SUSTAINED
WEALTH
P.J. Hill is a renowned scholar,
prolific author and sought out
speaker.In this interview he
discusses the history of sus-
tained wealth, who has it and
who does not, and our respon-
sibility as Christians.
P.J. HILL
THE HISTORY OF SUSTAINED WEALTH
Have you ever struggled with the concepts laid
out in Act 2:35, “And they were selling their
possessions and belongings and distributing
the proceeds to all, as any had need.” Does this
mean you shouldn’t own things? What is your
responsibility to others who are poor and in par-
ticular fellow Christians? Are you supposed to
be guilty because you make money? Well, read
on and see what P.J. Hill, a renowned Christian
economist has to say about sustainable wealth
and a Christian’s mind set.
AOF: Dr. Hill, thank you for talking to us today. Perhaps
you could start by talking to us a little bit about a subject
I think you are pretty familiar with: Sustained economic
growth. Could you tell the reader what that is?
HILL: Right, it is when economic growth has an impact on
the ordinary person, just a regular, run-of-the-mill person.
We’ve had wealth throughout history. You can look back
and you can see some people were pretty well off. You can
look at palaces, you can look at rulers of empires, you can
look at architectural features and there has always been
some people that have been able to do pretty well. The
idea of economic growth that effects everybody, or almost
everybody, really starts around 1800. It starts in England
and the Netherlands, then it goes to North America and
Western Europe. Then, finally, it gets to other places in
4 • The Art of Faith Magazine • www.aofmag.com
the world: Japan, Taiwan, Singapore, and then, most lately,
China and India. When we say “sustained economic growth,”
we mean that it increases the living standard of just regular
people, all people throughout the economy. Sometimes a
few people may be left out, but the amazing thing is that
for the last couple to three hundred years, depending on
which society you are talking about, some groups of people
have just had enormous increases in their material wellbe-
ing. Part of that is measured by change in life expectancy.
Life expectancy around the world in 1800 was around 30
years. In England and the Netherlands it might have been
around 35 years. Now, in almost all of the developed world,
it’s around 75 or 80 years. That alone is a pretty good indi-
cator that something has happened to allow people to live
better.
In a way, it is like someone had passed wealth on because
they only lived to be thirty, so it would span three genera-
tions. Now, people are living long enough to pass it on to
themselves.
Right. Part of it is passing on the technology, passing on the
capital, the knowhow to organize production. It is certainly,
say for somebody living in North America, compared to
where standards of living were two hundred years ago. It
is very difficult to get our minds around how much change
there has been.
America obviously is now part of the developed world, one
of the leaders. In the current economic state, there is a
We need to remem-
ber that when you go
back to the year 1600
or 1500, the whole
world was poor.
Poverty was just the
name of the game ”
lot of unemployment or underemploy-
ment, underpay, but the bottom line is,
we still have a lot more wealth than
most.
of a historical perspective. We need
to remember that when you go back
to the year 1600 or 1500, the whole
world was poor. Poverty was just the
name of the game for almost every-
There are certainly some economic body except for a select few. We need
problems wherein some people are not to be aware of those sorts of real
doing as well as others. The economic benefits for us.
recession that started in 2008 caused
a lot of hardship for people. But even I heard one of your lectures not too
then, people were still above, consider- long ago and there was an inter-
ably above, the levels they would have esting fact that you brought up. If
been a hundred years or two hundred someone makes $40,000 dollars a
years before. We don’t want to overlook year, which isn’t that uncommon in
the problems, the present issues that the U.S., they’re in the top one-per-
we have, but we also need some sort cent of the world.
Correct.
I found that absolutely fascinating.
I think you even mentioned that at
$19,000 a year, you’d still be in the top
five percent. That puts perspective on
how underdeveloped countries live.
It gives us some feel for the gap
between wealthy countries and the rest
of the world. It also raises very interest-
ing issues. There’s a lot of concern for
the top one percent. Are they morally
reprehensible? Are they culpable for
doing wrong sorts of things? When I
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