New CREDO newsletter

When the Catholic Research Economists Discussion Organization (CREDO) newsletter comes out (only twice a year), it's an occasion for celebration. Here's the latest, On The Margin Volume 2 Issue 2, Fall 2015, with a symposium on Laudato Si including:

• San Diego's Bishop McElroy, a poli-sci ph.d. (!),
• UCLA's Paco Buera, who does macro-style development (and unknowingly inspired my job market paper via Michael Carter's appreciation of his job market paper),
• Craig Gundersen, who researches food insecurity at U. of Illinois, 
• Mary Hirschfeld, the only dual ph.d. in econ and theology I know of, from Harvard and Notre Dame, respectively, and 
• Minnesota-trained applied microeconomist Jose-Miguel Sanchez. 

There's also a piece on the refugee crisis by Notre Dame labor economist Kirk Doran.

I hope to write more about these essays soon. For now, consider the passage from Laudato Si (paragraph 106) discussed by Hirschfeld more or less line-by-line:

“The basic problem goes even deeper: it is the way that humanity has taken up technology and its development according to an undifferentiated and one-dimensional paradigm. This paradigm exalts the concept of a subject who, using logical and rational procedures, progressively approaches and gains control over an external object. This subject makes every effort to establish the scientific and experimental method, which in itself is already a technique of possession, mastery and transformation. It is as if the subject were to find itself in the presence of something formless, completely open to manipulation. Men and women have constantly intervened in nature, but for a long time this meant being in tune with and respecting the possibilities offered by the things themselves. It was a matter of receiving what nature itself allowed, as if from its own hand. Now, by contrast, we are the ones to lay our hands on things, attempting to extract everything possible from them while frequently ignoring or forgetting the reality in front of us. Human beings and material objects no longer extend a friendly hand to one another; the relationship has become confrontational. This has made it easy to accept the idea of infinite or unlimited growth, which proves so attractive to economists, financiers and experts in technology.”

Her conclusion: "Economics has much of value to say about how incentives work, or how scarce resources can be well employed. This pope who does not fully appreciate what markets can do, could learn much from them. But on this deeper level, it is difficult to see how an economist could accept the pope’s critique without having to deeply rethink what is entailed in the deployment of the basic model that sees humans as subjects who maximize utility functions."