productivity

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This is the American worker's saga. The stuff you're making is getting cheaper. The stuff you need is getting more expensive. That's why you feel so squeezed. "That's a provocative idea," James Manyika tells me on the phone when I read through my theory. "I want to make a key point." The things getting more expensive fall into two categories, he said. You have the failures of productivity, including education, government, construction, and health care. Then you've got natural economic scarcity, like physical living space and crude oil.

"Health care is our most important failure of productivity," he says. "Many of the costs that go into health care are not open to competition. The nice thing about retail is that the costs are transparent. The management fees on your brokerage account are transparent and competitive and competed for. You don't know what the management costs for your health care plan are, because those are opaque. There's less incentive to make them cost effective. That's one reason why you've seen so few gains in health care productivity."

***

The presumption in Washington is that as long as we have a growing economy, everything will work out, and if productivity rises, jobs and wages will follow. It turns out that growth and productivity, while not at all evil, are not panaceas, either. GDP growth has been decoupled from job growth. Productivity has been decoupled from wages. What's good for work has been decoupled from what's good for workers.

"What can we do about that?" Manyika said at the end of our talk. I waited for him to say something. We're all still waiting.

via The Atlantic.

flawed proclamation

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Complex argument, hard to represent in a brief extract. Barth, CD I/2, p. 803:

Let us suppose the ideal case. We have a form of teaching which in its origin and first appearance, in spite of and in all its human conditioning, can only be traced back to the faithful and true hearing of the Word of God, so that what it says may be defined as the realization of pure doctrine and as the unadulterated proclamation of the Word of God. Why should we not say so at once, even if we can do so legitimately only in faith? But then the teaching goes beyond the stage of origin and first appearance. It passes from the first mouth to the second. Or it is even stated a second or third time by its first exponent. And even in the ideal case, it inevitably becomes dubious. For there is uncertainty whether this still happens in the originally faithful and true hearing of the Word of God. Perhaps the teacher concerned and the teaching church which follows him and uses his formula are already listening to themselves; to the fine and strong and timely things which they themselves have thought about the matter; to the joyful and pleasant sound which the words in question had in their mouths; to the echo of the approval and applause which they encountered; to the consequences of being publicly committed through speaking in this way to the persuasive power of a rapt congregation which wants to hear again and again what has been so wonderfully stated. Even affirmations, denials, syntheses and reservations which, as made in the original hearing of the Word, were well founded and legitimately impressive and - we will suppose - the purest doctrine, now take on a certain independence, or appear only as facile arguments, useful stones in structures with which, as originating in the Word of God, they had nothing to do, and which perhaps themselves derive from quite another source than the hearing of the Word of God. In short, the equivocal phenomenon of Church proclamation has again developed from what we will suppose was the unequivocally pure doctrine of the beginning. This development cannot be arrested. This is how it has always gone at the crises of Church history. As such, the teaching of the Church is not guaranteed even for a single moment against the possibility of immediately losing what we will suppose is its recently attained purity, and of again becoming something very different from the speech which obediently listens. A formula may be ever so simple, clear and powerful, an exposition and sequence of thoughts may be ever so transparent and compelling, but it is not guaranteed against this risk. It cannot be protected by any personality, however trustworthy, or any fellowship of believers, however faithful. Here at the very centre of its life the Church experiences the fact that it is in the world. Its proclamation begins, as we will suppose, in the Spirit, but immediately and at every point it shows a tendency to end in the flesh.

Later, on p. 807:

At every moment and in every situation the danger threatens that members of the Church may want the Word of God without God, bringing it under their power and understanding, and applying it according to their own good pleasure... No heresy has ever had the original intention of being heresy; it has become so only when and where a first unintended lapse from obedience has not been noted and resisted in time.

not frailty, but death

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Barth, CD I/2, p. 750-751:

The human impossibility of the Church's proclamation consists simply in the impossibility of the attempt to speak of God....

Of God it is impossible to speak... If we speak of Him, we are no longer speaking of Him. In this matter we cannot do what we want to do and we cannot attain what we should like to attain. This is the iron law under which all Church proclamation without exception stands. That what happens here is frailty is far too weak an expression for the real situation. This is not frailty. This is death. This is not difficulty. It is sheer impossibility. What happens here is not something imperfect. Measured by the standard of what is intended, it is simply nothing.

If there is proclamation, if the attempt does not fail, it is just at the point where success is achieved that it can and will be understood, not as human success, but as a divine victory concealed in human failure, sovereignly availing itself of human failure.