Economics and Catholic Social Teaching

Taken from the American Economics Association's website is the description of the JEL Classification Code A130:

The Relation of Economics to Social Values:

Covers studies about issues related to the intersection of economics and social values, including general issues involving ethics and morals.

Key Words:  Ethics, Moral Economics, Morality, Morals, Social Economics, Social Values

Social Economics is highlighted because that is the field of economics within which, hopefully, this blog will be considered.   Some may question the Catholic emphasis that provides a foundation to this blog.  There was a time when "Catholic Economics" was an active research field; in fact the Association for Social Economics was founded in 1941 as the Association of Catholic Economists.  The research agenda of the ACE attracted many from outside the Catholic Church and the name was subsequently changed to reflect the developing field of social economics.

Private conversations at the last few Allied Social Science Association meetings have indicated a desire of the part of a few members within the ASE to revisit the organization's Catholic roots.  While an admittedly small observation to support the larger claim of increasing interest is CST, in the last four years there have been three dissertations in economics and CST written, defended, and accepted at the University of Missouri - Kansas City, and a fourth is being developed.  A session in Catholic Social Teaching is being proposed for the meeting of the Missouri Valley Economics Association in October, 2011.  Conferences and workshops have been held to incorporate CST into the teaching of economics at Catholic universities.  This blog is intended to be but one of the many responses to that rising tide of interest in CST.

One last introductory word: Catholic Economics is not considered by the blog's founder as an alternative to free market capitalism or to Marxist thought.  In the words of Pope John Paul II:

The Church's social doctrine is not a "third way" between liberal capitalism and Marxist collectivism, nor even a possible alternative to other solutions less radically opposed to one another: rather, it constitutes a category of its own. Nor is it an ideology, but rather the accurate formulation of the results of a careful reflection on the complex realities of human existence, in society and in the international order, in the light of faith and of the Church's tradition. (Sollicitudo Rei Socialis, 41)

Catholic Economics is seen to be an economics built not upon the emperical postivism that has dominated the discipline since the 1930's.  It is, rather, an economics built upon a different ontological foundation, a foundation that probes further and asks more than what the economics profession typically is willing to allow.  There are elements of Institutional Thought, Post Keynesian Thought, Critical Realism, and much more.  It is a deviation for Classification Code A130, for it is not about the relation of economics to social values, it is about the impact of social values upon economics.