No Free Lunch: Economics for a Fallen World: Third Edition, Revised

Chapter Ten: It’s all About the Institutions! 229 “He who supplies seed to the sower and bread for food will supply and multiply your seed for sowing and increase the harvest of your righteousness; you will be enriched in everything for all liberality, which through us is producing thanksgiving to God” (v. 10-11) . Jesus often used knowledge of how humans choose and act in His ministry on earth. In the Bible, Jesus talks far more about heaven and hell than did the Old Testament prophets, often explicitly laying out eternal costs and benefits from our actions. What do you want, streets of gold and eternal bliss or a lake of fire? Of course he expands on this point by showing the difference between costs and benefits across time. Being a disciple will carry costs in the present but will come with reward in the future. Jesus refers to the past to guide expectations for the future, both for punishment and for reward. Jesus provides clear linkages between ethical cause and effect to help us understand how to choose, such as in the parable of the talents in Matthew 25:14-30. In this parable, the faithful servants used their talents effectively to gain a reward, but the unfaithful servant took his talent and hid it. For squandering the use of this gift, he was rejected by his Master. The ethical cause and effect is clear: good service to God leads to reward, while rebellion to God will lead to punishment. The ethical link between cause and effect seems consistent in both Old and New Testaments. For our purposes, we will assume a tight linkage between cause and effect in understanding human choice and action. Our analytical technique is to understand how humans assesses costs and benefits—we do this by trying to understand cause and effect, which guides our choices and subsequent actions. This analysis can be in how we perceive the choice to obey God, whether we choose to take one job over another, or whether we buy a Coke or a Monster. Whether spiritual or material, we assess costs and benefits of any action. We base our understanding of both costs and benefits from past actions and thereby form expectations of how an action will turn out in the future. If we got sick the last time we drank a Monster, we may be more reticent to buy another; perhaps we’ll purchase the Coke. In both spiritual and material choices, the more we think and act consistently with a Christian worldview, the better our outcome is likely to be. UNCERTAINTY In our review of the entrepreneur, we noted that prescience is an enabling attribute precisely because of the uncertainty we face in life. We now need to more precisely define what we mean by uncertainty. When we speak of uncertainty we mean that the In both spiritual and material choices, the more we think and act consistently with a Christian worldview, the better our outcome is likely to be.