I hope you are all staying well. I wanted to give you all a New Year’s update about the society. We had an active year in 2021. A few updates:
- In January, we announced the formation of six committees to get more input and organizational structure to the society. We have tremendous leadership for the committees, a generous number of volunteers as members of the committees, and they have been quite productive (see below).
- We were officially admitted as members of the ASSA. Our first ASSA session last week was outstanding. It involved a panel of Maureen O’Hara, Ulrike Malmendier, Stijn Van Nieuwerburgh, and Borja Larrain, with discussion from Dominic Chai, SJ, of the Vatican’s Dicastery for the Promotion of Integral Human Development. They discussed “Finance and the Social Good”. Recordings are available until March for those who attended the meetings and will be made public on Vimeo in several months.
- In the fall, we launched several new offerings: a revamped website (thanks to the work of new webmaster, Luis Valenzuela); this bimonthly newsletter (thanks to the work of Illenin Kondo, Jessie Wang, and the rest of Outreach and Inclusion committee); and a mentoring program (thanks to the work of Peter Arcidiacono, Borja Lorraine, and the rest of the Mentoring committee).
- In October, we welcomed several new members to the Executive Board. Daniel Flores, Bishop of Brownsville, became our new Episcopal Moderator, and Eric Scorsone, Ulrike Malmendier, Michael Le Chevallier, Illenin Kondo also joined the Board. We mourned the passing of my dear friend, Thomas Levergood, who founded the Lumen Christi Institute and was a founding board member and instrumental in the founding of CREDO as well.
- Anticipated accomplishments in the coming year include (1) the launching of a new working paper series, entitled “Values, Economics, and Catholic Social Thought”, spearheaded by Quentin Wodon, and joint with Global Catholic Education Project. Jesus Fernandez-Villaverde, Bernhard Gunter, Quentin Wodon (of CREDO), John Buchman (of the Lumen Christi Institute), and Jo Marie Griesgraber (New Rules for Global Finance Coalition) are the editors, and (2) non-profit status, which will enable to raise money to fund our activities. Thanks to Michael Le Chevallier and Eric Scorsone for pushing this forward.
- I’d also like to bring attention to a series of interviews of Catholic economists about economist as a vocation. It is part of a longer interview series by and Global Catholic Education, and the economist interviews are jointly sponsored by CREDO. You can read them here (the economists interviews are lower on the page, search “CREDO”).
- We have other hopes for the coming year that will require volunteers and perhaps some funding. These include:
- We plan to put together resources for teaching that will be made available to members. We need a volunteer of someone tech savvy enough to put this together to be useful, secure, and only accessible to members. We will then ask for people to submit materials.
- We are hoping to put together a series of short videos that will educate the broader Church on important topics of economics and/or Catholic social thought. We’ll need people willing to organize and help produce these short clips. We’d like this to be a high-quality production, so this will require some funding.
Lastly, I want to encourage people to invite friends to join. Membership is nearing 700 people, which is quite impressive, but it is still a tiny fraction of the number of research economists and the potential pool. (For example, RePEC has over 60,000 registered authors, at least 5% of whom are likely Catholic.) We added 89 new members in 2021, which is a new high. Generally, however, the number of new members is relatively stable (between 70 and 90 new members a year). This is stable even as the total membership continues to grow. The most likely diffusion process that I can think of to explain this is that older members have already asked all the Catholic friends in the profession they know, and newer members ask their friends. This puts the onus on newer members to invite any Catholic friends they may know in order for the society to continue growth. We continue to look for new ways to engage the Church and grow the society internationally and among underrepresented groups, so if you have ideas please share them, and even better if you have initiative.
God bless you all in the New Year.
Joe
