Last week, The Boston Globe ran an article about the decline of the final exam. Professors, it seems, are increasingly omitting final examinations at the end of their courses. The conclusion, although anecdotal, is that this is happening not in a few isolated places, but all around the country. Harvard offers a case study. According to the Globe, last spring only 259 of 1,137 Harvard undergraduate courses scheduled final exams, the lowest number since 2002. The Times' “Today’s idea” section repeated the story a few days ago, including the caveat that “serious pedagogical questions about 21st century education” are raised by the decline in giving finals. The questions that are inevitably dragged into the discussion are,  “How best do students learn? And what’s the best way to assess that?"

Educators are obsessed with pinning down the answer to “How are students best educated?”  Yet the...

I keep picturing the Cranick family. Their faces would have been glowing a sweaty ember-red, earlier this week, while they plaintively watched their home and all its contents (including their dogs and cat) burn to the ground. Meanwhile, the “firefighters” (yes, I’m deliberately putting scare quotes around the word) who arrived at the scene stood around and watched along with them. Why? Well, heck, it’s actually quite logical, if you think about it. This is the New America, where a man who neglects to pay an annual $75 surcharge for fire protection from the South Fulton Fire Department, located in rural Tennessee, is punished appropriately for his irresponsibility. (One wonders: Would the “firefighters” have lifted their hoses if human beings had been in the house? Who’s to say?)

Glenn Beck and his ilk immediately praised the “firefighters,” arguing the...

Philosophizing takes one only so far in understanding the effects of wealth on individuals. But before I turn from philosophy to anecdote, I’d like to address a comment on one of my previous posts on wealth that noted, “If we take the Bible seriously, then it’s not wealth that’s the problem, but the love of money that’s the root of all evil.”

It happens that in modern times, unlike aristocratic times, wealth and love of money run along the same track. Wealth may or may not corrupt every person who gains it, but ordinary people who happen to be naturally greedy often make their life's goal the accumulation of wealth. In an age of equality, based on commercialism, making money for its own sake is acknowledged as a reasonable goal in itself.  In aristocratic ages, by contrast, making money for its own sake was a contemptible endeavor. In fact, once capitalism took off, many...

I said I’d have one more post on the problem of wealth, but I’ve changed my mind, and I have two. I’d like to take a moment here to ponder the just-released Census Bureau report in which we learn that the income disparity between rich and poor in the United States has increased yet again. America now has the dubious distinction of having the greatest gap between the rich and poor among Western nations. The top wealthiest 5 percent of American families earned more than $180,000 last year—an increase from the year before. Meanwhile, the median income was down more than $1,500 from the previous year. Oh, and one in four American families today earns under $25,000.

If this keeps up, we'll have to wake up Tocqueville from the grave to have him rethink his proposition that history is moving inexorably toward equality. Or perhaps the wealthy in America can keep on pulling the wool over the eyes...

In my last two posts, I explored what I thought were the practical and ethical implications that come with wealth—how much happiness derives from possessing it (Aristotle), and how much time accumulating and maintaining wealth takes away from truly important things (Leonardo da Vinci). The problem of wealth goes beyond a matter of economics, and to permit the national discussion about how much to tax the wealthy to rest entirely with the economics of taxes excludes broader, equally important ethical questions about how we should live. In this third of what I’ve decided will end up being four posts on the problem of wealth (yup, one more is coming), I’ll offer a cursory look at how the Judeo-Christian tradition sees wealth. (I know too little about Islam’s attitude toward wealth, other than that one of its five pillars is to care for the needy, to comment on it.)

The wealthy are all...

In my last post, I tried to move the current argument about taxing the wealthy away from economics into the realm of ethics. I argued that wealth presents both a moral and practical problem for societies, citing Aristotle’s Politics, where the philosopher notes the perpetual tension between the rich and the poor. But wealth also presents a moral and practical problem for wealthy individuals. In his Ethics, the philosopher, in exploring the subject of human happiness, discusses along the way the various ways in which wealthy people handle their wealth—some with liberality, some without. He concludes that in most cases wealth fails to lead to happiness. Although remaining with Aristotle’s ideas is tempting, this is a blog, where a certain amount of free-associating enlivens things. So I’d like to turn now to Leonardo da Vinci’s less well-known yet equally insightful thoughts on wealth.

I was surprised at the vitriol in many of the responses to fellow blogger Teresa Ghilarducci’s argument in support of the Obama administration’s proposal to raise taxes on the richest 2.1 percent of taxpayers. The wealthy who are at risk of having to pay a piddling more of their wealth in taxes should be pleased that so many are willing to go to the barricades to support them. Who woulda thunk it?  

Yet whether the wealthy should pay higher taxes or not is not merely a question of tax policy, or what’s “fair” or “just” to the wealthy.  There are also the questions of the connection between wealth and the moral problem of human greed—problems that seem almost overlooked now that we live in an age where people are incapable of thinking without citing statistics.

If we think about wealth as a moral and practical problem, instead of an economic one, with implications both for society as a...