For three days this week, the 104th archbishop of Canterbury told economists, theologians and others attending a Wall Street conference that the “fat cats” of the world were not necessarily bad people, just victims of a terrible misunderstanding.
The misunderstanding ”” shared by people with lots of money, people with aspirations of having lots of money and those with neither ”” is that money is equated with wealth, he said.
And wealth, said the archbishop, the Most Rev. Rowan D. Williams, leader of world’s 80 million Anglicans ”” including members of the Episcopal Church in the United States ”” is the sum of one’s loving relationships with people. It is not, he said, “the number of naughts on the end of a balance sheet.”
Williams’s words do not strike me as particularly radical nor clueless; indeed, it seems to me that his main attack is against the economist cluelessness of pretending that people participate in the economy rationally.