Rowan Williams, crunchy con?

An English reader sends along this recent speech on economics by the Archbishop of Canterbury. Excerpt:

'Economy' is simply the Greek word for 'housekeeping'. Remembering this is a useful way of getting things in proportion, so that we don't lose sight of the fact that economics is primarily about the decisions we make so as to create a habitat that we can actually live in. We are still haunted by the dogma that the economic world, 'economic realities', economic motivations and so on belong in a completely different frame of reference from the sort of human decisions we usually make and from considerations of how we build a place to live. And to speak about building a place to live, a habitat, reminds us too that we look for an environment that is stable, 'sustainable' in the popular jargon, a home that we can reasonably expect will be an asset for the next generation.

Economics understood in abstraction from all this is not just an academic error: it actually dismantles the walls of the home. Appealing to the market as an independent authority, unconnected with human decisions about 'housekeeping', has meant in many contexts over the last few decades a ruinous legacy for heavily indebted countries, large-scale and costly social disruption even in developed economies; and, most recently, the extraordinary phenomena of a financial trading world in which the marketing of toxic debt became the driver of money-making - until the bluffs were all called at the same time.

If we are not to be caught indefinitely in a trap we have designed for ourselves, we have to ask what an economy would look like if it were genuinely focused on making and sustaining a home - a social environment that offered security for citizens, including those who could not contribute in obvious ways to productive and profit-making business, an environment in which we felt free to forego the tempting fantasies of unlimited growth in exchange for the knowledge that we could hand on to our children and grandchildren a world, a social and material nexus of relations that would go on nourishing proper three-dimensional human beings - people whose family bonds, imaginative lives and capacity for mutual understanding and sympathy were regarded as every bit as important as their material prosperity.

There's a lot of wisdom here, and in the entire speech. Not to crack on Palin too hard, because she's not saying anything that every other garden-variety Republican politician says, but it's this religious and moral dimension to the economy that so many Republicans fail to appreciate. How can you praise the "creative destruction" of markets, as Palin does, while also praising tradition and continuity, as she also does, and as Republicans do? The thing is, I don't believe the Democrats fully grasp this either. Their attitude seems toward the economy seems to be fundamentally no different from the Republicans', except they'd rather the rich be taxed more heavily and their income redistributed more fully. At bottom with both parties is a separation of the economy from life in our thinking.