BOB FAW, correspondent: We are very good at measuring what we make in this country and the services we provide. It’s called the gross national product. But 43 years after Robert Kennedy complained that the gross national product “measures everything except that which matters most,” economists like Carol Graham say maybe there should be an additional barometer.

CAROL GRAHAM, Brookings Institution: We need more metrics to fully understand human well-being and human welfare and how to advance it.

FAW: In other words, happiness, the subject of a torrent of recent books from the Dalai Lama to Harvard’s ex-president. Even in the academic world, “happiness” has become a cottage industry.

GRAHAM: There’s a search for a new paradigm with the financial crisis and the sense of were our fundamental’s wrong? Were we chasing the right goals?

FAW: The tiny country of Bhutan now actually uses “gross national happiness,” a survey that measures the quality of life there. France and England are also trying to include “happiness” when assessing their economies. International business consultant and author David Rothkopf:

DAVID ROTHKOPF: Something like happiness, it sound frivolous, but it’s not frivolous. The purpose of society is to create a better quality of life for all the people. It’s not to create the highest amount of aggregate wealth.

FAW: From the sublime moment of an artist in a performance, to children playing blissfully, to church-going ladies displaying their Sunday-best, we know what happiness looks like. But what exactly is it? For the last eleven years Carol Graham has tried to measure happiness.

GRAHAM: We’re getting a handle on this. There’s a new science of measuring it. We haven’t cracked all the codes and it’s not an exact science by any means but we do find some very consistent patterns.

FAW: By surveying thousands of people about how they view their lives, if they smiled that day or were worried, Carol Graham found that money doesn’t necessarily guarantee happiness, that anxiety actually diminishes it, and that people of faith tend to be happier than people without.

GRAHAM: One of the things that surprised me when I got into this enterprise was how common the determinants of happiness were around the world. People actually get happier as they age, as long as they’re healthy.  Health is incredibly important, stable employment. Friendships and family tend to matter. Income matters but only up to a point.

FAW: The fabulously successful internet pioneer and sports team owner Ted Leonsis had to learn what brings happiness the hard way. As a young man, he literally made a fortune, and found it was not enough.

TED LEONSIS, entrepreneur : Maybe you’re lucky and you can start your own business and take it public and sell it, make a lot of money, and declare victory. And I did that in a really compact amount of time, and you get there and think: Is that it? Is that what the dream was all about? It’s not as fulfilling as you were told it would be.

FAW: So after a near-crash in an airplane, Leonsis vowed to seek not wealth, but happiness.

In his book, Leonsis outlines five steps to happiness. One of them: Empathy. For example, after making a harsh statement about his cleaning crew.

LEONSIS: I called a meeting and I said, “Look, I apologize. Teach me what your job is. I want to clean the building. I want to walk a mile in your shoes.”

FAW: So on the same day that President Obama attended a game…

LEONSIS: I’m sitting next to President Obama. ESPN reports on it live, first time a sitting president has gone to a game. Game ends, president leaves. I’m feeling like a million bucks. And now it’s, let’s go clean the women’s bathroom.

FAW: Leonsis says he did it to show empathy for the clean-up crews.

LEONSIS: It really taught me a lot. It’s a year later. No one in our company of 1500 people ever talks about me sitting next to the president of the United States. But they all reference when I cleaned the women’s bathroom and showed empathy.

FAW: Leonsis says what he has also found is that truly happy people recognize what he calls “a higher calling.” To leave in this world more than you take.

LEONSIS: People who give back, who are self-reflective of their role in society, they tend to be the people that are role-modeled, that are remembered, that are loved.

FAW: Father Jonathan Morris, vicar at St. Patrick’s Old Cathedral in New York City, has also written a book about happiness.

FATHER JONATHAN MORRIS, St. Patrick’s Old Cathedral: Part of finding out who we are and flourishing at the deepest levels of who we are, has to do with helping my neighbor. And that’s part of really tapping into this notion of a search for meaning and purpose and the pursuit of happiness.

FAW: From the beatitudes of Jesus in his Sermon on the Mount, philosophers and poets agree true happiness is rooted in a higher calling. That is possible only, says Father Morris, through “a union with god.”

FATHER MORRIS: Which means connecting to my very origin, my essential origin and somehow developing a relationship with him that gives us purpose, a special type of purpose, and then gives us joy.

FAW: In his blueprint for happiness, even Ted Leonsis, hardly an avid church-goer, says stay in touch with a higher being.

LEONSIS: Some people interpret that as meditation, some interpret that as your inner voice, some people interpret that as prayer. Regardless of how you personally internalize and make an outcome of it, I think that is a very, very important part of the process of finding what makes you happy.

FAW: All that research on happiness does have real-world implications. For example, if a lack of medical care causes anxiety, shouldn’t government pay more attention to health care than, say, general prosperity? Or, maybe we should do what they’re trying in Bhutan.

GRAHAM: It’s hard to imagine increasing contentment being a goal that we would agree on as a public policy objective, at least not in the United States, which is a very opportunity-focused society. But I do think we could agree that giving more people the opportunity to lead fulfilling lives is an objective of public policy that fits with everything our country is about.

FAW: After all, despite our enormous wealth, in quality of life surveys taken in various countries by Newsweek and Gallup, the US doesn’t even make the top ten.

ROTHKOPF: What could we do to improve the quality of people’s lives? Is it education, health care, rewarding jobs, environment? You find there are a lot of measures of quality of life and you find the countries that do better than we do, in terms of those metrics of quality of life, actually have an approach towards government where government sees its role as providing those things.

