Plenty of tributes have poured in over the past three weeks celebrating the papacy of Pope Francis who passed away on 21st April. The tributes have focused on his progressive thinking about inclusivity, notably LGBTQ among others. This piece in the Business Standard focuses on his critique of the modern economy for having created inequality, excessive consumerism and related issues around climate change.
“In a world where economics is dominated by models, markets, and metrics, Francis insisted on a different standard: A moral one.
Throughout his papacy, Francis consistently challenged the assumptions of today’s prevailing economic orthodoxy. In his 2013 exhortation Evangelii Gaudium (“The Joy of the Gospel”), he issued a stinging rebuke of what he called “an economy of exclusion and inequality” — a system that, as he put it, “kills.”
Unlike many critics of capitalism, however, Francis did not call for its outright rejection. He adopted a more pragmatic approach, urging economic thinkers to ask deeper, more fundamental questions: What sort of markets do we want? Who should govern them, and to what end? His was a call to rethink not just our economic policies, but also the priorities that shape them.
In his 2015 encyclical Laudato Si’ (“Praise Be to You”), Francis went further, integrating ecological and economic critiques into a unified moral vision. Climate degradation, he argued, is not merely a “negative externality” to be managed; it is the inevitable outcome of an economy that commodifies nature and marginalises the poor. Viewed through this lens, economics and ecology are not separate academic fields but intertwined arenas of moral responsibility. “The earth herself,” he wrote, “is among the most abandoned and maltreated of our poor.”
…Francis’s views stood in stark contrast to the neoclassical assumptions that have long dominated economic policymaking. Neoclassical economics treats individuals as isolated utility maximisers, markets as largely self-correcting, and growth as an unalloyed good. Poverty, inequality, and environmental damage are seen, if at all, as technical problems at the margins of an otherwise efficient system.”
The author highlights that Francis’ views are not necessarily in contrast to what the forefathers of economics professed:
“Even Adam Smith, widely regarded as the father of free markets, would have found echoes of his thinking in Francis’s project. In his 1759 book The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Smith warned that economic life must be grounded in sympathy, justice, and norms of civic trust. The quest for a moral economy also animates the work of scholars like economist Samuel Bowles, who argues that well-designed incentives and institutions can encourage pro-social behaviour.”
But somewhere down the line modern economists seem to have forgotten that:
“Some economists bristle at this intrusion, insisting that the strength of economics lies in its value neutrality and ability to provide a rational — rather than sentimental — basis for hard choices. But that stance itself reflects a choice to protect the status quo rather than question it. Francis’s intervention revealed that the claim to neutrality is, in fact, a form of moral abdication.
At a time when neoclassical models increasingly struggle to explain or contain the crises facing humanity — rampant inequality, climate breakdown, political instability, and the rise of populism — Francis’s message feels especially urgent. It speaks directly to the spiritual ailments at the heart of our failing economies. While he did not present an alternative model in spreadsheets or regression tables (the kind of economic language that often alienates ordinary people), he offered something more intuitive: The capacity for moral imagination.
Most importantly, Francis was not an enemy of economics. He was its custodian, reminding its practitioners of their forgotten calling: To serve the common good. Economists would do well to heed his message. If a 2,000-year-old institution like the Catholic Church can change, so can an economic consensus that has prevailed for only a few decades.”
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