CREDO Economists Headline Lumen Christi Conference

The 6th Annual Lumen Christi Conference on Economics and Catholic Social Thought provoked a thoughtful discussion on conceptions of the human person within economics and theology, and CREDO members played an instrumental role in the conference. CREDO’s own Mary Hirschfeld (Villanova) gave the keynote address at the conference on April 1 at the University of Chicago, and she was joined by fellow CREDO member Jesus Fernandez-Villaverde (Penn), as well as Francis Cardinal George of Chicago, economist Rachel Kranton (Duke), and philosopher Russell Hittinger (Tulsa).

Cardinal George, in his last conference as acting Archbishop of Chicago, opened the event by emphasizing the importance of conversation between economists and bishops. He noted that past conversations were often difficult because of different anthropologies. …

Fairness in the 21st Century

After the score of reviews already written about Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century over the last few months, it is futile to rehearse the same arguments about the economics of the book yet one more time. Suffice it to refer the reader to the reviews of Debraj Ray, Larry Summers, or Per Krusell and Tony Smith. However, the readers of this newsletter may find of some interest to reflect not on the book itself, but on the reasons of its success and why those reasons point out to the challenges that Catholic economists need to address to help building a fair society in the twenty-first century. …