Author: purplesage41

Economist, theologian, public policy writer and advocate.

The Legacy of Elbridge Gerry

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Elbridge Gerry was an early governor of Massachusetts who created some very oddly shaped districts in an effort to control the outcome of elections. One famous district was in the shape of a salamander, and a newspaper quickly labeled it a gerrymander—a word that has stuck ever since.  A lot has been written, argued, and taken to court over the design of electoral districts from Congress all the way to county councils, school board, and city governments. The Supreme Court is hearing a case right now, and state courts are tied up with the aftermath of the 2020 census even as we got to the midterms with questionably drawn district lines.  Once these districts are affirmed or redrawn—and a number of states are still contesting the lines used for the midterm elections—they will be with us until 2032.  That sounds disheartening.  But it’s not as bad as you might think.

A recent article in Politico identified two consequences of the redrawing after the 2020 Census that may have had an unexpected effect on the relatively strong Democratic performance.  Both of them relate to the COVID pandemic, which began just as the Census was wrapping up.  During COVID, a lot of workers got to work from home, and many of those who had that option moved farther away from work, often from the center city to the suburbs or even small towns and rural areas.  Those who had that option were disproportionally Democrats, and they were moving in many cases from Democratic-leaning districts to Republican-leaning districts.  Apparently, that made a difference in some closely contested races—and it was a year of many closely contested races.

The second effect of COVID was partisan differences in death rates.  More Republicans died from COVID than Democrats, at least partly because of calls from Republican party leaders to refuse both masks and vaccines.  I wondered at the time about the wisdom of pushing a response o the pandemic that would kill off your most loyal partisans. 

Attention is now focused on the U.S. Supreme Court as the justices are considering the independent legislature theory that would vest all the power to redistrict in state legislatures without court oversight at either the state or federal level. That is certainly an important decision.  Beyond SCOTUS and the midterm 2022 elections, however, there are reasons to hope that the 2020 Census-based districts, drawn up by partisan state legislatures, may not have as much lasting impact as one might think.  Age cohorts die off and new ones come of age. The difference in voting preferences between the average 75-year-old and the newly enfranchised 18 to 25-year-old is quite substantial. Also, people move.  A district that might have looked safely Republican in 2022 could be very different by 2026 or 2028 or 2030 as voters migrate to where the weather is better or the job opportunities and cost of living are more attractive. . There has been a steady migration from the Northeast and the Midwest and California to redder states, turning parts of them purple—my favorite political color. The Elbridge Gerrys of 2030 will have a harder task squeezing as many of their opponents into as few districts as possible.

Economists believe that monopoly power is ephemeral, attracting would-be competitors to find ways into that monopolized market, encouraging consumers to find substitutes for the products and services of monopolized industries. Technology moves on and pokes holes in the flying buttresses and drains moats surrounding a castled monopoly.  Remember when cable TV was an evil monopoly? And before that, the “Big Three”—NBC, ABC, and CBS? The political equivalent of monopoly is tyranny of the minority.  It’s true that the Constitution, somewhat deliberately, provided excessive protections for the minority, , the southern states where enslaved persons only counted for 3/5 in the Census and couldn’t vote, the smaller states with two senators per sat regardless of population. But ultimately, the majority will find a way to prevail, sometimes by intent but more often by the changes carved by the flow of a moving population river flowing in and out of districts, bringing in changes in gender, politics, religion and priorities to districts which were once safely stowed in a particular political basket.

I never understood why economics was labeled the dismal science.  I think it is largely populated by incurable optimists, with deep and abiding faith in the forces of change. Like the fabled King Canute, who was (apparently wrongly) accused of trying to hold back the ocean’s tide, we know change is inevitable.  Good change, bad change, neutral change. Yes, it’s worth trying to direct the tides in the affairs of men (and wmen), but it’s also good to learn to go with the flow!

Reflections on the Season

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At the behest of my daughters, particularly my oldest daughter, I am downsizing Christmas.  No, I didn’t fire Santa Claus, or his elves, but there will be fewer packages and less shopping this year.  Instead of everyone buying everyone else a present, we did a lottery for gift exchange among the eleven in the next two generations—three daughters, three sons-in-law, four granddaughters, and one grandson-in-law. My extended family of 12 will have seven physically present and five on Zoom, because several of them have to work over the holidays. The tree is smaller and sits on a table.

