The Spirit of Capitalism

Weber talks about the connection with modern Capitalism and its foundations in the spirit of Protestantism. He starts out mentioning that according to Ben Franklin, Protestantism is responsible for a healthy capitalistic society. Work is seen as a virtue and people thrive when they have values of hard work. Franklin is particularly interested in moral values that are akin to those of protestantism such as hard work, honor, honesty, timely paying of debt, etc. In this part I found it interesting because I know in the old testament, it says that owing any money in the form of debt is considered to be sin. That makes sense because it opens up people to many bad forces such as poverty or bad credit should they default on their loans. So paying debt in a timely way is important to Franklin, but bad none the less in the origins of Christianity.

Weber then compares old traditional capitalism to modern capitalism. He mentions many contradictory circumstances when people abuse the system, or are less than altruistic. He talks about how some laborers work better often when they are compensated less, but in many cases workers demand more pay or education since they are in control of expensive machinery and processes. Not sure why he mentioned all of those but it was interesting. On the other hand, he shows that the traditional societies worked more for religious reasons, and now people tend to find greed to be more of a motivating factor. I also like the part where he mentioned the harvest as a motivator for work in a manufacturing background. It was neat to see how he showed people would work less if they were paid more to do less. I found it interesting how this might show a need for more ethical or religious motivation since pride in work alone is not always motivation enough for everybody. Yet he says that people today don't really need religious motivation since they live for business itself. We now live for the acquisition of material goods.

I found many points in the reading to be logical and founded in evidence, but I kind of lost focus of his direction at times since he was negative in langauge when his conclusion would be positive.