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chris_okeefe's review
4.0
Nibley writes interesting stuff. When I first read some of his work on Mormons and political economy, I was a little offended. At the time I was still stuck in my conservative world-view, so nothing he said rang true.
I think Nibley has many interesting things to say about how Latter-Day Saints ought to engage our economy. I disagree that it should be fundamentally based in agriculture, but some of the principles he discusses, such as cooperation in investing in capital (instead of a combine, perhaps neighbors could share a nice lawnmower or something?). He does spend a lot of time wishing the economy was more like it "used to be," and he'd probably downplay the insights of modern political economy applied to his ideas (as well as the ones he lifts from Brigham Young and other LDS leaders).
Nibley may play a little too fast and loose with his quotations and conclusions from speeches given by the leaders of the church. He argued that S.W. Kimball opposed the MX missile being place in Utah as well as favoring environmentalism. The citation given, to a First Presidency message in the Ensign, neither clearly opposes the missile system nor endorses environmentalism. He similarly treats a snippet from a Steven L Richards talk at BYU which becomes the jumping off point for Nibley's treatise on anti-careerism. Richards said something about how being career minding was a bad thing, and Nibley bemoans BYU's shift toward supporting "careerism" and the singlemindedness of being in the same career for one's lifetime. Nibley might be on to something, but arguing that one line in a Steven L Richards talk at BYU doesn't reflect the "old" perspective at BYU.
In the end, his ideas are worth reading, if nothing else, as a check on the libertarian economic spirit that seems to go hand in hand with many folks' idea of what it is to be a Latter-day Saint.
I think Nibley has many interesting things to say about how Latter-Day Saints ought to engage our economy. I disagree that it should be fundamentally based in agriculture, but some of the principles he discusses, such as cooperation in investing in capital (instead of a combine, perhaps neighbors could share a nice lawnmower or something?). He does spend a lot of time wishing the economy was more like it "used to be," and he'd probably downplay the insights of modern political economy applied to his ideas (as well as the ones he lifts from Brigham Young and other LDS leaders).
Nibley may play a little too fast and loose with his quotations and conclusions from speeches given by the leaders of the church. He argued that S.W. Kimball opposed the MX missile being place in Utah as well as favoring environmentalism. The citation given, to a First Presidency message in the Ensign, neither clearly opposes the missile system nor endorses environmentalism. He similarly treats a snippet from a Steven L Richards talk at BYU which becomes the jumping off point for Nibley's treatise on anti-careerism. Richards said something about how being career minding was a bad thing, and Nibley bemoans BYU's shift toward supporting "careerism" and the singlemindedness of being in the same career for one's lifetime. Nibley might be on to something, but arguing that one line in a Steven L Richards talk at BYU doesn't reflect the "old" perspective at BYU.
In the end, his ideas are worth reading, if nothing else, as a check on the libertarian economic spirit that seems to go hand in hand with many folks' idea of what it is to be a Latter-day Saint.