To know the actual economic history of enrichment and civilization, you have to know the numbers. Most people don’t. People got rich and civilized by liberty, not by coercion.

Let’s be clear ethically. Imperi­alism, as in South Asia, was very bad. Enslaving people, as in West Africa, was too. So was shooting striking workers, as in Ken­tucky. There are no excuses for the Opium Wars or King Leopold II in the Congo or the U.S. seizure of the Philip­pines or Ford’s goons beating up workers at the Battle of the Overpass. Stealing, coercion, murder are evil.
Wealth and its civilization, though, did not depend on the evil. The Left channels Vladimir Lenin in claiming that the West got rich by robbing the poor. And the Right channels Theodore Roosevelt in claiming that the world got civilized by conquering the poor. Both sides are wrong. People got rich and civilized by liberty, not by coercion.
To know the actual economic history of enrichment and civilization, you have to know the numbers. Most people don’t. The surpassingly wise Swedish professor of public health Hans Rosling reported that even well-informed people score worse than a chimp would throwing darts at the numbers. People think that the rich are getting richer and the poor poorer. They think that economic growth is perpetually threatened by new headwinds requiring urgent tacking by the ship of state. They think that things are worse than ever. They think that The End Is Near. And in reaction to such horror movies, they think that perhaps a bit of tyranny from left or right would be a Good Thing.
No. Nearly forever, from the caves until about two centuries ago, the average human, except for a few lords and priests, dragged along in today’s prices on less than $2 a day. Try living on $2 a day. Some people still do: South Sudan. Then, from 1800 (or 1900 or 1960) to the present, a Great Enrichment, dwarfing the mere doubling in the so-called Industrial Revolution of 1750 to 1850, made the average human 25 times richer. The number nowadays in the same prices is about $50 a day. Think China, Brazil, and Botswana. And Finland, Ireland, and Iceland, once miserable and colonized, stand well above $100 a day. At $50 or $100 a day, people get food instead of famine, long lives in­stead of parasites, Ph.D.s instead of illiteracy, high-rises instead of hovels.
Every nasty jerk in history has stolen, and usually gotten away with it. As Gibbon said in 1776, “history is little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind.” So stealing by imperialism and enslavement caused the Great Enrichment, yes?
No. Do the numbers. If you seized your neighbor’s house and her stuff and enslaved her husband, you might get 20 percent richer. Maybe 50. Call it 100. Great for you. “Foreigners shall rebuild your walls,” said the Lord to Jerusalem through His prophet Isaiah, “and their kings shall be your servants…Your gates shall be open continuously…that through them may be brought the wealth of nations and their kings under escort.” Good for Jerusalem. In the zero-sum world before 1800, stealing and enslaving got the jerks 10, 50, even 100 percent richer. Hallelujah.
But the Great Enrichment has been two-and-a-half thousand percent. By fourth-grade arithmetic, the present $50 minus the miserable base in 1800 of $2 is $48, which divided by the base is about a factor of 25, or about that 2,500 percent. Blimey. Stealing can’t come remotely close to accounting for it. Stealing from the wretched of the earth doesn’t even sound like a good criminal plan. And anyway, stealing from Peter to pay Paul can’t enrich both, and certainly not by 2,500 percent.
Consider, for example, British imperialism. Half of the Royal Navy, which was paid for by Britons at home, was assigned to protect the sea routes to India. Glorious. Yet India itself yielded no stolen benefit to the average Briton. Not a shilling. India traded with Britain, sure. But trade is not stealing, and the trade would have happened regardless of whether the Raj was Britain or France or the domestic rajas.
Straightforward stealing from India happened only once. A window opened after the Battle of Plassey in 1757 through which some bold thieves en­tered. Robert Clive of India and Warren Hastings and some other nabobs made fortunes by stealing. Clive remarked that in view of his opportunities, “by God,…I stand astonished at my own moderation.” Then the stealing stopped and the paying for the glory began, as did a little peaceful trade of Sri Lankan tea and Indian jute for Lancashire dhotis and Yorkshire railway locomotives. And as rich as Clive and his fellow nabobs briefly became, their enrichment was trivial in national terms. Clive’s wealth at his death was half of one-tenth of 1 percent of Britain’s. Nice to have, you say, roughly $200 million nowadays. But it’s not average-enrichment-making, then or now. It’s a fly on the scale.
Something therefore is deeply screwy about blaming the West’s undoubted stealing and enslaving and other mal­feasance for the poverty that remains. While the malfeasance was taking place, humans for the first time went from misery to sufficiency, and they can now look forward in a few more generations to universal enrichment. As late as 1960, 4 billion out of the 5 billion souls on the planet earned the old $2 a day. Now it’s 1 billion out of nearly 8 billion, and truly rich places that were once shockingly poor, such as the Italian South or South Korea or South Tyrol, multiply.
Stealing does not a Great Enrichment make. Our friends on the left claim that rich people stealing from the English working class around 1800 resulted in…uh…everyone getting richer by a factor of 25. Huh? You break into your neighbor’s house and, like the assassin in the 2002 Tom Hanks gangster movie Road to Perdition, you brutally murder Hanks’s wife and one of his sons. Then you make off with his stuff. Out of this, says the Left, the real incomes of everyone—you, Hanks, his other son, the gangster boss, everyone—rise by 2,500 percent.
