As long as the problems of the poor are not radically resolved by rejecting the absolute autonomy of markets and financial speculation and by attacking the structural causes of inequality, no solution will be found for the world’s problems or, for that matter, to any problems.

I cannot possibly agree with that statement. I will have to hope he meant some other, not properly qualified thing. I'm not in the habit of disagreeing with encyclicals.

Now, what precisely shall I attack? Shall I write an indignant blog post? Run for president? “Speak out for justice,” a phrase rendered tiresome by its employment in hundreds of meretricious causes? Will any of those things help anyone, or change the situation?

Good questions.

Growth in justice requires more than economic growth, while presupposing such growth: it requires decisions, programmes, mechanisms and processes specifically geared to a better distribution of income, the creation of sources of employment and an integral promotion of the poor which goes beyond a simple welfare mentality.

How about we agitate for growth in justice in the realm of marriage law? Let us have no more divorce at all and only permit legal separations under serious conditions. Although to offset the probable reduction in people marrying as a result of such laws, there should be a general reversion to whatever laws and social policies were previously in effect to protect the status of marriage.

That would halt an awful lot of poverty right there, potentially.

Nor should any of us feel exempted. Ultimately the reason so many American jobs have gone abroad or to illegal immigrants at home is that the people at large did not want to pay the higher prices that would be required if these jobs were done by Americans for an American living wage. All of us can consider such things in our daily life.

I think Aquinas says that the desire to buy cheap is a vice. Although it can be hard to determine exactly where to draw the line there, since objects do not have an absolute monetary value.

Louise it is not an encyclical, it's an apostolic exhortation.

Thanks, Grumpy. I don't even know what the difference is.

One of the world's problems is solved every time anyone forgives an injury.

Good advice, RG.

The words Daniel quotes are clear enough. It's the program that's vague, to say the least. Any problems at all?! No point trying to feed that homeless person, because it won't work till the problems of the poor are radically resolved? "Vague" is a generous way to describe that. It's a strange thing for a Christian to say, much less a pope, as Grumpy's instance implies.

"...justice is a major part of the Gospel." Indeed, and I don't know of any Christians arguing otherwise.

That Ratzinger quote nicely encapsulates something that had been bothering me for a while. Morality can handle people criticising a well-intentioned action on the grounds of that action's consequences; moralism can't, and conflates criticising the consequences with despising the good intentions. (Granted, someone who despises the good intentions might criticise the results as camouflage, but accusing someone of that should be a last, not first, resort.)

With regards to the autonomy of financial speculation, I note that this is one of the few areas where I've seen pro-free-market/government-is-useless types complain that a market is not regulated enough to ensure a minimal level of honesty and sanity, as high-frequency trading has made possible new modes of market crashes, and also new ways of gaming and distorting financial markets for the rich and well-connected. Governments are playing catch-up with this, in addition to suffering the more time-honoured weaknesses of big-money pressure and regulatory capture causing existing regulation to be cut in unwise places or be too weakly enforced.

As long as the problems of the poor are not radically resolved by rejecting the absolute autonomy of markets and financial speculation and by attacking the structural causes of inequality, no solution will be found for the world’s problems or, for that matter, to any problems.

In the context it is clear that Francis is talking about socio-economic problems, not "any problems" in some sort of absolute sense. As if he is saying that unless there is not a radical resolution of the problems of capitalism that it makes no sense, for example, to change a flat tire, or give alms to a panhandler. Come on, folks, the man is a Jesuit. He is not an idiot. He IS speaking in unusually radical ways, and definitively coming down against corporate capitalism, much to the confusion of certain Catholics of the Americanist persuasion.

From a priest-friend's fb:

Writing in L’Osservatore Romano, a prominent German cardinal defended Pope Francis’s comments about the economy in his recent apostolic exhortation Evangelii Gaudium [The Joy of the Gospel].

Cardinal Reinhard Marx, who was installed as Archbishop of Munich and Freising in 2008, is a member of the advisory Council of Cardinals established by Pope Francis to assist him in the governance of the Church.