Downsizing Christmas has been an evolving process over the last few years. It makes me aware of what really matters.  One is reducing wasteful consumption. My daughters have been urging a shift to consumables and experiences.  Two of them are getting tickets to Stomp! Others are getting movie tickets, and gourmet chocolates. And always books, which I regard as a consumable, a few that may be kept and others passed on to libraries or book sales or friends.  A round of visiting the Global Giving website in which I invite each person to choose a project to support. A movie night for all those present (sometimes we can’t agree and have to split up into smaller groups!) A reading of Dylan Thomas’s A Child’s Christmas in Wales. Baking favorite treats for those present and absent—gluten free cookies for my middle daughter, blueberry scones for my oldest grandchild, neither of whom can be present.

I remember what Christmas was like when I was much younger, with a family of five and an academic career. I used to complain that I couldn’t observe Advent during final exam season, let alone a less frenetic preparation for the holidays. Now I can observe Advent, alone with my cat, playing Christmas music, lighting an advent wreath, attending all-adult social events, and looking forward to a scaled down and less exhausting round of family-centered gifts, games, movies, church services, and food.

Which is better? Neither. Each has been a treasured place  place in my journey from wide-eyed child going into the woods with my mother, brother and sister to cut down a tree, to the 81-yearold grandmother with the four-foot artificial tree, from the delighted five year old with a doll house with real electric lights to an aging widow who makes a list of minor household repairs for two of her tree sons-in-law. But I do wish that I had come earlier to this awareness, urged on by daughters (especially the oldest) to simplify Christmas, to downplay the material side, slow the pace, and be present in the moment for those I love.

May you experience the blessings of this universal season of cold and dark as both a time to look inward and a celebration of the return of the light (pagan), the arrival of the light (Christian), the persistence of the light (Jewish), or whatever other meaning may speak to your heart and soul. I wish each of you a rich, tradition-filled, earth-embracing holiday season.

An Open Letter to Senator Tim Scott

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Dear Senator Scott,

I watched your political commercials during the recent campaign, talking about how far you had come as a sharecropper’s son to the U.S. Senate.  I’m sure you did your family proud.  But did you know that in the Union states during the War of the Rebellion (that’s what they called it), there was a lot of support for sending your ancestors back to Africa? Even President Lincoln thought for some time that blacks and whites could not peacefully co-exist after all that history, and perhaps returning them to their continent of origin would help to keep the peace. But most of them had been born on this continent, and many of their forebears as well, so returning to Africa was not exactly going home.

Going home? They spoke English. They had accustomed themselves to different religions and food and history. Some of their descendants adopted the words of the song Blue Boat Home, “I was born upon the water,” because the middle passage shaped them as a distinctive people with a new homeland not of their choosing but in which they could make a home. They built a distinctive but rich culture within the American land of diversity, and many of them, like you, were able to thrive and prosper despite all the obstacles that faced them.

Today the U.S. Senate is facing a similar dilemma.  Today’s immigrants, especially Dreamers, may not have cone across the water, or be brought here as captives, but they did leave behind a homeland, a culture, a language, a history  to start over.  And some of them didn’t even make that choice, because they arrived as children.  They grew up in America, but like your African ancestors even after the end of slavery, they faced and still face obstacles in seeking the American dream. Dreamers, mostly Hispanic, are the ones brought here as children, who never knew a homeland in Mexico or Central American of the Caribbean or Venezuela. They went to school with our children but had far fewer rights and faced the threat of deportation.  Yet they filled important gaps in our labor force, learned English, worked hard, enriched us with their cultural heritage while embracing ours.

So as you contemplate pending legislation that would provide protection from deportation for the Dreamers, wrap them in the warm blanket of your own cultural heritage and give them the kind of opportunity you as a born citizen have always had.

What Voter Fraud?

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On Tuesday, November 8th, in a fit of civic duty, I spent 14 hours from 6 am to 8 pm as a poll manager, which is less complicated than being a clerk (one of a few places where a clerk is the boss of managers!).  If you have any doubts about the security of your vote, sign up to be trained and serve at the polls just once and you will be enlightened.  The security precautions are awesome and the whole team pitches in to make sure that people have a good experience and are treated with respect.  At least, that’s how we run an election in South Carolina. Every ballot is accounted for, all tallies must match, and we worker bees have to witness the opening and closing o f the scanner that tallies and collects the votes.  For my part, I patiently explained from my station at the scanner what happens to your ballot, how it is tallied by the scanner and deposited in a safely guarded basket below to revisit in case of an audit.

