Beyond Pareto optima, efficiency and the “free market”

The author in this essay surrounds John Paul II with professional economists from the past and the present, such as Taussig, Keynes, Richard and Peggy Musgrave, and Stiglitz, all of whom have very similar reservations concerning the social beneficence of the “free market”. As with these professionals, John Paul II’s vision of the social economy embraces and transcends Pareto efficiency and optimality. Those who seize selectively on John Paul II’s acceptance in his 1991 encyclical Centesimus Annus of the market mechanism for its efficiency in allocating resources, and those who think that such a one as John Paul II without formal training in economics is a voice crying alone, Nitsch contends, have further reading and more thinking to do.