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Now, on to the podcast. My tax has helped to support the public institutions which I have mentioned, and they cost enough. Those who are badly off. Must go there. Many can't go there, and many would rather die.
If they would rather die, perhaps they had better do so. And decrease the surplus population. Surely you don't mean that, sir, with all my heart. Merry Christmas! I'm Rob West.
That was Ebenezer Scrooge in Charles Dickens A Christmas Carol. There's a message hidden in that exchange, and Jerry Boyer will let us in on the secret today. Then it's on to your calls at 800-525-7000. This is Faith and Finance, biblical wisdom for your financial journey.
Well, Jerry Boyer is our resident economist here at Faith Phi and the president of Boyer Research. He's also the author of The Maker and the Tinkers, What Jesus Really Said About Social Justice and Economics. Jerry, great to have you back. Always a pleasure. Was that George C.
Scott? Was that the George C. Scott version that you just played? It sure was. Absolutely.
That's a good one. It sure was. Well, I'm looking forward to this. A little different, Jerry. We're doing a movie review, and most of us have heard or read that exchange between Scrooge and the alms collectors many times.
So I'm looking forward to hearing your insights. Jerry, what have we been missing?
Well, what we've been missing is the extreme importance of that phrase surplus population. Because we don't happen to be in the mindset of the early, mid-1800s.
So when we have conversations in our time, if we hear someone say zero population growth, we know what that means. Um you know, if we hear people talking about reproductive rights. We know what that means. But if we hear someone talk about surplus population, we don't know what that means. But they did.
And it's not really very subtle at all. There was a very active debate that had started, I don't know, about 40 years before Dickens wrote the book, A Christmas Carol, by the Reverend economist Thomas Malthus.
So I guess he's a Christian economist, but I don't think he was a very good one. Because Malthus believed that because of the biblical commentary about the ground being cursed, that that meant that there were too many people in the world. That as we reproduced and created and brought into being, God creates us, but as we conceive and bring into the world more people, that the population grows faster than the food supply and the supply of goods and services.
So that's called Malthusianism, big word for this Malthus. He wrote a book called An Essay on Population that was very influential. And basically, the idea was we need to stop the poor, especially, from having so many babies. They're having too many children because they're producing what? Surplus population.
There is a population surplus, too many people, not enough food.
So when Dickens Put that language in the mouth of Ebenezer Scrooge. He's making a very important point. Scrooge is now a stand-in for a certain philosophy, the philosophy of Thomas Malthus, the philosophy that now we would call zero population growth. Yeah, and not everyone agreed with Malthus, of course, so who opposed his theories? Jean-Baptiste Say, who was one of the founders of classical and supply-side economics, but I think a lot of G.K.
Chesterton was another, the Christian journalist. But I think his most important opponent was Charles Dickens. because once you understand that Dickens is writing about this, we now understand that the Christmas Carol was in fact a story written against Malthus. Because by the end, Scrooge changes his mind. Scrooge is wrong.
Okay.
So if you put a philosophy in the mouth of your villain, you're basically saying you disagree with that philosophy. And the story really is the unfolding of why, first of all, why Scrooge got wrong in the first place. It has to do with his own childhood trauma of hunger. And cold. When he goes back in time with the ghost of Christmas past, and these aren't ghosts, these are angels, right?
That's, I think, obvious to most Christian readers. When he goes back in time, Dickens says that the school where he lived felt or smelt of not enough to eat and too much cold and too much darkness.
So he was poor when he was young. By the way, an interesting kind of economic history side note here, if you treat Scrooge like a real historical character, he grew up before the free, he was a child before the free market revolution, when things really were dire. And then when he's an adult, you have a free market revolution and things really are abundant. Fascinating. Jerry Boyer here today.
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Learn how at faithfi.com forward slash NCF. Yeah. Delighted to have you with us today here on Faith and Finance. With me today, Jerry Boyer, my good friend, our resident economist and president of Boyer Research. We're talking about Charles Dickens, a Christmas Carol, perhaps from a vantage point you haven't considered previously.
Jerry, just before the break, you were talking about Thomas Malthus and how he was really represented in the character of Scrooge, who was obviously the villain character that comes full circle at the end. But what else can we take away from this character that gives us some insight into Malthus and what he was advocating at the time?