 All signs and equipment are delivered before the crack of dawn and returned to the election office as soon as possible after the polls close. The seven seals of the Book of Revelation nothing to the number of seals are applied to every container and machine and we have to witness each unsealing and resealing.  I hope this safe, secure, and nonviolent election has put the fraudulent fraud claims and threats of violence to rest.

I spent the post-election day recuperating and watching the aftermath.  Democracy passed the test. I will never take it for granted again.

A Little Economics Goes a Long Way

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According to pollsters, the economy is the number one issue on the minds of voters.  So perhaps it is time for a little economic information, as opposed to dubious claims and outright misinformation.

Question: Are we in a recession?  Answer: No. According to the National Bureau for Economic Research, the official agency charged with measuring recessions, “The official metrics used to determine a recession include negative gross domestic product (GDP), increased unemployment, a decline in retail sales, a slowdown in manufacturing, and diminishing income. When a nation’s economy begins to experience these events simultaneously over an extended period of time, there’s a good chance it’s in a recession.”

GDP grew at a 2.5% rate in the third quarter, and the unemployment rate remains at a historic low at only 3.5%.  Competition for workers has led to increases in wages, which don’t fully offset the inflation. Inflation is a result of not only worker shortages but also lingering supply change problems, a spike in post-pandemic consumer demand, lingering housing shortages, and the effect of the war in Ukraine on worldwide inflation (especially food and fuel).  Gas prices have settled down somewhat, about30 cents a gallon above a year ago.  But housing, good and energy continue to drive rising prices.  A typical recession has high unemployment, falling output, and low inflation.  Those conditions are the opposite of what we are seeing now.

Question. Is a recession coming?  Probably not immediately.  A lot of people look at the Index of Leading indicators as a forecast tool. The Conference Board Leading Economic Index® (LEI) is the most widely used predictor of recessions, with about a six-month lead over changes in GDP and unemployment. This index is a composite of a number of measures that turn up before the business cycle turns up and turn down before the economy begins to decline. Building permits, manufacturers’ inventories, and the stock market are included in these indicators.   In the US, the LEI index rose by 0.9 percent in October), following a 0.1 percent increase in September and a 0.7 percent increase in August.

Question: What about interest rates?  The Federal Reserve Board affects interest rates through its control over the Federal Funds rate, which is the rate at which banks can borrow from the Fed.  A series of increases in that rate by this independent board has affected mortgage rates, auto loan rates, and other key interest rates that affect household and industry borrowing and even borrowing by the federal and state governments. These rate hikes are intended to tamp down borrowing but there is always afear of overshooting and dampening economic activity.

The Fed ‘s board is appointed by presidents with seven-year terms and confirmed by Congress, so they are largely independent of the current president.  While some fiscal policy—changes in tax rates and spending programs—is under the joint control of Congress and the executive branch, the influence of presidential actions on economic activity is generally modest. Neither Trump nor Biden deserves much credit or blame, especially in a global economy where economic activity is highly influenced by what is going on in the rest of the world.  We used to say that when the United States sneezed, the world catches pneumonia, but today the spread of influence, like the spread of COVID, goes both ways.

If you haven’t voted, I hope this helps you factor in the economy in your choice. If you have, please share it with others.  And I shall l turn my blogging attention back to less mundane and more philosophical matters.

Saving Daylight?

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On November 6th, we will have to turn back our clocks one hour (most of them automatically reset). When we wake up thinking it is 7 am, the clock says it is only 6 am and we can doze a bit more. Then in March, we will be reminded to reset the clocks forward to standard time, so the 7 am when  we were used to starting our day has been relabeled 8 am and you are LATE!!!

In fact, we can’t save daylight.  What we can do is choose a time pattern to ensure that as many people as possible have enough of the available daylight for their activities that need it. It is in the hands of Congress. Despite requests from 28 states, Congress has yet to act on keeping the same time zone times year-round rather than messing people’s sleeping and living patterns with a one-hour leap forward in March and a turnback of the clock in November. A few states have requested and received permission to stay on one time year-round. (I think their permission is to stay on daylight saving time rather than standard time).

