Francis is the first pope from the Americas/the Southern Hemisphere/the “global south.” That last one is a favorite of those who like the word “neoliberalism.” Francis is also from the “developing world” (which used to be called the “third world”), said CNN.
Argentina, not to mention its natty neighbor and suburb Uruguay, is actually part of the developed world, indeed the first world. It regularly produces paragons of modernist achievement on the order of Daniel Berenboim and Juan Maldacena. And at least until the 1940s, it was one of the princes of the “second industrial revolution,” that fabled age when other nations imitated if not blew past the standards set in the “first industrial revolution” by Great Britain.
Before the Depression hit in 1929, Argentina’s economic output easily put it among the ranks of the successful European economies. Per capita, it was exactly as well off as Germany.
Argentina was also a major adherent to the gold standard. When the world discarded the gold standard in the 1930s and 1940s, Argentina was left with a hoard of gold reserves and few global trading partners. Juan Peron swept in and spent the stuff buying votes, and the country’s long decline commenced. The Argentine peso became one of the most devalued currencies the world has ever seen.
The legacy of great achievements is hard to stamp out, however, and despite the best efforts of latter-day leftist Peronists like the Kirchners, the old bourgeois greatness which Argentina was always good for even today will shine through, in some fascinating new idea in string theory, music, or medicine.
In Pope Francis we have the son of an Italian immigrant born in Argentina before Peron. Italy—the country that England supplanted centuries ago as the greatest economic performer Christendom had ever produced.
The main impact of the industrial revolution on the Church was the disruption it brought to the ways of agriculture and the life of the land. In the later Middle Ages and in the early modern period, Christian piety became very nicely developed within the structure of farm life in Europe. Thus the uprooting of a vast proportion of the agricultural workforce to factories and cities was not merely a practical mater of great consequence; for the flock of the Church, the acute challenge was to achieve in an entirely new and foreign mode of economic life the good habits of the spiritual pilgrim.
But what was not a challenge was rationalizing economic growth and production in an intellectual fashion. That was old hat. Aristotle, Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, and the 17th-century School of Salamanca had collectively put together a corpus of economic wisdom at whose feet the best of the modern economists, including Adam Smith, would sit. It would have been rather impossible for Italy (home of Thomas), which bestrode the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, and which redefined the possibilities of global commerce, not to have developed and taken in a maximally developed economics.
In a pope whose origins are Northern Italian (Max Weber for all his faults always said that Northerners know economics) and who snuck into this world in glittering Buenos Aries before Peron, is surely in command of the Church’s long-term perspective on the great goods that the economy can bring.
The retired Benedict XVI wrote fascinating things in this tradition. Benedict reminded us of the analogy that capitalism is to the market as theory is to practice. This, however, was basically Karl Marx’s rendering, so problems must lurk. What Benedict strove to teach was that theory and practice themselves are shadows of an even more primary reality, namely truth and charity.
Truth is the theory, and charity and creation is the practice: the ways of God, and by extension, the goal of human life in all its organization. Creation is something we humans imitate pretty well when we get involved with economic growth. The final thing is to make every impulse one of charity. We should create out of practicality and joy and dole out our fruits liberally, indeed as we would make gifts to family members. (The best book on this subject is John Mueller’s Redeeming Economics.)
The vision Benedict set before us is wholly compatible with, and encouraging of, economic growth and achievement, indeed of the most scintillating kind such as the world at its best has been capable of in the industrial and technological ages. It also bids us to become more capacious in our generosity and for there to be less grounds for suspiciousness in business and commerce.
Practically, something that is going to have to go at some point is usury, i.e. monetary interest. Usury is a sin as age-old as they come, yet it seems to be no biggie today. As T.S. Eliot put it, “I seem to be a petty usurer in a world manipulated largely by big usurers.”
A humane economy (Wilhelm Röpke’s term) would be one where the lender would love to (literally love to) underwrite a project of another for the good of all involved, and require no more than simple repayment and the common enjoyment of any ensuing bounty. Obviously monetary degradation, that thing of recent times, would have to go, since all most interest strives to do today anyway is beat the currency’s devaluation.
So there is work to do. But one of those things is not begging off economic growth. That would defy the arc of economic progress (and the Christian apologia of it) begun and sustained in Italy for the first five hundred years of the second millennium and then carried forward in astounding fashion by the industrial revolution in places like Argentina.
This article first appeared in Forbes.
W styczniu 2020 roku Wielka Brytania formalnie opuściła Unię Europejską. Oczekiwane korzyści z brexitu, poza odzyskaniem suwerenności w zakresie kształtowania prawa i zewnętrznych relacji gospodarczych, jednak się nie zmaterializowały. Widoczny jest natomiast spadek wydajności i konkurencyjności brytyjskiej gospodarki, co wpływa także na kondycję rynku pracy.