FAW: Even hard-headed businessman Leonsis agrees we should focus less on things like the gross national product and concentrate more on what really matters.

LEONSIS: You don’t necessarily win if you’re successful. There’s lots of miserable wealthy people. There’s way more people who if they focused on their communities, their giving back, they’d be much happier in their life.

FAW: Happiness then has many faces. And what all the books, and all those academic studies suggest is that happiness is elusive, is a process, not an end-point. After all, said Albert Einstein, everything that can be counted does not necessarily count; everything that counts cannot necessarily be counted.

For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, this is Bob Faw in Washington.

FRED DE SAM LAZARO, correspondent: Minutes after delivering a slightly premature infant by C section, Dr. Nayna Patel was back in her office and on the phone to the parents.

Dr. Nayna Patel: Congratulations, it’s a baby girl. Where are you, in Mumbai right now?

DE SAM LAZARO: They were en route from their home in England and didn’t reach the small town of Anand, India in time to watch a surrogate mother give birth to their child.

Dr. Patel: Surrogate is also fine. The baby is also fine. We have taken the picture.

DE SAM LAZARO: Dr. Patel has delivered some 400 surrogate babies since 2004. Her clinic implants embryos in surrogates she recruits from the area and pays around $7,000 for a pregnancy carried to term. Biological parents come from across India and around the world. Kirshner Ross-Vaden came here from Colorado to pick up her baby girl named Serenity. She was born four weeks premature, but after a week in neonatal intensive care she was ready to be discharged. Serenity’s 46-year-old mother traveled here with her nine-year-old son. She had tried unsuccessfully in recent years to conceive. Surrogacy was her last hope and India her first choice. The cost—$10,000 to $15,000 all told—is a fraction of what it is in the United States, and in America, she added, surrogacy contracts are not always air-tight.

KIRSHNER ROSS-VADEN: You can sign a hundred documents. It doesn’t matter. If that surrogate changes her mind she can sue you for that child, and oftentimes she will win, and coming here to India, these women, they don’t want my child. It’s very cut and dry. They do not want my child. They want my money, and that is just fine with me.

DE SAM LAZARO: It’s not fine with everyone.

DR. ARTHUR CAPLAN (University of Pennsylvania): The contracts usually are written, to be blunt, to protect the wealthy people who are commissioning the baby, so that if the woman suffers an injury, if the woman has a health problem due to childbirth, if there’s a long-term chronic condition, then what?

DE SAM LAZARO: University of Pennsylvania ethicist Arthur Caplan worries the relationship is inherently lopsided between poor, minimally literate women and well-heeled couples who commission them to have their children. For example, surrogates in India are routinely implanted with up to five embryos to improve the chances of a pregnancy. In the US, clinics usually implant no more than two, sometimes three.

DR. CAPLAN: Why would you use three, four, five embryos in India? Because you don’t want the couple to have to come back. It’s expensive, even for a rich person so you’re trying to maximize the chance of pregnancy, even if it might compromise the interests of the babies.

DE SAM LAZARO: Dr. Patel concedes that implanting five embryos heightens the risk for infants and mother and says she is now lowering the number to three or four. But she says the downside of fewer embryos is a lower pregnancy success rate. When multiple embryos develop into viable pregnancies, Dr. Patel’s policy is to reduce them by selective abortion. Aside from possible religious concerns, this process could present medical risk to the surviving fetuses.

DR. PATEL: Parents—yes, there are some who say right from the beginning, “Doctor, put less embryos because we are not for reduction, and we don’t this to happen.” So in those cases we definitely never transfer more than two. But there are certain parents who don’t have any objection to this, and surrogates—we don’t allow them to carry more than two.

DE SAM LAZARO: Dr. Patel insists that her facility protects the interests of surrogates as much as the clients of her commercial surrogacy program and the infants she delivers.

DR. PATEL: We do a lot of psychological counseling for the surrogate and the family before we recruit them. We explain to them the procedure of IVF, what all they’ll have to undergo. If she has had any complications during her previous pregnancy, we will ask her not to become a surrogate, because the same can repeat this time, to make it very sure and safe for her.

DE SAM LAZARO: The moment their pregnancies are confirmed, surrogates are required to move into this home run by Dr. Patel. They’re offered skills training in things like tailoring, but mostly it’s a quiet, sedentary life. The women who spend nine months in this surrogate hostel have all experienced childbirth with their own biological children. It’s a prerequisite for becoming a surrogate. What very few of them have experienced with those previous pregnancies is any kind of prenatal care. That’s in sharp contrast to the pampering they get here: meals provided and medical attention, should they need it, round the clock. Dr. Patel acknowledges the irony but says it is part of a thorough surveillance to ensure smooth pregnancies, for both surrogate and parents’ sake.

DR. PATEL: We have a fetal medicine specialist who checks all the surrogates every three weeks. We have been able to detect minor congenital malformations which we inform the couple can be treated post-delivery without any impact on the baby. We have had patients whose surrogates had babies with Down syndrome, which was detected, which was confirmed with amniocentesis, and we have aborted those babies after the consent of the couple.

DE SAM LAZARO: Well in advance, she says, parents are consulted on decisions like pregnancy termination. Similarly, parents must accept their babies, once born, whether healthy or not. Surrogates we spoke to talked about building a new home and using their money for their children’s education. The money—$7,000-$8000—would otherwise take them decades to earn. Most say they were happy to have helped infertile couples. The woman who bore baby Serenity who we met earlier, admitted to some sorrow at her separation.