Well, I think one of the things that's really interesting is the ghost of Christmas Present. When Scrooge first sees him, Christmas Present says, have you never met my like behind or any of my brothers before or any of my brothers? And Scrooge says, How many brothers have you had?
Well, more than 1,800. In other words, there have been more than 1800 Christmases. And what's Scrooge's reaction? What a large family to provide for. See, there's that scarcity mindset.
I mean, a lot of people think having a lot of brothers and sisters is a good thing. I do. My kids do. They like having brothers and sisters, but we believe God is abundant and generous. But Scrooge didn't, if he believed in him at all.
And when Scrooge says that, what a large family to provide for, Christmas present rises in anger. He disapproves. Of Scrooge's Malthusian ideas. Later on, when they go to see Tiny Tim, Scrooge talks about Tiny Tim and how he cares for them, and the ghost kind of throws it back in his face. You called him the surplus population.
You know, forgo that can't, man. And then he makes an analogy that Scrooge is like a bug on a leaf looking down at the bugs in the dirt, saying that there are too many. To him, we're all kind of bugs, but you know, Scrooge is a little richer than Tim, so he thinks there's too many people. And then the ghost kind of raises the question: maybe you're the surplus population, maybe you're the one that doesn't deserve to live.
So he's pretty tough on Scrooge, but in the end, it works well. And then later, the ghost Christmas present takes him to the marketplace, and there's all this food. And he emphasizes the food from different parts of the world, oranges and things like that, which you can't grow in Britain.
So the international trade and the economic takeoff that you and I have talked about in the presentation that I do on 2000 Years of Economic History, where you see the bubbles rising and falling. When you see the United Kingdom bubble rising, it's back down low in Malthusian equilibrium when Scrooge is a baby and it's kind of popping out. During Scrooge's lifetime, the great takeoff is actually occurring. Obviously, he's a fictional character, but you can kind of treat him where he was. And that great takeoff is just taking place during his lifetime.
Malthus was wrong at exactly the worst time. He makes his predictions before the greatest increase in human flourishing ever known to mankind. Wow.
Well, now, of course, these Malthusian ideas haven't gone away, Jerry.
So who's advocating them in modern times? Planned Parenthood is the Malthusian philosophy in industrial profitized form, even though technically it's a non-profit. The abortion revolution is largely a result of a belief that their surplus population. We go back to Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, too many of the wrong people, the swarthy people, the people of color, the poor people.
So it's interesting that these people who believe that there are too many people. It's never their kind of people. There are too many of. Ivy League professors who think there are too many people don't think, well, there's too many of my folks. They think there's too many of other kinds of folks, usually immigrants, usually people who are working class.
Usually, people, I mean, this is why the Scopes trial takes place in the South.
Southerners are thought of as too many people because they're thought of as backwards. Black people, Italian people, Jewish people, you know, outsiders, they're the surplus population. And whether it's the contraceptive revolution or whether, especially I'm going to focus on to the degree that it's grounded in a zero population growth ideology, that it's bad to have babies. And that shows up in the abortion industry. That shows up in a lot of like the Davos world and the United Nations sustainability.
It shows up in a lot of corporate engagement. That in order to be sustainable, we have to have fewer people. History shows in order to be sustainable, we have to have more people. The most sustainable thing that we can do economically is to fulfill God's commandment to fill the earth and subdue it. There are no surplus people.
And I think it's interesting. I think this story is called a Christmas carol because Jesus, Yeshua of Nazareth, would very easily have been classified as surplus population in a Malthusian worldview.
Now, the poor in workhouses in England weren't fictional, of course.
So, how did the economic system there and elsewhere get so confused?
Well, by the way, note that they're government entities.
So, Scrooge is, in some ways, a welfare state person. In other words, men are going door to door saying, We want to do private charity. And he doesn't want to do private charity. He wants to do it through taxes, where it's impersonal. The workhouses and the prisons, they, in essence, would keep people alive, but it would be a terrible existence.
So, the idea is to punish them for being poor. And that obviously is not the solution.
So, if you want to be the opposite of Scrooge, you're going to be pro-baby and you're going to be pro-private charity. You're going to be pro-generosity. And by the end, that's exactly what Scrooge is. He's pro-generosity. By the way, another little side story: when he visits his nephew Fred, you know, when Fred visits him.