Evangelization, said Cardinal Marx, entails more than catechesis and the administration of the sacraments; it also entails the transformation of society, culture, politics, and the economy.

“The call to think beyond capitalism is not a struggle against the market economy,” he said, as he distinguished the market economy from the financial capitalism that has come to the fore since the 1990s. This financial capitalism, he said, has “led to a catastrophic crisis.”

In criticizing capitalism, he added, he criticizes an ideology that “makes capital the point of departure” and views human persons as “cost factors.” An economic vision that “reduces economic action to capitalism has chosen the morally wrong starting point.”

“To think that somewhere there are pure markets which give rise to the good through free competition is mere ideology,” he added. “Capitalism should not become the model of society” because “it does not take into account individual destinies, the weak and the poor.”

“The social doctrine of the Church,” on the other hand, offers the “spiritual foundations of a social market economy … In the global economic debate, however, these ideas have never played a real role.” Ensuring that the poor play an active role in the Church and in society, rather than simply viewing the poor as objects of charity, is part of the task of evangelization, he added.

“The future is not capitalism, but rather a world community that leaves more space to the model of responsible freedom and that does not accept that people, groups, and individuals are excluded and marginalized,” he concluded.

Yeah, I assumed there must be a bit more to it than that.

Robert, that all sounds like pretty much what the pope was saying, in a somewhat clearer form.

As always, the discussion is a bit handicapped by the lack of a clear and agreed-upon definition of capitalism, so he has to resort to qualifiers like "the financial capitalism that has come to the fore since the 1990s."

It may take me awhile to find the citation, godescalc, but as it happens with your example about food, the problem there is that the food is being sold dear - also a vice.

To know the value of an item one has to consider a just wage for the people producing the item and the cost of the materials etc. It seems to me that most Westerners want to buy food too cheap. If the poor cannot afford food then they need better wages. If the better off complain about food prices, maybe they have their priorities wrong. It is not possible that anyone in my neighbourhood could not afford good, nourishing food, but they seem to expect it cheap anyway.

http://newadvent.org/summa/3077.htm

Waal, this is the full paragraph in English translation:

The need to resolve the structural causes of poverty cannot be delayed, not only for the pragmatic reason of its urgency for the good order of society, but because society needs to be cured of a sickness which is weakening and frustrating it, and which can only lead to new crises. Welfare projects, which meet certain urgent needs, should be considered merely temporary responses. As long as the problems of the poor are not radically resolved by rejecting the absolute autonomy of markets and financial speculation and by attacking the structural causes of inequality,[173] no solution will be found for the world’s problems or, for that matter, to any problems. Inequality is the root of social ills.

The penultimate sentence is perplexing, the last is contentious, it is unclear whether he is referring to social relations across the globe or to individual societies, and he seems unaware of how fraught with difficulty and how lengthy any process of economic development is. Perhaps the rest of the document revises and extends and clarifies, but this particular paragraph is a train-wreck.

Here is the text of footnote 173, which is in the quoted text:

"This implies the commitment to 'eliminate the structural causes of global economic dysfunction': BENEDICT XVI, Address to the Diplomatic Corps (8 January 2007): AAS 99 (2007), 73.

AAS = Acta Apostolicae Sedis = the Acts of the Holy See (the Pope)

Interesting. The reply to objection 2 ought to worry people who speak of economic laws as if they were like the laws of physics.

Indeed.

I tend to wonder if the Pope's thinking is making excess use of Latin America as a frame of reference. Latin American societies commonly have malintegrated labor markets (with large populations in the informal economy), abnormally skewed income distributions, hideous crime rates, and a multi-tiered private sector which consists of an 'official' business community which carefully maintains connections to politicians to navigate complex mercantile regulation and an 'unofficial' community of off-the-books employers. Rent-seeking, politically determined incomes, and incestuous relations between business and politics are pervasive in this world, but particularly problematic in Latin America.

what is rent-seeking?

thanks