What is the point of all this mass confusion and interrupted waking and sleeping patterns?  Nature encourages us to sleep more in the winter and be more active in the summer with the seasonal changes in both light and warmth, or lack thereof. The path of nature is gradual as we descend into winter and emerge from it about four months late. But adjusting the clocks every Sunday night by 5 or six minutes would be a big hassle, so we seem to have settled into this spring forward, fall back pattern as a grudging way of listening to Mother Nature. There are some reasons offered for the shift, but they aren’t very compelling.  It would probably be good to minimize the number of days children have to wait int he dark for school buses.  (That could be addressed by a healthier, later starting school day, but that’s a different blog and an even more intractable political choice.) Golfers like to extend the light into the evening so that they can play longer. People who work outdoors prefer to maximize the number of normal workday hours that fall into their standard schedules.  People like me who don’t like to drive at night might prefer year-round daylight-saving time to have light later in the day. And therein lies the problem.

Making a change requires that we talk to each other, weigh the advantages of one pattern or the other, and enact it into law.  It isn’t a partisan issue.  It’s not like Republicans want daylight saving and Democrats want standard time, or vice versa.  The consensus for change is strong but split between the “all standard time” supporters and the “all daylight-saving time” coalition. And thus, we are stalemated on a change that would ultimately benefit all of us by avoiding the twice a year confusion and disruption.

The time controversy is just a metaphor for our inability to make democracy work on the bigger issues. If a majority of states and people want a single time pattern year-round, why can’t we make it happen? And if we can’t solve the little problems, how are we ever going to make any headway on the big ones?

So, with one of my favorite holidays—Election Day– just ten days away, think about that challenge when you vote.  Ask yourself, or your candidates, how open-minded, flexible, and responsive is this person, or has he/she been if incumbent, or likely to be in the future? Because democracy only works if we are able to learn, discuss, compromise, make decisions, and move on.

A Doorway Into Winter

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A week from today is the Celtic New Year ,October 31st (or November 1st).  Hallowe’en was Samhain (pronounced Sah-wain) in the Celtic tradition.  It was the day when the walls between this world and the spirit world were thinnest, and ghosts walked the earth. It was a day to honor the dead, and to begin again, experiencing the cold and dark of the womb of earth before being reborn again into the light and warmth of spring.

There are many times to celebrate a new year. January 1st is arbitrary, in deep winter, ten days after the winter solstice. (For an economist, that date is important as the start of a new tax year.)  Christians start their new year with Advent, four Sundays before Christmas. Chinese New Year’s Day is in February.  A new school year, for many who are teachers are students, is definitely worth knowing as a fresh start, usually in August or September.  I once hosted a new year’s eve party on August 14th, because Clemson University’s academic calendar and our nine month faculty contracts started on August 15th

.States celebrate a new fiscal year on July 1st, as the federal government used to until it was chronically unable to get a budget passed in time, so it is now October 1st.  The Jewish New Year is a moveable feast, being on a lunar calendar, but like the Celts, the Jews celebrate a new year by going into and through the darkness instead of starting with the return of the light. As for me, I observe two new years: July 1st, the day after my birthday, a new year of my life, and January 1st, because it dictates so many other events and financial matters, and I am an economist by profession and mental framework.

.The idea of going through the darkness and into the light is one worth contemplating, along with the two remarkable cultures that adopted that season as the time to celebrate their new year. The Celts and the Jews were wise and persistent peoples with a great deal of depth of being that persisted from ancient times until the present day.  The darkness they celebrate is a period of renewal—hibernation, reflection, a slowing down of activity, a time for closeness.  Central heating, foodstuffs from all over the world, electric lights, refrigeration, and television have made  winter less different from other seasons of the year in modern industrial culture. We can have fresh blueberries in December, displacing the more traditional holiday fruits. If we are wealthy enough, we can escape the winter cold by becoming snowbirds and spending up to half a year in Florida or Mexico or the Caribbean.

Aside from the expense and inconvenience, that never appealed to me. My body and soul need winter.  I know longer have any yard work to do for at least three or four months. I can turn my attention to nesting, to indoor improvements, to learning new skills and ideas and especially to catching up on my reading. (I have only read 95 books so far this year, the first time I have kept track, and there are so many more!). I can plan what I will do in the year that officially begins on January 1st, start new projects and finish old ones.  I can spend long winter evenings doing jigsaw puzzles and watching documentaries.