DHANA: You can’t help it when you’ve carried a baby for nine months. I’d like to see how she does in the future.

ROSS-VADEN: I do have her address, so I can get a hold of her. And I hopefully will be able to maintain some kind of a relationship with her.

DE SAM LAZARO: We caught up with Serenity’s mother in Mumbai, about 500 miles from Dr. Patel’s clinic. She and son Brandon were holed up in a hotel awaiting DNA test results and myriad documents to satisfy the Indian and US governments that the infant could leave the country.

ROSS-VADEN: Am I living happily ever after now? I certainly hope so. I hope that I can get her home, and I hope that she is a happy, healthy little baby, and that is what I will have—a healthy, happy little girl.

DE SAM LAZARO: But will every surrogacy story end happily? Right now, India has only voluntary guidelines, and it’s not clear whether future laws would be adequately enforced, and standards vary widely. For example, Dr. Patel says she only serves infertile patients. But some clinics offer surrogates to healthy parents who, for career or convenience, want to avoid pregnancy. Ethicist Caplan worries about where all this is leading.

DR. CAPLAN: We may get into situations where people start to say, as genetic knowledge improves, you know, I’m not infertile but I’d like to make a baby with traits or properties that I want to avoid or that I desire. That day is coming. I think it’s important to keep in mind, as we watch the evolution of surrogacy as an international activity, what is really something that a tiny handful of people use who suffer from infertility tomorrow can be what more people are interested in because they have a more eugenic, more perfectionist interest in making their children.

DE SAM LAZARO: For her part, Dr. Patel plans a major expansion of her one-stop surrogacy shop, a leader in what’s now a half-billion-dollar industry in India. She makes no apologies for making a lucrative living and insists that she, the surrogates, and the new parents all come out winners.

For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, this is Fred de Sam Lazaro in Anand, India.

DE SAM LAZARO: Microlending began in the nonprofit world as a means to help poor people start enterprises that would make them self-sufficient.

VIJAY MAHAJAN (Founder, BASIX): We were from the world of development, and we spent a frustrating number of years trying to get small amounts of credit for poor people. Then there’s a limit to how much you can do as a nonprofit, and then eventually we restructured as for-profit.

DE SAM LAZARO: In less than decade, microlending grew into a seven billion dollar industry. One company, SKS Microfinance, raised $350 million in an initial public stock offering. Salesmen from various new companies fanned out into rural areas like this village in the southern state of Andhra Pradesh, offering money to people, no questions asked.

VILLAGE WOMAN: They came to us continuously for 10 days, and they offered loans. They said we will give you loans and you can pay them back in easy installments. It’s not a hard thing.

DE SAM LAZARO: No sooner had one company’s agents left than another’s would arrive. The goal, critics of these companies say, was to increase the volume of loans so as to attract or impress the big investors, even though many borrowers earned barely two dollars a day as agriculture laborers. Almost all of these women say they were coaxed into several high-interest loans ranging from $500 to $1000.

MARIA POLEPAKKA: I have loans from three different companies, about $700 in all. I use the money from one to pay off the others, and I’ll continue to do that until I can’t any more, and then I’ll stop making the payments.

DE SAM LAZARO: That won’t be easy, say others who’ve fallen behind. Pula Polepakka, a mother of two small children, says even though she and her husband had four loans they stayed current for three years. But they missed three weekly installments after her husband, a house painter, took ill. “The collection boys,” as she calls them, began to hound them.

PULA POLEPAKKA: We left for another village where we have relatives, but the collection boys tracked us down in that village, and we were humiliated. He didn’t say anything about committing suicide. He just went far away and took his life.

DE SAM LAZARO: Her husband’s suicide late in 2009, and those of several dozen other borrowers, gained the attention of media, politicians, and government regulators like Subramanyam Reddy.

SUBRAMANYAM REDDY: Some day it had to burst. The bubble had to burst.

DE SAM LAZARO: Last October, an ordinance written by Reddy was approved by the state’s legislature. It mandated credit checks, monthly instead of weekly installments, and it outlawed unfair collection practices that Reddy says also jack up administrative costs and interest rates to usurious levels. He says those rates are never fully disclosed to unsuspecting, often barely literate clients.

REDDY: If you really calculate, it comes to about 35 percent, about—the percentage of interest. So there has to be a lot of disclosure, that’s the first fundamental thing. They employ a number of unlawful elements to do their recovery.

DE SAM LAZARO: Intimidation?

REDDY: Intimidation.

Television news broadcaster: As the ordinance from the government would propose….

DE SAM LAZARO: Meanwhile, opposition political leaders upped the ante. They urged borrowers to stop making payments on their loans altogether. Repayment rates previously above 90 percent plunged, as did the stock of SKS Finance, and banks stopped lending to microfinance institutions. The industry’s Vijay Mahajan says these developments have paralyzed business and imperiled a critical source of credit for the poor.

MAHAJAN: Instead of going after a few incidents where, you know, extreme overlending had been done, or going after one or two institutions which had systematically engaged in such practices, the entire sector was converted into a demon.

DE SAM LAZARO: Mahajan defends several practices singled out for criticism, like weekly collections. Laborers get paid weekly, he says. As for interest rates, he says microlenders themselves borrow from banks at 12 to 13 percent interest and incur high costs going door to door to collect payments. However, critics say these commercial microloan companies cared more about the profit of their investors than the welfare of their clients. Ela Bhatt, who runs the much smaller nonprofit Sewa Bank, says people at the very margins of the economy need much more than credit, because many of their most basic needs are not met.