Fred implies that Scrooge was upset because Fred married. Why did you marry? Scrooge didn't want his nephew to marry because of surplus population. You marry and you have children. See, it comes up again and again and again.
Scrooge's whole existence was: there's too many people. God, if he exists at all, is stingy. By the end, though, what is he? He's generous and he's especially generous to children. By the way, I don't know if people know this, but Dickens wrote a novel version of the Gospels.
He read the Gospels and then wrote a novel. I think it's called The Life of Our Lord, and it has similar themes.
So Dickens was thinking a lot about Jesus, wrote a novel about him, and also about he was one of those people who might have been considered the forgotten class, but he treated everyone with love and dignity, which made Jesus unusual. That's something Dickens really focuses on on the novel. Wow.
Yeah. Well said. Jerry, we're getting short on time.
So when folks watch a Christmas Carol this season and perhaps look at it through this new lens, this filter that you've just shared, what would you hope, above all else, they take away from the story? that God is generous, not stingy. That Scrooge is damaged because he grew up in poverty. It's real. There's trauma.
And so we should be patient with him and help move him away. But that we should help move our entire Scrooge ruling class philosophy away from Scrooge at the beginning towards Scrooge at the end, where everybody's welcome. We aren't bugs in the dust. We produce and we produce more than we consume. And over time, that has given us miraculous prosperity and flourishing, which Dickens was just seeing the beginning of.
So I think we should watch it with gratitude and also understanding that there's real philosophy going on here and theology going on here. It's not just a fun story. And then we should bring Dickens' philosophy into our own lives. The child in the womb who's unwanted is the tiny Tim of our generation. Hmm.
Wow.
Well said. What an opportunity to share this with our kids, too, as we watch this and help them interpret what they're seeing. Jerry, always thankful for you, my friend. Merry Christmas. Merry Christmas to you.
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Visit FaithFi.com to take the next step in your faith and financial journey today. That's faithfi.com. FAIFI is grateful for support from One Ascent. OneAssent believes that your values inspire why you invest and how they can inspire how you invest. OneAssent's goal is to provide solutions designed for every need and invest in businesses that bless the people and places God has made.
They want to help investors do well by doing good. To explore a new way of investing that aligns with your values. More information is available at onascent.com and by clicking Analyze My Investments. I'm so glad you're with us today on Faith and Finance. I so appreciate your questions, you tuning in.
And, you know, listen, each day we just want to encourage you, cheer you on as you live as a faithful steward of God's resources, and try to provide some wise counsel, recognizing, listen, we all make mistakes. Maybe we wish we would have started saving earlier or not taking on that debt or, you know, whatever it is. But listen, you know, we put everything at the foot of the cross. We serve a God who's in the business of restoration. We hold it loosely and we just seek to be found faithful one day at a time over a lifetime.
And when we do that, I believe God honors that.
Now, we will not be free from any challenges. We live in a fallen world. But when we apply biblical wisdom to our financial decisions, we put ourselves in a position to experience God's best. And that's certainly what we try to help you with each day on this program. Let's head right to the phones.
Omaha. Carrie, go ahead. Yes. I was just wondering the best way to invests my money. I've got quite a bit saved and I've just had it in a just in a bank.
And I want to know the best way to invest it so that it's making it's not going to be totally inflation eaten up. Yeah. Yeah, very good.
Well, I think that last point is a key one: that, you know, if we just hang on to it and it's not working for us, it is losing purchasing power because of inflation. And we can talk about why that is and why we actually shouldn't have inflation. But as a result of just an increase in the money supply over time and more money sloshing around in the system, we just kind of have gotten into this new norm that everything just gets more expensive over time. And so that's a reality. And so we need to manage money appropriately.
You know, whenever we're investing, it's always important to start with a plan, not a product.
So, before choosing where to invest, we need to decide why we're investing. And so, some questions we might ask ourselves are: what are my goals? Is my goal to have a nest egg to support my lifestyle when I'm no longer working? Is it to build an emergency fund? Is it to generate income?
You know, what are my goals? How long until I need the money? That's the second question, because that's your time horizon. That's critical. And then, third, is: what is my comfort level with risk?
