Economic Motivation (2) Choices

Augustine of Hippo explained that our behaviour ranks people according to their significance to us. We do more for those that we love the most. We give the most to those who have the greatest significance to us.

In all our activities, we must constantly make decisions about whom our actions will benefit. Sometimes we will do things for ourselves. Sometimes we will do things for our neighbour. In other situations, we will decide to do things for others. In other words, we must constantly decide between loving ourselves, loving our families, loving our neighbours, or doing to others what we want done to us.

We have limited resources and limited time, so we cannot do all of these all of the time. If I give help to my neighbour, I will have less for myself. If keep more of what I own for my family, I have will less for my neighbour, and for others. If I spend more time serving others, I will have less time for myself. Economists call this scarcity. Scarcity means that I do not have the resources to do everything that I might want to do. I have to make choices, between keeping things for myself, giving things to my family, giving things to my neighbours, and supplying things to others in exchange for what I need.

Although it might be simpler, we cannot choose one category of person, and ignore all the others. God has given us a duty to them all.
The Bible does not give rules for deciding how to prioritise between loving ourselves, loving our family, loving our neighbour, and supplying others. We learn how to make these choices by listening the Holy Spirit and learning from the scriptures. Some decision will be quite hard, with no easy options.

These ideas might seem obvious to most people, but economists have struggled to get hold of them.