ELA BHATT (Sewa Bank): There are so many gaps, so many leaks in the life of the poor, and for them livelihood is very essential. Unless we have something really concrete to improve the livelihood conditions so that they have more income, all these have to be done. Otherwise, only microcredit is just flimsy.

DE SAM LAZARO: In other words, she says loans should be used to finance productive activities that generate new income. In Andhra Pradesh the government says two-thirds of the loans were used for everyday households needs. Bhatt and many development experts say commercialization has distorted the central mission of microlending. But Basix’s Mahajan says there’s simply not enough money in the nonprofit or charity world.

MAHAJAN: The capital investment that’s required to meet all the, you know, unmet needs of poor people in this country and the world, for all kinds of things—it runs into trillions of dollars and you need, therefore, mainstream capital to actually underpin any attempts at addressing this in a business-like way.

DE SAM LAZARO: Mahajan agrees microlenders will have to return to lending strictly for income-generating activities. For now, banks have slowly resumed lending to the companies, and both he and regulator Subramanyam Reddy say it’s critical that borrowers now resume paying back their loans, though Reddy says they’ll have to be rescheduled with lower payments and longer payback periods.

(speaking to Mahajan Reddy): So you would like for people in distress to have loan modification, not loan forgiveness, basically?

REDDY: Absolutely, absolutely. Clearly many of these loans are unsustainable, but yes, I mean no loan forgiveness.

DE SAM LAZARO: There’s broad consensus that microfinance can be an effective tool to bring hundreds of millions of poor people into the global economy as participants in one of the world’s fastest growing economy. But the more immediate task is to clean up the microfinance industry that’s been spawned in India, one that right now looks very much like the American subprime mess.

For Religion & Ethics Newsweekly, this is Fred de Sam Lazaro in Hyderabad, India.

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BOB ABERNETHY, host: As public outrage continues over Wall Street’s plans to pay multimillion-dollar bonuses to its top executives and traders, President Obama called such bonuses “obscene” and proposed a new tax on the country’s largest banks.  Meanwhile, the heads of the four largest investment banks were the first witnesses before a bipartisan commission investigating the causes of last year’s financial crisis.

A new book out this week called “Rediscovering Values” urges moral as well as economic reforms. Its author is Rev. Jim Wallis of Sojourners magazine. Jim, welcome. As you look back at the causes of the so-called Great Recession, what are the most important ones that you see?

REV. JIM WALLIS: Well, I’m talking about rediscovering values on Wall Street, Main Street, and our street. We can’t just look at Wall Street. We’ve got to start personally, and so we talk about families and choices and local churches and what we can do in our lives, our neighborhoods, our communities.

ABERNETHY: I want to get into that, but first of all, the causes. Who’s to blame?

WALLIS: Well, I think we all have to look in the mirror here. These new maxims — greed is good, it’s all about me, I want it now — we see that on Wall Street. We see these bonuses that are being announced this week are really, I think, a sin of biblical proportions, clueless about what’s happening in a place like my hometown of Detroit where there’s thirty percent unemployment. But also my Depression-era parents didn’t spend money they didn’t have for things they don’t need. So I’m seeing a whole reevaluation going on. Underneath this economic crisis there is a values crisis, and I’m hearing a conversation, already in this first week, around the country about how we need a moral recovery to go along with the economic recovery.

ABERNETHY: And in that moral recovery, talk about some of the things that other people have talked about, as well as you, which is the huge gap between the richest and the poorest.

WALLIS: You’re exactly right, and, indeed, I learned that the two peak moments of the great gaps were the year before the Great Depression and now the year before this Great Recession, when things get so divided it breaks social contracts and covenants, and things begin to unravel and spin out of control. We trusted the Invisible Hand, you know, of Adam Smith, the market, to make sure things turned out alright. But the Invisible Hand let go of the common good, so I’m saying values like “enough is enough,” it’s “we’re in this together.”

ABERNETHY: So we consume less, we conserve more.

WALLIS: And we find each other. Don’t keep up with the Joneses; make sure the Joneses are okay. That’s a very different kind of conversation. So I see a new kind of “let’s learn from this.” A crisis gives us a chance to reset some things, so I see that happening. I’m talking to community organizers, Wall Street people, pastors. We’re having dialogues around the country. This is the beginning of a new conversation. You know, this is a chance to learn from our mistakes and find a moral compass for a new economy.

ABERNETHY: So you want individuals and families to be more responsible about their use of money, going into debt, that kind of thing. But it’s also going to take, if what you want is going to come about, it’s going to take massive change in government policy, right?

WALLIS: You’re exactly right. Right. This is a structural crisis and a spiritual crisis.

ABERNETHY: And so how is that going to come about?

WALLIS: Well, we need new financial regulations, a real holding Wall Street accountable here. You know, [my wife] Joy and I just fired Bank of America, because they had all this money, and we gave them grace, you know, in the meltdown, and now they are extending no grace to people who are being foreclosed upon. There is more money in these bonuses, these bank bonuses, than would be needed to resolve the foreclosure crisis. So the banks say they’re too big to fail, I’m saying make them smaller, so a lot of people could move their money. There’s even a website, moveyourmoney.info. You move your money to community banks that are serving the community, I think that’s a practical thing that people can do. It empowers people. Congregations, denominations could move the Methodist $15 billion pension fund. That gets Wall Street’s attention.