Poet Mary Oliver asks us, what we will do with our one wild and precious life?  That’s too big a question for me, but I can decide what to do with this one dark and quiet season before the earth (at least in South Carolina) bursts forth in glorious technicolor, sunshine, and new possibilities and demands. As you enter the darkness, what new possibilities are taking root and growing in the darkness to burst forth in March? How will you use this one precious and wild season of winter?

Morning Questions

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I’m a longtme journal-keeper, starting the day with a page or two of what is going on in my life.  At the end of each day’s entry, I ask myself three questions.  The first two are “What do I hope for today?” And “What am I grateful for today?” The third question come from British author E.B. White, who posed it something like this.  “When I get up in the morning, I have to decide whether to enjoy the world or to improve the world. It makes it hard to plan my day.” In the form of a question, as the Jeopardy host would say, ?What do I plan to do (or not do) that will enable me to enjoy and/or improve the world today?”  Most days I try to do some of each, but there are some days that are mostly enjoy and some that are mostly improve. Over time, I have seen closer links among the questions because the enjoy/improve questions are grounded in what I hope for and what I am grateful for.

The practice of gratitude journaling has been around for a while. Those not inclined to do prayers of thanks (I’m one of those) find an alternative way of expressing thanks to be an alternative spiritual discipline.  There are so many big and little things that make our life more enjoyable that we can be thankful for and so many things we can do to make the world a better place. I have hopes for myself, about being a better person or getting more exercise or losing weight of being more mindful and more present. I have hopes for my friends and children and grandchildren, hopes for my state and my country and the world, hope for peace in Ukraine and slowing down climate change and preserving democracy. Gratitude is tied to enjoy, and hope is improving (or at least not to making things worse). All four of them are part of the mix of who we are and what we do and how that being and doing impacts our life and the lives of others.

Theologian Joanna Macy reminds us that hope has to be active hope, not wishful thinking.   She castigates both optimism (all will be for the best in this best of all possible worlds) and pessimism (nothing I do will make any difference) as a failure of hope, which those who read the New Testament may recognized as one of Paul’s cardinal virtues, along with faith and love. It is not enough to sit yon your recliner and think hopeful thoughts, but to find ways to work alone or even better with others to bring them about.  Similarly, gratitude means respecting the sources of joy, whether it is a sunny day, flowers, a cat on your lap, or a surprise phone call from an old friend. Gratitude calls us to be kind, attentive, and respectful of the atmosphere, the plants, animals, and other people.

What might it look like as a journal entry?  Something like this.  Today I plan to enjoy my weekly 4 pm visit with my women friends who largely share my values and attitudes but are enough different to challenge some of them.  I also plan to enjoy my exercise class, doing some writing, taking a walk, and making pumpkin bread.  I will finish up preparations for my congregational board meeting (I’m the president) and gather the supplies I need for a postcard to minority voters projects to launch after the Sunday service. I will get in touch with an old friend who recently suffered a fall and haul my recyclables to the local recycling center.  I will spray my doorways and windowsills with cleaning vinegar to discourage critters from moving in without resorting to poison. The postcards are part of my hope for democracy, the recycling and vinegar reflect my hope for the planet, and my call to my friend rests on the hope that it will cheer her up while she recovers. I am grateful for so many things, but the ones that are reflected in my enjoying and improving are my friends, my faith community, a good recipe for pumpkin bread, and the Botanical Garden in my community where I often walk.

We are what we think and what we do and what we refrain from thinking and doing.  Sometimes it helps to commit it to paper.

Lessons from the Pandemic

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The pandemic is never completely ended, but most of us have returned to normal life, knowing that getting Covid is now more like getting the flu and for most of us, It’s not likely to be fatal. However, the pandemic has taught us some important lessons.

