Monday, April 17, 2017

EconTalk on the Economics of Pope Francis

Russ Roberts recently interviewed Robert Whaples on the EconTalk podcast, which I have listened to regularly for years. I was especially interested when I saw the title of this episode, The Economics of Pope Francis, both because I am a Catholic and because I generally find Roberts' discussions of religion (from his Jewish perspective) interesting and so articulate that they help me clarify my own thinking, even if my views diverge from his. 

In this episode, Roberts and Whaples, an economics professor at Wake Forest and convert to Catholicism, discuss the Pope's 2015 encyclical Laudato Si, which focuses on environmental issues and issues of markets, capitalism, and inequality more broadly. Given Roberts' strong support of free markets in most circumstances, I was pleased and impressed that he did not simply dismiss the Pope's work as anti-market, as many have. Near the end of the episode, Roberts says:
when I think about people who are hostile to capitalism, per se, I would argue that capitalism is not the problem. It's us. Capitalism is, what it's really good at, is giving us what we want--more or less...And so, if you want to change capitalism, you've got to change us. And that's--I really see that--I like the Pope doing that. I'm all for that.
I agree with Roberts' point that one place where religious leaders have an important role to play in the economy is in guiding the religious toward changing, or at least managing, their desires. Whaples discusses this too, summarizing the encyclical as being mainly about people's excessive focus on consumption:
It's mainly on the--the point we were talking about before, consuming too much. It's exhortation. He is basically saying what has been said by the Church for the last 2000 year...Look, you don't need all this stuff. It's pulling you away from the ultimate ends of your life. You are just pursuing it and not what you are meant, what you were created by God to pursue. You were created by God to pursue God, not to pursue this Mammon stuff.
Roberts and Whaples both agree that a lot of problems that are typically blamed on market capitalism could be improved if people's desires changed, and that religion can play a role in this (though they acknowledge that some non-religious people also turn away from materialism for various reasons.) Roberts' main criticism of the encyclical, however, is that: "The problem is the document has got too much other stuff there...it comes across as an institutional indictment, and much less an indictment of human frailty."

I would add, though, that just as markets reflect human wants, so do institutions, whether deliberately designed or developed and evolved more organically. So it is not totally clear to me that we can separate "indictment of human frailty" and "institutional indictment." No economic institutions are totally value-neutral, even free markets. Institutions and preferences co-evolve, and institutions can even shape preferences. And the Pope is of course the head of one of the oldest and largest institutions in the world, so it does not seem beyond his role to comment on institutions as an integral part of his exhortation to his flock.

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