ABERNETHY: It is said that the high salaries that are paid on Wall Street, and to CEOs generally, and to a lot of performers and athletes, that these encourage people to work harder and that if you don’t pay them somebody is going to go someplace else. Are you really, are you proposing then a tax on everybody, not just Wall Street, but a big tax on people who are making above a certain amount of money?

WALLIS: You know …

ABERNETHY: A bigger tax, I should say.

WALLIS: At some point you cross a line, and they’ve crossed some lines here. I mean, to go from a ratio of CEO salaries to average workers of 30 to one, which is what it was thirty years ago, to now 615 to one, come on, I mean, we’ve crossed some lines here, and so we have to — Joseph Schumpeter, the Austrian economist, said when you’ve got no moral framework for the market, no ethical sensibility, the market devours other sectors and finally devours itself. Gandhi said the seven deadly sins are wealth without work — two of them — and commerce without morality. So we’ve crossed some lines here. How do we come back to some of our most basic, oldest virtues here? And I’m hearing conversations on Wall Street and right in my own hometown of Detroit that say, “We’ve lost our way here, let’s try and find it again.” And I think, yeah, some structural accountability, but also some spiritual transformation at the level of our family life and time with kids and all the rest. That’s what’s coming out of this. I think that could be redemptive.

ABERNETHY: Jim Wallis of Sojourners magazine, many thanks.

WALLIS: Great to see you again.

BOB FAW, correspondent: For 900 years this has been the hallmark, indeed, the passion, of Cistercian monks—prayer seven times every day. Nearly five hours each day are devoted, says the superior of this abbey, to the solitary pursuit of friendship with God.

THE REV. BERNARD MCCOY (Superior, Cistercian Abbey): It’s really about a relationship with God, and prayer is just the word we give to the conversation and the relationship that we have with the divine person.

FAW: On nearly 600 remote acres in south central Wisconsin, even private time, as when Brother Stephen Treat walks the Stations of the Cross, even that time is spent, he says, lifting his mind exclusively to God.

BROTHER STEPHEN TREAT (Cistercian Abbey): The main part of our business is going into that church seven times a day and praising God and praying for the safety and well-being of the world.

FAW: Even when Father Bernard relaxes with his Spanish hotbloods Alejandro and Tinaco, or with the ordinary Bert, there is meditation.

FATHER BERNARD: Theirs is about being and about awareness, and there is a quietness to them, obviously, for the most part, so they are a very contemplative presence in our life.

FAW: The rituals, the routines here are familiar, but what sets this abbey apart is that while it keeps one foot in the 11th century, the other is firmly planted in the 21st. On the grounds nearby, with a background of Gregorian chants, is a high-powered Internet operation run by two laywomen which permits the abbey to flourish.

CINDY GRIFFITH (Co-Founder, Monk Helper Marketing and Co-Author, “Laser Monks”): We allow them to be what they were put on the planet to be—to be monks, to do good, to pray for the world.

FAW: All this began seven years ago when Father Bernard went to buy toner for his printer.

FATHER BERNARD: I said, you know, wow, this is just way too expensive for a bunch of black dust or a few squirts of ink. There has got to be a better way.

Lasermonks website

FAW: So in 2002 Father Bernard started LaserMonks, selling ink and toner to charitable groups at prices far less than office supply stores. In Colorado, online marketing experts Cindy Griffith and Sarah Caniglia noticed and gave Father Bernard a call.

SARAH CANIGLIA (Co-Founder, Monk Helper Marketing and Co-Author, “Laser Monks”): He said come on out to Wisconsin. He said there is beer, you know, there is beer, there are brats, come on out—we’re on 600 acres—and see what you think.

FAW: Sarah and Cindy didn’t just visit; they stayed.

SARAH CANIGLIA: I saw an opportunity to take the monks where they needed to be and to relieve—to take a business idea, the germ of an idea which he had, and turn that vision into a success.

FATHER BERNARD: It’s a wonderful symbiosis that lets us use our talents, lets them use their talents, and helps us do a lot of good work.

FAW: I would regard that as serendipitous. I gather you regard it almost as providential?

FATHER BERNARD: Both. I would call it sacred serendipity.

FAW: Now they also sell deluxe coffee, Benevolent Blends, with profits supporting families who pick the coffee beans—also chocolates, creamy caramels, jams, and jellies made in other monasteries. Sales last year were nearly five million dollars. Eighty percent of that was for expenses, but ten percent went to fund the abbey, and the remaining ten percent went to charity, from a camp for kids with HIV to Buddhists in Tibet.

FATHER BERNARD: So we’re a for-profit whose bottom line is to not make any profit at the end of the year, because it’s all given away in some form or fashion. That’s social entrepreneurism, really, at its radical best.

FAW: Their product line also includes Benevolent Biscuits, treats for dogs prepared in the abbey kitchen, rolled, stamped, and baked by the Cistercians themselves and sampled by the abbey’s quality control officer, Ludwig, the abbey’s Doberman Pinscher.

Here no talent is kept under a basket. What Father Robert Keffer paints will someday be sold to help maintain the abbey.

THE REV. ROBERT KEFFER (Subprior, Cistercian Abbey): You work during the work hours. You stop, you go to prayer. It’s a very—regimented is the wrong word, but it is a very disciplined life. So that’s a little hard for an artist: Oh, I’ve got this great inspiration. I can’t stop and pray now.

FAW: But you have to.

FATHER ROBERT: Yes, you have to, and you most certainly can.

FAW: So here there is a balance between the rigors of monasticism and the demands of the marketplace in an abbey which is both in the world and apart.

