John Thornton, a Baptist pastor in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, writes: “Spending on consumer goods has not driven people into debt. Rather the rising cost of fixed goods like housing, healthcare, and education combined with stagnant wages have.” (Plough, Winter, 2019)

Thornton has incurred a large debt for his education. He lauded the schools he attended as successful in instilling in him the character he needed in his career.

It also, however, left him with a monetary debt. That debt influenced him in the choices he had to make to pay it off.

Choices in education increasingly have to do with what fields are more economically rewarding. They have less to do with equipping someone to serve or to explore knowledge. Choosing education has become a “consumer decision.”

Given this outlook, we may produce less teachers and scientists and more computer engineers and CEO’s of finance. We may neglect service careers as well as the “why” careers, the ones seeking knowledge and meaning.

Creating faster computer chips and working ever more efficiencies into our economic machines are not evil in themselves. Good things result: better medical diagnostic tools, for example, or more efficient energy systems.

But our technology also has provided new ways to spread hatred and to kill. We have also improved our economic machines at the expense of the average men and women who maintain them. The underclass that resulted is riddled with growing suicide rates and drug overdoses.

For kindness and meaning and a reason to live, we need thinkers and teachers and healers and spiritual leaders.

We need more of our resources underwriting the basics mentioned by John Thornton: housing, healthcare, and education. Cheaper basics make it easier for the less materially rewarded, including, perhaps, thinkers and teachers and healers and spiritual leaders.