chose. At no point did he say that they sinned by refusing to share their wealth. Rather, Peter insisted their sin lay in pretense: sharing only a small portion while pretending to have given everything. Their sin was in lying, not in refusing to give what they had to the poor.

How is it that neither Popes Leo nor Francis, nor even St. John Chrysostom, references this very telling passage when they discuss the plight of the poor and the duties of the wealthy?  

Now, is poverty a problem? Certainly. Roughly 9% of the world still lives in extreme poverty, defined as a significant risk of starving to death. We must continue to work to end this. But this extreme poverty is largely the result of legal structures which do not protect private property, and government officials who do not enforce laws on private ownership, thus preventing the poor from protecting anything that they may manage to accumulate. Why private property laws are strong, poverty disappears. Why laws are weak, or weakly enforced, poverty grows. 

Of all the saints who understand the need to protect the poor, certainly the Blessed Virgin figures most prominently. Why then, does this Pope, alone among all the popes in the last century, refrain from referencing the Blessed Virgin Mary in his closing panegyric on the poor? 

You will search in vain through the apostolic exhortations and encyclicals of the previous several centuries for a papal document that closes without referencing or invoking the Virgin. The only such document that comes to mind is Mit Brennende Sorge. Pope Leo has now added his very first apostolic exhortation to this very short list of BVM-free closings.

Which is sad. After all, doesn't that reflect a certain.... shall we say... poverty?

 

Why Global Fertility Rates Have Fallen

The "demographic transition" has been observed for two centuries, but the reasons behind it are not clear. Simply put, as a society becomes wealthy due to industrialization and economic development, fertility rates fall. The trend was first noticed over two centuries ago. It has replicated in every country around the world since then. As countries become rich, they stop having children

The problem is, no one knows precisely why this happens. There are some clear correlations: a drop in infant mortality rates and a rise in female education certainly cause fertility to drop. If you can make sure pre-teen and teenage women attend school, fertility rates drop. If you can make sure children do not die in their first year of life, fertility rates also drop.

People who try to explain this don't understand how long this has been going on. They talk about the introduction of the Pill, the 1960s Sexual Revolution, or the laws on car seats. But none of those things explain the two-century drop in America's fertility rate.

This theory does. It has to do with vision. As my son pointed out, technology is just the material instantiation of ideas. As the number of ideas you interact with proliferates (via tech and education), the number of possible futures available to you proliferates.

In order to become parents, a man and a woman have to share a common vision for the future, a vision that includes common agreement on when to have children. But, the more ideas, the more possibilities, the more technology, available to both the man and the woman, the less likely the visions of both will be common. If they don't start with the common vision, they have to discuss, which takes time. They may never actually agree, so they never both choose that single vision: children.

If women aren't educated, they are exposed to ideas primarily through their parents and their husband, thus the vision the woman has for the future is much more likely to be in common with her husband's vision. Female education destroys fertility not just because every minute spent in the classroom is not a minute spent in the bedroom. Education is the beginning of a divorce from the common social vision.

In this sense, female education is a variation on homeschooling. Parents homeschool children to make sure the children share a vision that is common with their parents. Because of homeschooling, the family has a common vision.

If you hand your children, or your spouse, to other people to be educated, they won't have your vision. People who attend college together have common instructors, thus more likely to get married, more likely to have children. People who have common religion have common instructor and a common vision.

Notice the Baby Boom after World War II. World War I saw only 4.5% of the male population under arms, and the nation at war for only nineteen months.

In contrast, World War II saw 12.1% of the male population under arms, the entire nation intensively trained together in a common vision for over five years. The Baby Boom was the result of that common, national vision. But the 1956 Orphans Educational Assistance Act destroyed the common vision. This act expanded eligibility for college education to include education benefits for spouses and widows of veterans. Not coincidentally, the Baby Boom peaked in 1960, just four years later. It was essentially over by 1963. College education of women had shattered the common national vision, destroyed family formation and total fertility rates.

The presence or absence of a common vision explains everything.... the steadily falling fertility from 1800 through now, the Baby Boom, forged by WW II into a common vision for most Americans, which fell apart as female education and even more technology, even more ideas, were introduced, shattering the common vision into a thousand pieces.

Global fertility decline was kicked off almost entirely by normative and cultural processes, not strictly economic ones. The effect of income on fertility is not even remotely consistent across cultures or even across times. When whole societies become richer, they do not necessarily have fewer children.

Without a vision, the people perish (Proverbs 29:18). If nations wish to restore their total fertility rates, they have to find a way to rebuild a common national vision, a self-perception shared across a significant section of society. Given internet access and technological advances, that is nearly an impossible ask.