FATHER BERNARD: We have cell phones. We have Wi-Fi. We have, you know, things like the normal world. But we know when to turn them off.

FAW: Even though that takes some getting used to, says Brother Stephen Treat, who left what he says was a satisfying job for a Quaker social service agency because he felt the need to do something more.

BROTHER STEPHEN: You do miss certain things, but you would be surprised with what you replace it with, that here I am in a community of six guys, that if all works out I will spend the rest of my life with them and whoever comes after, and I will be buried on that hill, and that falls into an 80-year history of this house and a 900-year history of this order.

FAW: And for those who contend this way of life, this withdrawal from the world, is ultimately selfish, Cistercians have an answer for that.

BROTHER STEPHEN: The Christian tradition understands places like this, contemplative monasteries, as these lighthouses, these beacons where people are joined together in prayer and praying on behalf of the whole world.

FAW: Theirs is a calling which appeals only to a few, but a calling which transforms those who embrace its rigors, just as being part of this community has changed a lapsed Catholic and a divorced grandmother.

CINDY GRIFFITH: Personally, I think I’m more grounded, more settled, more peaceful. The abbey has brought that kind of religious part of me that I didn’t have before I came here.

SARAH CANIGLIA: For me it’s been as much of a spiritual journey as it has all other types of journeys. It’s really brought me back into the fold in a really slow, step-by-step, peaceful way.

FAW: So here, in this oasis of serenity, seven times every day the Psalms, the chants will continue to echo.

FATHER BERNARD: In some ways we perch a little bit more lightly on this planet, and, you know, we have one foot firmly planted in the earth and another one off in the heavens.

FAW: Here, where they live both simply and smartly, having learned, as one put it, “only those who can see the invisible can accomplish the impossible.”

For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly this is Bob Faw in Sparta, Wisconsin.

President BARACK OBAMA: “…a situation where greed, excessive compensation, excessive risk taking have all made us vulnerable and left us holding the bag.”

ABERNETHY: We want to pursue the moral issues of the meltdown with David Miller who teaches business ethics and directs the Faith and Work Initiative at Princeton University, after a career in corporate finance. His most recent book is “God at Work.”

David, welcome. Let’s begin with the enormous gap in pay between the richest few and the average employee. Is that difference in your judgment fundamentally unfair?

Dr. DAVID MILLER (Director, Princeton University Faith & Work Initiative): It’s a great question. In fact, the final exam topic I’ve given my students in the business ethics class is this: “Is executive compensation just or just obscene?” In some cases multiples of 350 times the lowest paid employee is outrageous and not just, not moral. But there are cases when people have added value to society, to their organization; created jobs; dealt in highly risky industries in prudent and responsible ways, and we should reward those people handily. But, indeed, there are some egregious examples, particularly those who get paid for it in non-performance.

ABERNETHY: And the consequences of that for young people, bright young people coming into the workforce? You’ve talked about that.

Dr. MILLER: Yeah, I think there’s a bit of a shift. People going to college and they’re bright and excited. They want to go out and change the world and make a contribution, and then they get lured to Wall Street. Indeed, I’ve been there myself, so I understand the attraction — the competition, the high salaries. But maybe this is a chance for people to rethink — that they ought to become teachers or dentists or scientists or technologists and use their great intellect and skills in ways to create value for society other than through financial engineering. I don’t want to minimize financial engineering, but there are other great ways that some of our minds have not been looking at over the past decade or two.

ABERNETHY: And President Obama has been talking this week, this past week about precisely that — some kind of change in the corporate culture, the business culture. What would that look like?

Dr. MILLER: Well, it’s such an important issue — how can we have a culture, a corporate culture that accents character, that accents the common good and not just earnings per share or a penny more per share per quarter? That’s a new culture. Is it possible that companies can make a decent profit — create wealth, create jobs, provide goods and services for society and maybe even be a moral community to develop its people? I think it can, but it will take leadership that’s committed to a new vision.

ABERNETHY: And when a corporation has enormous power, such power that if it messes up it can hurt the entire country and perhaps the entire world? Should that corporation have a special degree of regulation?

Dr. MILLER: I’m reluctant to pick out or single a particular corporation, but certainly, and we’ve done it historically, certain industries—the energy industry, the communication industry—some are so big and so important that we do regulate them. I don’t know yet if the problem with our current financial meltdown is that we need new regulation or that the existing regulators didn’t do their job — the SEC, the ratings agencies, the actuarial firms. A lot of people could of caught this and didn’t. Certainly people need to do their existing jobs better as far as oversight is concerned. Whether we need new regulation — the jury’s out on that.

ABERNETHY: You, as I said, you used to work in the financial business. What do your friends there, the friends that you have who’ve worked there — what do they tell you about what went wrong; how they feel about it; what they might have done wrong?

Dr. MILLER: Yeah, I work with a group up in Greenwich, Connecticut—we were known as the hedge-fund capital of the world—a group called Greenwich Leadership for people trying to connect their faith and their work and their morals and their values. Some people feel a bit beleaguered by the current situation, because they love their job and they’re good at it, and they are trying to do it in a moral, ethical way and create liquidity and creative instruments for companies. Others, however, realize they’ve bought into something. They’ve almost become addicted to the power and the money. One friend who recently was laid off by AIG, is part of their troubles, privately said he felt that he had made his company his false idol, if you will—that work had become, in his company that he is very proud of actually, had become a false idol, and he was now trying to reorient his life to have balance where faith, family, and other priorities, including his work, would have the right balance, the right perspective

ABERNETHY: David Miller of Princeton University, many thanks.