  1. Things go better when we cooperate.  Getting shots and wearing masks don’t just protect me, they also protect everyone else from me. We are all in this together.Sometimes teh government is a useful way of facilitating cooperation, and that’s not a bad thing.
  2. Electronic communication is very useful, but it is a complement, not a substitute, for in-person presence.  We have five senses.  Zoom gives us two, hearing and sight.  We don’t expect to smell or taste each other, at least not in public, but there is something meaningful about touch, even if it’s only an elbow bump.  Being physically present is a very different experience form seeing people online.  Body language is clearer and communication is more direct. It’s easier to break up into subgroups, and to move from one group to another. Groups that have resumed meeting in person seemed much more appreciative of the company of others whether it was at work, play, church, school, or social gatherings.
  3. Having said that, Zoom and Google Meet have become an important part of our lives, and remain very useful for gathering people together from disparate spaces from short periods of time. Other software like Slack also enables speedy and focused communications via the internet.
  4. The workplace will never be the same.  While some jobs always did and always will require physical presence, there is a whole lot work from home at least a few days a week that is especially helpful for people who have lives—spouses, children, community involvement.  Flexibility and hybrid work situations save commuting costs, make workers happier, and reduce the need for so much expensive office space.
  5. We learned to appreciate essential workers—nurses, caregivers, first responders, teachers.  Hopefully we will remember how essential they were and are when it comes time to consider they wages and working conditions.
  6. Some of us may have learned to appreciate the value of solitude, which is different from loneliness.  Spending time alone or at least at home can help us get better acquainted with ourselves and family members and encourage us to try out new experiences.
  7. Science doesn’t have all the answers, but it does know how to look for them.  Science is something we learn as we go.  The speed with which the vaccine was developed and distributed is mind-boggling. The investments we make in scientific research can have big payoffs in terms of human flourishing.

If we are mindful, or lucky, or reflective, maybe we can take those lessons with us on the next stages of our life journeys.

The Labor of Our Lives

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The end of summer, the beginning of school, and the advent of fall is marked in this country by Labor Day. It seems like a suitable occasion to reflect on the meaning of work in its various incarnations.   Most work involves serving the needs of others, collaboration, and learning to do difficult or challenging or boring tasks in order that the work of the world may go on.

Homework.  Housework. Yard work. Volunteer work. Paid work. While all these kinds of work have a place in our lives, I want to focus mostly but not exclusively on those kinds of work that involve wages or salaries or the sale and purchase of services. My first job was in retail during my junior and senior years in high school.  I knew I wanted to go to college. My and my family could not afford to send me, and in those ancient days, scholarships were scarce.  I worked for a dollar an hour and managed to save $2000 by the time I left for college. The job had its satisfactions, the camaraderie of other working teens, the interaction with customers, the feeling of being useful and getting a paycheck.  But it was only a job. For some people, a job is something that pays the bills and buys the groceries while the real vocation is something else, such as homemaking, the arts, care giving, or community building.

My sophomore and junior years in college I earned money by grading freshman physics papers.  That too, was just a job for spending money.  It did teach me how little I liked grading paper.  Still, I knew I was headed for an academic career so that I could spend the rest of my life reading and learning and writing and teaching and thinking. I knew that academia was where I needed to be from the time when I started elementary school, even before I knew what the word academic meant. I had turned my attention from job to career and/or vocation.

A career involves more than a job. It means getting better pay and acquiring skills and credentials as well as doing things to advance your career, learning and applying new skills, and finding yourself in a competitive environment, which didn’t exist in either of my first two jobs.  A career, unlike a job, can get in the way of the rest of your life, your physical, psychological, and spiritual well-being and your relationships. Usually. you leave a job behind when you go home– that’s part of its appeal, a life that is not totally absorbed in work. The demands of a career create many of the tensions of midlife, that period when one is working full time and also raising a family and building a social network of friends and neighbors and co-workers.

Vocation evolves over a lifetime. Just as learning does not end with graduation,  neither does vocation, the place where your passions meet your gifts. Vocation is your answer to poet Mary Oliver’s question “what will you do with your one wild and precious life?” A sense of vocation may emerge in some nebulous form from our earliest years. One of the hardest tasks of parenting or mentoring is to hold up a mirror to a young person to see their passion and their gifts and how they might blend into a vocation.  Vocation is what Parker Palmer describes as letting your life speak.

Knowing that I wanted an academic niche as both career and vocation was not enough. Like lawyers and doctors, academics specialize, sometimes too much. My first semester, I fell In love with economics. I was drawn to economics because it was theoretical and applied and useful and mathematical all at the same time.   Most of all, it was the foundation for much public policy. I was passionately interested in politics, more from the policy standpoint than from the spectator sport part, although I liked that too. Like any good choice of a career that doubles as a vocation, economics was where my gifts met my passions.  That defined vocation for me.

My daughters went through their own vocational discernment.  My older two daughters knew very early that their passions were art and music.  My youngest daughter struggled more with defining her gifts and passions,; she has a career as a library director and a vocation as a photographer that takes up much of her spare time. Two of them followed careers that embodied vocations, while the youngest split her time between the two.