It’s Monty Python loony. In 1930 the spoof of English history 1066 and All That put it this way: “Many remarkable discoveries and inventions were made [about the year 1800]. Most re­markable among these was the discovery (made by all the rich men in England at once) that women and children could work for 25 hours a day…without many of them dying or becoming excessively deformed. This was known as the Industrial Revelation.”
After all, the historical problem with the hypothesis of stealing for enrichment is that stealing is historically commonplace, yet it never resulted in a Great Enrichment. Until it did. Whoops. What kind of a historical explanation is that?
And the economic problem is that the Enrichment after 1800 was so very Great that it can’t possibly be explained by routine projects, whether financed by evil stealing or by virtuous abstention from consumption. Canals, for example. Projects such as the Swedish state’s stealing of the conscripted labor of 58,000 soldiers to dig the Göta Canal from Söderköping to Gothenburg be­tween 1810 and 1832 face sharply diminishing returns. Normal capital accumulation does. That’s besides being economically idiotic in this case, and in the case of most of the canals that were financed as nice-sounding “internal improvements” in the United States during the 1830s. Compare stealing tax money to build a high-speed railway between L.A. and San Francisco. Just sayin’.
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Ecclesiastes 4:1 states a very simple truth: “Two are better than one…”
It’s not a new truth; in fact, it’s one of the first things we hear from the Lord in the Bible:
“It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a helper suitable for him” (Gen. 2:18).
As human beings, we were not meant to live in isolation; we are meant for each other. That “each other” includes all kinds of relationships – marriages, church groups, and just basic friendships included. In all these cases, two are better than one.
While that seems obvious, it’s a truth that needs to be re-embraced today. After all, we live in a culture that has never been more connected and yet never more isolated. We might have hundreds or thousands of virtual connections without any of those connections ever moving into a genuine, deep relationship. Now, more than ever, we need to deeply believe and live out this reality of relationship.
Here, then, are three reasons why two are better than one:
1. Because we have different gifts.
Ecclesiastes 4 continues like this:
Two are better than one,
because they have a good return for their labor…
This is, of course true in most any general sense – two people working at the same time are most often going to produce more and better things than just one. But in the church, this truth takes on another meaning.
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Must Christians renounce political and cultural power in order not to lose sight of the fact that heaven is their true home? Many evangelical leaders believe so. C.S. Lewis, in Mere Christianity, recognized that it is entirely the other way round: “It is since Christians have largely ceased to think of the other world that they have become so ineffective in this.”

Last week we took a look at the debates over whether the elites in charge of evangelical colleges, seminaries, and other institutions, in their desire to gain a hearing in the world, have compromised key Christian convictions in the process.
This week we dive into a related topic making the rounds, the current fracturing of the evangelical world. Peter Wehner, a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, wrote a much cited article in the Atlantic entitled “The Evangelical World is Breaking Apart” in which he contends that the evangelical churches are fracturing because they have become politicized and tribal “repositories of grievances.” David French (unsurprisingly) agrees.
Wehner and French’s contention can be boiled down to this: Christians who are politically active, more often than not, have exchanged Christian faithfulness for the resentful rage that defines the contemporary political scene.
A slightly different angle is found in Collin Hansen’s recent article about the final Together For the Gospel conference, to be held in 2022, where he laments the fact that “many pastors find more in common with even unbelievers who share their political and cultural assumptions than with believers who affirm the same doctrine.”
Unlike Wehner and French, Hansen doesn’t throw every politically right-leaning Christian under the bus, but he is also troubled by the same basic dynamic: those who would strongly insist that evangelicals should adhere to certain cultural and political priorities. Russell Moore shares Hansen’s concern, although he places those he criticizes in the category of heretics.
Wehner, French, and the myriad other writers churning out slightly different forms of the same basic claim, of course, always have only one group of evangelicals in mind: those on the right. While they may throw in a brief comment here or there about how this is a bipartisan issue, they never really examine left-leaning evangelicals at all. When Wehner mentions a pastor who has recently resigned his pulpit and left the ministry altogether because “he felt undermined by people in his congregation…who, it turned out, were less animated by spiritual matters than by political agendas” you know he isn’t talking about supporters of President Biden. Trump and evangelicals who support him are the problem. They are the ones who angrily denounce, ridicule, persecute, slander, and hound pastors from their pulpits. Crickets regarding those on the left.
One of the main ways this comes out is the anecdotes and quotes these authors choose to highlight. There will be a lengthy litany of abuses coming from those on the right, with an equally lengthy recounting of how mistreated and abused those are who righteously stand apart from politics, simply feeding God’s people with the unadulterated truths of Scripture. No doubt such mistreatment does occur. It should be opposed. But the selectivity of these authors is not accidental. It builds up a one-sided picture meant to send shivers of revulsion down the spine of any decent human being: “That kind of evangelicals, they are the problem. They have made an idol of politics. They must be stopped.” The recent special on CBS is a particularly egregious example of this kind of intentional selectivity. Those who, it is claimed, are politically neutral, are always carefully portrayed as being above the fray, their hands unsullied by worldly affairs. Instead, such pastors and leaders—so we are told—simply want to show us how the gospel shapes our understanding of race, gender relations, immigration, and more. Nothing political in that, right?
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