Dr. MILLER: Thank you, Bob.

Wendell Berry

The first thing that becomes apparent in times like this is how imaginary the economy is. Not imaginary in the sense of fake, necessarily, but in the sense of the way economic realities depend on how reality is imagined. So much of the panic selling of stocks, for example, is based on perception of reality, which then becomes the reality. When billions of dollars of wealth can vanish overnight, it becomes apparent how imaginary wealth is.

All of this is another way of saying that economics and theology have a lot in common. Both deal with how larger reality is conceived. Capitalist economics sometimes tries to deny this by separating questions of “fact” from questions of “value.” We are told, for example, that a market is “free” as long as transactions are informed and voluntary. It does not matter what people value; the economist claims neutrality on that question. All that really matters is if a transaction is free in the above sense. Regulation is usually considered an interference with freedom.

But of course this negative definition of freedom as freedom from interference is a deeply value-laden, theological notion. It assumes a view of the human person as essentially an individual, and it views the human will as sovereign and uncorrupted. Both of these ideas conflict with Christian theological notions of the human as essentially interrelated and in need of the healing of the will by God’s grace. For the Christian, true freedom is not just a lack of interference but is defined positively as an ability to flourish by being connected to God and to our fellow humans who are made in God’s image.

So the questions being raised now about regulation and deregulation and “interference” with the freedom of the market are theological questions, and the theological answer, I think, is that there is no such thing as a value-neutral “free” market. The question is always: “What kinds of economic arrangements lead to true human flourishing and freedom?”
Wendell Berry

We usually turn to the state to regulate the market when crises hit, but I don’t think the modern bureaucratic state is capable of giving real answers about true human flourishing. The best the state can do, as we’ve seen, is try to protect large financial interests. The state has been systematically undermining the interests of workers for a long time now, while politicians, especially on the right, distract the working class by emotional appeals to anti-immigrant sentiment and issues like gun ownership and reverence for the flag.

We have to begin, therefore, to create economic spaces that are not based on profitability and freedom from interference for those in power. There is just no way to avoid the deep theological questions about what makes humans really flourish. The churches should be cooperating with others to imagine and create economic spaces where true human flourishing can take place. The fair trade movement and providing markets for local farmers are a couple of examples. These create personal contact among people, where economic transactions take place within a community of people who are not simply trying to maximize self-interest, but are concerned for the flourishing of all parties involved. One of the lessons of the global economic meltdown, it seems to me, is that a stable economy is always essentially local, as the American writer and farmer Wendell Berry has been saying for years.

The Eucharist provides a resource for Christian imagination and practice here, because it connects people throughout the world but is always essentially local, a people sharing heavenly food around a table. The Eucharist is a kind of consumption whereby we are consumed by a larger body, the Body of Christ, in which, as Paul says, when one suffers, all suffer together, and when one rejoices, all rejoice together.

–William T. Cavanaugh is associate professor of theology at the University of St. Thomas in Saint Paul, Minnesota, and the author, most recently, of BEING CONSUMED: ECONOMICS AND CHRISTIAN DESIRE.

The recent economic debacle should cause us to reread, or perhaps read for the first time, the Christian theological tradition and how it inextricably relates economic exchange to morality (our quest for the good) and to God.

Alfred Marshall

British economist Alfred Marshall, well known for his Marshallian scissors of supply and demand, once said that the modern science of economics “puts man in the saddle.” In other words, all that now defines economic exchange is what humans decide. “Man” takes the place of God in driving history. Perhaps the wild speculation in the stock market that has come to a ruinous end for many (recall that some economists were predicting the Dow would reach 36000 by 2005 — do they still have their jobs? — and the impending fluctuations, where some would try to outguess the market and receive windfall profits, only accentuating the fluctuations) might cause us to reconsider Marshall’s wisdom.

What would it mean to think of economics in terms of God and the good? It would mean in part, I think, that we would take more seriously the problem of usury, which is often mischaracterized. Usury occurs when anyone thinks he or she can have an unlimited growth of money without it being related to validly productive enterprises. It is a sin against God’s created order. The vice of usury is greed, wanting a maximization of profit without relating it to any fruitful created product. Profit is permissible, but within a context of production that is good and can be rightly ordered to God. Once we have a system where an enterprise such as a corporation can be productive, that is to say, its workers produce quality products that serve the common good and better the lives of their neighbors and even turn a modest profit, and yet the first obligation of the CEO of that corporation is not to those workers or those neighbors but to the maximization of shareholders’ profit, then we have an improper disjunction between work, productivity, and money.

Diligence, loyalty, and work are no longer rewarded. What gets rewarded is speculation. We lose any relationship between what is produced and how it is rewarded.

We have seen this in the stock market, where there is little to no correlation between a corporation’s stock price and its earnings. I am no economist, but this seems to me inevitably to produce something of a Ponzi scheme that eventually comes back to haunt us. The individuals who benefit from this are not those who do the work, but those who speculate. They do not purchase goods. They purchase “time” — a speculative possibility of what might be in the future — and try to “sell” it to others, knowing that not all can benefit. The bubble will eventually burst.

As long as business, finance, and the “art” of management fundamentally serve only this one principle of economy, maximization of profit, we may very well continue to have such wild fluctuations every one or two generations, as we now seem to be experiencing. The result will be, as it currently is, that we will socialize the losses while we continue to capitalize the gains. Everyone becomes responsible to pay out when the Ponzi scheme fails. Only those who got in and out early reap the profits. The winners benefit at the expense of their neighbors’ good.