A career or a job are something from which you will, if you live long enough, eventually retire. Then the question becomes, how to fill that space.  After a few years of golf, bridge, and travel, most of my retired friends have looked for something more meaningful. .My late colleague, Jim Hite, used to say that he had retired from his career, not his profession.  That was also true for me. We just practiced it less full time and in different contexts than before.

 If a person hasn’t already found a vocation, it can and often does happen in retirement. I have a friend who spent her career in real estate management, but now finds her vocation in care-giving tour elderly neighbors. Retirees are often drawn into volunteer work that uses their skills and satisfies the passions in ways that their careers did not. It also gives them some flexibility they longed for during their working years.

In the feudal society of medieval Europe, birth and gender determined one’s station, serfs and peasants, craftsmen and merchants, knights, lords and king. Even then, there were deviants. The church was one of those places to find a niche for deviants, especially women. Over the centuries and around the world, women’s options were settled at birth. Only the brave and defiant managed to find expression for their gifts and passions outside of a very confined role, embracing what theologian Paul Tillich called The Courage to Be. Entering a convent offered options as intellectuals, teachers, nurses, theologians, and leaders. These options were not available to most women, who chose or were coerced into marriage as job, career, and vocation. Even in 19th century Britain, as we learn from reading Jane Austin novels, women’s task was to find a husband, manage an household, and procreate.

In the classical Hindu tradition, as in feudal European society, your vocation was not a matter of discernment.  It was assigned at birth.  Resistance was futile, as we learned from the Bhagavad Gita. It was age and gender and caste specific.  Children play until it is time to begin learning and preparing for their adult roles.  After the student years, it is time to embark on a career—there are more options now than when one was limited to peasant, merchant, warrior, or Brahman for men, wife and mother for women.  When you become old, your hair turns white, and you have seen your grandchildren, you are called to renounce worldly things and engage the life of the spirit.  This pre-ordained job-career-vocation track was mitigated by the promise that if you lived your assigned life well, you would get promoted on reincarnation.  And also the opposite. For traditional Christians and Muslims, heaven replaces reincarnation as the compensation for a lofe that did not let you find the joy of self-expression in vocation..

The pandemic turned the world of work upside down but also recalled an earlier time. For many centuries most families were farmers.  They worked from home without benefit of the internet.  Women and men were partners with each other and mother nature in making a living.  Industrialization and commercialization changed that pattern, and work became separated from home.

While there are many jobs, careers, and vocations that do not lend themselves to working at least partly from home, it is surprising how many there are. It not surprising how productive workers can be when they have less conflict between earning a living and living a life. Hybrid is becoming the new normal for many jobs, combining the benefits of less commute time and flexibility with the opportunity to collaborate in real time with physically present people.

After high school, many young people feel adrift, trying to figure out what next, what to do with their adult lives and what skills they need to acquire to find their niche in the world of work. They need mentors, but they also need to learn about themselves through work of most any kind. At the opposite end of the lifespan, many retirees find that they miss the companionship and collaboration that they had experienced in their work years and often seek out a form of work to develop relationships with co-workers and those whom they serve and to provide meaning and structure to their days.  For those in the middle, work in whatever form is a big part of the challenge of life balance, because those are also the years of marriage and children and competing demands for limited time.

For all of us, there is a tension between making a living and living an authentic and meaningful life, a lesson brought home by the pandemic, work from home, and a severe shortage of immigrants. With 3.5 percent unemployment, many workers have power to influence their wages, working conditions, and duties because they know they can find a better job. 

What does Labor Day invite us to think about the meaning of work Honest work, paid or unpaid, job, career, vocation, or all three, makes us better human beings. It builds community. Picking up garbage and delivering the mail, checking out of groceries and teaching our children, building our cars and mowing our lawns, caring for the sick, growing and harvesting crops, are just a few of the ways in which workers sustain our lives and our communities.

Labor Day offers an invitation to reflect on the role of work. To be thankful for the work we have been called or at least empowered to do and appreciative of the many kinds of work of others that makes our lives richer, safer, wiser, healthier, or more meaningful. To be mindful of those who struggle with the discernment about what to do with, as poet Mary Oliver says, “their one wild and precious life.” And to be advocates and supporters of those who struggle to find work that pays enough to provide for a decent life and hopefully other satisfactions as well.