You know, because your goals that should be informed by your values as a Christ follower, your time horizon, and your risk tolerance really are going to allow the appropriate investment strategy to kind of fall out of those three questions such that you're not investing taking too much risk or, you know, locking up the money when you need it. Or perhaps, you know, if you're saving for a specific goal and the time horizon is less than 10 years or you don't have an emergency fund or you have high interest debt, you shouldn't even be investing in the first place.
So, so let's talk through that and I'll ask a few questions that might lead us there. First, do you have what I would call an emergency fund liquid savings?
Well It just But I'm You know, just what I'm planning to invest, I get um social security every month and okay. And I have this money which I probably you know I won't invest at all because I will need emergency. Yeah, great. And so I would say three to six months' worth of expenses. Do you know what you're spending on a typical month?
Oh, I I don't really probably. Maybe twelve hundred or something.
Okay.
I mean, let's say it's 2,000.
So you'd probably want somewhere between $6,000 and $12,000 that you put aside in liquid savings that would be best in a high, what's called a high-yield savings account.
So this would be a bank or a credit union where you'd get a nice interest rate, somewhere north of 3%, maybe even north of 4% a year, but it's safe. It's FDIC insured, backed by the full faith and credit of the United States government. But the key is it's liquid. You can get to it.
So if something comes out of left field, then you don't have to sell any investments. You've got money there for the unexpected. Do you have any debt at all? No.
Okay, great. And do you have any retirement accounts of any kind or any investments?
Well, you said you have not invested before, right? No, I don't have anything like that.
Okay.
And so you're just living on Social Security.
So this is great.
So this is a nice little nest egg. Are you able to cover your expenses on a typical month from Social Security alone? Yes, unless I have a large extent. I got a I got a water softener put in and I had to pay a little extra for that. But usually, yeah, I'm usually I can.
Got it. Yeah. And the amount that you have saved and and if you would rather not say that's fine, but is it is it more than one hundred thousand or less? Um Let me think. It's more.
Okay.
Yeah. So that would put you in a category where you could have an advisor that would come alongside you to help you manage this. And that's what I would recommend. Just because, you know, you to try to pick the investments on your own when you've never invested before, you've got a sizable sum of money here, and the exact amount doesn't matter. It's significant.
And we want to protect it. But we also want to grow it because, to your point, you know, the effects of inflation. And so, to build that diversified portfolio that, you know, based on your age, so let's say I didn't ask you how old you were, but let's say you were 70, you know, you would probably want at that point to have a 60-40 portfolio with maybe 60% in bonds, 40% in stocks. You know, maybe we take 10% off, five off of each side of those and put into precious metals like gold. But that would be a nice balanced portfolio, very conservative, generating some income that still has a growth component.
If you were 60 and not 70, it might be more like a 50-50 portfolio, 50 bonds, 50 stocks. And again, we could pull 5% from either bucket and put a total of 10 in gold or precious metals. That would be a diversified portfolio. But the actual investments that are selected, which bonds and which stocks, you know, would be the role of the advisor and that advisor. Could even, if it was important to you, screen those investments for your faith values to make sure you're not owning a company that is misaligned with your values as a Christ follower.
So that would be the direction that I would go: is try to interview two or three certified kingdom advisors there in Nebraska and find the one that's the best fit, and then let that advisor manage the portion of this money. Beyond what you're going to set aside for your emergency fund. If you're comfortable on the web, I would just go to findacka.com. CKA stands for certified kingdom advisor. Findacka.com.
When you get there, you can put in your zip code and I'd interview two or three of those certified kingdom advisors and find the one that's the best fit.
Okay?
Okay.
All right. Excellent. Thank you.
Well, you're welcome. Carrie, stay on the line. I'm going to send you a copy of the Soundmind Investing Handbook. If you're a reader, this will begin to introduce you to some of the investing terms.
So when you go meet with that advisor, you'll have a little bit more knowledge and maybe some of the things will make sense a little quicker.
So stay on the line. That's our gift to you. We'll get it in the mail. Hey, before we round out the broadcast today, let me remind you: this is a critical time of year for us to hear from you as a listener-supported ministry. We have a goal between now and the end of the year.
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