I don’t claim to know how to fix this, but I do think we have to rethink the role of the corporation, its managers, and its commitment to locality: to workers, neighborhoods, schools. Perhaps churches, synagogues and mosques could at least begin there, reminding people of God’s intentions for a profit related to the goodness of creation’s fruitfulness. They all share a fundamental assumption that unlimited growth for its own sake is usurious and that God gives us the opportunity for economic exchange in order to “sanctify” or “make holy” God’s name throughout creation.

What we have seen among CEOs as well as individual households is certainly unholy. It should at least be named for what it is. Greed, we have discovered, is not good.

–Steve Long is professor of systematic theology at Marquette University and the author of many books, including DIVINE ECONOMY: THEOLOGY AND THE MARKET.

The Seven Virtues

Ethics in the economy depends on character, not calculation. It depends on being a good person, not on “stakeholders” or other utilitarian considerations. The word “ethics” comes from the Greek word for “character,” and such an approach through what humans could aspire to be dominated Western — and for that matter Eastern — thinking for millennia. The old and honored approach is called “virtue ethics”: Be thou just, loving, prudent, courageous, temperate, hopeful, and faithful, said the ancients, and you will not make loans to people who cannot possibly pay or request bridges to nowhere from people who can. We are called by God to be virtuous — that’s the religious way to put it. But you can, instead, name the seven virtues the Seven Secular Commandments and note that an economy cannot get along without a modicum of all seven.

–Deirdre N. McCloskey is UIC Distinguished Professor of Economics, History, English, and Communication at the University of Illinois at Chicago and the author of THE BOURGEOIS VIRTUES: ETHICS FOR AN AGE OF COMMERCE.

BOB ABERNETHY, anchor: Now, the financial crisis: more failures, fears, realignment, layoffs on Wall Street, with consequences around the world. Is anyone to blame? We explore the ethical issues underlying the financial meltdown with Rebecca Blank, an economist, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, and co-author of the book “Is the Market Moral?” Dr. Blank, welcome.

REBECCA BLANK (Senior Fellow, Brookings Institution and Co-author, “Is the Market Moral”?): Thank you.

ABERNETHY: So in the movie “Wall Street” we were told that “greed is good.” If that’s true, to what extent was greed responsible for all that’s happened?

Dr. BLANK: Greed is clearly partially responsible for where we are right now. But greed is good to most economists. It’s greed that makes people work harder, be more productive, and helps the economy grow.

ABERNETHY: Greed is good even though it’s a sin?

Dr. BLANK: Yeah, well greed has certain economic advantages. It’s hard for an economist not to say that. But there’s a level beyond which greed can go too far, and I, being greedy for more goods and to make another buck, can stop paying attention to the effects of my action on you, and that is when greed clearly becomes sinful even, I think, in the economic books and can lead to the sort of situation that we’re in right now.

ABERNETHY: And that’s what happened in these cases. People were, traders were encouraged to take big risks and not pay attention to all the costs that there would be for people down the line if those risks didn’t pay off.

Dr. BLANK: That’s certainly true in part, but I will also say that there was also a culture where what those traders were doing was what everyone in all the cubicles next to them were doing. And, you know, there’s always the question of to what extent is that an excuse — and a justifiable excuse? There were also a lot of people at the very beginning of this, the whole sub-prime crisis that started this off, who saw themselves as providing more funds for low-income families. They were doing a good thing. So motives here are very mixed. I think it’s hard to say this is all about greed.

ABERNETHY: What about justice? Was there injustice involved?

Bob Abernethy

Dr. BLANK: So, you know, we love a world in which the people in the white hats get rewarded, and the people in the black hats pay the price, and that I have to say doesn’t happen very often, particularly in a very complex economy. We’re in a time of panic right now where people have lost trust in what the banks are doing, what the investment firms are doing — lost trust beyond a level of reasonableness, to be honest, and it’s got to be stopped. And, you know, taking account of that fear and panic in many ways is more important than assigning blame one way or the other.

ABERNETHY: We all do want to assign blame, though.

Dr. BLANK: Yes, we sure do.

ABERNETHY: We look for villains. Are there no villains in this?

Dr. BLANK: Yes, I do think there are a few villains, but it’s probably too strong a word. There is, as you say, there are leadership particularly in some of these banks that were not open at all about what they were doing and how they were bundling . . .

ABERNETHY: Did they understand what they were doing? Is there a question of competence here?

Dr. BLANK: Well, that’s an open question. I think that is part of a question. There’s also a real question on the part of regulation. You know, there were no requirements here for greater openness and greater transparency, and of course that’s now what’s being called for. But that should have been called for long ago. And it is the role of government to create, if you will, responsible greed to keep boundaries around what people do.

ABERNETHY: Government perhaps, and how about the boards of directors and the people who are running some of these companies?

Rebecca Blank

Dr. BLANK: No, I think there is certainly leadership questions here about competence and understanding and not paying attention to the risks that they were taking.

ABERNETHY: And trying to put some limit on the greed?

Dr. BLANK: Yeah. And of course if you ask these people three and four years ago how do you justify multimillion dollar salaries and huge bonuses, their answer would have been, “We are in a high-risk industry, so we deserve this.” Under those circumstances you then can’t feel very sorry when they lose at the other side of the risk. But, of course, there are a lot of people who weren’t in a high-risk industry who are also losing — the clerical people, the maintenance folks.

ABERNETHY: Rebecca Blank of the Brookings Institution, many thanks.

Dr. BLANK: Thank you.