by Caitlin Kenney

Tyler Cowen of Marginal Revolution has an interesting and critical take on the pope's encyclical in today's Wall Street Journal (sub req.'d). Pope Benedict XVI called on financiers this week to "rediscover the genuinely ethical foundation of their activity."

Cowen responds:

Most of the encyclical, appropriately, expresses a desire for ethical conduct. The importance of ethics for civilization is obvious, but of course good ethics, consistently applied, are hard to come by. People are very good at ethical and psychological compartmentalization, and so it is possible for them to offer the church nominal authority over the ethical realm while continuing their dubious economic behavior.

It should be said that, despite moments of coherence, the encyclical is a sprawling mess that reads as if it was written by a bureaucracy that felt it had to mention everyone's concern. What does it mean to write: "The transition inherent in the process of globalization presents great difficulties and dangers that can only be overcome if we are able to appropriate the underlying anthropological and ethical spirit that drives globalization towards the humanizing goal of solidarity"? It sounds as if somebody has read Hegel. It's good that the document repeatedly reminds us that globalization doesn't have to be bad. But what exactly do we do with that knowledge?

 

Many of the encyclical's generalizations tend to favor the point of view of the left. For instance, the document refers repeatedly to growing inequalities, but in fact, at the global level, inequality has been falling, most of all because of the continuing economic growth of China and India.

BONUS: The Pope Is Not "Left-Wing" About Globalization