 It's my pleasure this afternoon to introduce the Lew Church Memorial Lecture. The Mises Institute is proud to present the Lew Church Memorial Lecture in Religion and Economics. This annual lecture is made possible by the Lew Church Educational Foundation whose chairman is Dr. Robert D. Hemholt. The lecture seeks to honor the late Lew Church, a Florida businessman and advocate of liberty, and also the ideas to which he was dedicated his whole life. Starting out as a swimming pool cleaner, Mr. Church eventually established successful businesses in swimming pool construction and the restaurant and travel industries. Through it all, he dedicated himself to the values of the free market, private property, free association, entrepreneurship and liberty, realizing that big government threatened not only the free enterprise system, but all that is good about America. Our 2015 Lew Church Memorial Lecture is John Mueller, who I will now say a few words about. Mr. Mueller is the Lerman Institute Fellow in Economics and Director of Economics and Ethics Program at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. Mr. Mueller specializes in the relation of modern economic theory to its Judeo-Christian and Greco-Roman origins. Its practical application to personal family and political economy and the interaction of economics, philosophical worldviews and religious faith. He is the author of Redeeming Economics Rediscovering the Missing Element. As a former president of LBMC, a firm in Washington DC, Mr. Mueller has more than 35 years experience in economic and financial market forecasting and economic policy analysis. He has advised many American and foreign policy makers on monetary policy and exchange rates, policies for reducing unemployment and income tax, welfare and social security reform. From 1979 through 1988, Mr. Mueller was economist and speechwriter to then Congressman Jack Kemp, mostly as economic counsel to the House Republican Conference, of which Kemp was the chairman. In that capacity, he drafted bills originating some key features of President Ronald Reagan's tax cuts of 1981 and tax reform act of 1986 and also of Kemp's 1988 presidential campaign. Mr. Mueller is a graduate of Haverford College in Pennsylvania, so please help me welcome John Mueller. It was a pleasure to be here. I'm honored though I must admit also pleasantly surprised to be invited to deliver the Blue Church Lecture in Religion and Economics at the 2015 Austrian Economics Research Conference. My first introduction to Austrian economics came when I borrowed the well-thumbed copy of Ludwig von Mises' human action from my then my boss, then Congressman Jack Kemp, for whom, as Joe mentioned, for my work as speechwriter and congressional staff economist before and during both President Reagan's administrations. While I have a high regard for what Austrian economics gets right, that other economic schools do not, I consider myself a neoscolastic economist, a term which I will try to explain. Today, I would like to discuss the significance of what my book's subtitle calls the missing element in modern economics. To address this central issue, I'll begin with a question. I won't ask for a show of hands, only that you think of the answer. Did you celebrate the most recent Christmas or holiday season by giving gifts? According to a recent national survey conducted by the Pew Forum, nine in ten Americans say they celebrate Christmas and three-quarters say they believe in the virgin birth of Jesus. But only about half see Christmas mostly as a religious holiday, while one third viewed as more a cultural holiday. Virtually all Christians, 96 percent, celebrate Christmas and two-thirds see it as a religious holiday. In addition, fully eight in ten non-Christians in America also celebrate Christmas, but most view it as a cultural holiday rather than a religious occasion. The Pew Forum survey summary continues by saying the way Americans celebrate Christmas present is rooted in Christmas's past. Fully 86 percent of U.S. adults say they intend to gather with family and friends on Christmas this year, and an identical number say they plan to buy gifts for family and friends. Roughly nine in ten adults say these activities were part of their holiday celebrations when they were growing up. Now my working hypothesis is that economists in general, including those adhering to the Austrian school, behave pretty much the same as other Americans, both in their attitudes and, more importantly, in their behavior. But rather than merely assuming this, assuming that I'm right, I have compiled an anonymous questionnaire drawn from the Pew Forum Christmas survey. I should emphasize it has no official relation or sanction from the Mises Institute, but I would be very grateful if you would fill it out and return it to me to confirm or contradict by working assumption. So subject to contradiction by this mini survey, I consider it likely that though scholars adhering to the Austrian school may also be inclined to view Christmas as a cultural rather than a religious holiday, nevertheless, whatever their reasoning, they remain just as likely as other Americans to celebrate Christmas by giving gifts. But if so, this behavior creates an explanatory problem because no school of modern economics, including the Austrian school, has an adequate theory of personal gifts. How did this missing element go missing? From the mid-19th to the mid-20th centuries, even specialists in the history of economics view their subject much like Saul Steinberg's view of the world from Ninth Avenue, the famous poster which depicts Manhattan's 9th and 10th avenues in exquisite detail right down to the fire hydrants, while across the Hudson River, the rest of the world, consists of vast blank areas with labels like Jersey or Japan. For years, any historical textbook would start with Adam Smith, while in the hazy middle distance were the 18th century physiocrats and mercantilists. Moreover, economics seemed a very cozy British affair and it was presented very much like a biblical genealogy. Adam Smith begat David Ricardo, who begat John Stuart Mill, who begat Alfred Marshall, who begat Alfred Pigou, who begat John Maynard Keynes, whom Keynes and economists consider the pinnacle of economics. But this view began to change radically in 1954, when Joseph Schumpeter's history of economic analysis was published. Schumpeter showed that it was not until 1848, when John Stuart Mill's principles of political economy was published, that as Schumpeter put it, Adam Smith, in his words, was invested with this insignia of founder, which none of his contemporaries would have thought of bestowing on him, and earlier economists moved into the role of precursors, in whom it was just wonderful to discover what nevertheless remained Smith's ideas. Schumpeter concluded, the fact is that the wealth of nations does not contain a single analytic idea, principle or method, that was entirely new in 1776. To their credit, Austrian school scholars stand in less need of such remedial history. Thanks, for example, to the work of Murray Rothbard, who traced the development of Austrian economic theory back through the scholastic thinkers, particularly the late scholastic school of Salamanca. Despite this valuable achievement, it is still necessary to correct Rothbard in one key aspect when he summarizes, and I quote, in recent decades, the revisionist scholars have clearly altered our knowledge of the prehistory of the Austrian school of economics. We see emerging a long and mighty tradition of proto-Austrian scholastic economics founded on Aristotle, continuing through the Middle Ages, and the later Italian and Spanish scholastics, and then influencing the French and Italian economists before and up till the days of Adam Smith. Now, what is objectionable is the term proto-Austrian scholastic economics? Since it reads history, which runs only forward in the wrong direction by choosing the Austrian school as the summit to which economics was always headed. Joseph Schumpeter similarly considered the scholastics to be proto-Ovalrassians, and I must admit that I also used to share such weak histories of economics, but I had to abandon them about 15 years ago when I realized that they failed to wrap up what you might call all the leftovers. As Alex Chaffin has noted in his excellent book, Faith and Liberty, personal gifts and distributive justice were central to scholastic economic theory, both early and late, that they are not taught exception by claiming them to be disguised exchange in any neoclassical school, including the Austrian school. So to have it in the right direction, we must begin with an important but widely overlooked fact. There have been three phases, so far in the history of economics, and the logical and mathematical structures of scholastic, classical, and today's neoclassical economics differ fundamentally. Most students and even professors of economics are unaware of this fact because starting in 1972 at the University of Chicago, George J. Stigler succeeded in the national campaign. He had started in 1954, the year that Schumpeter's book was published, to abolish the requirement that students of economics master its history before being granted a decree. This is why all of us, including or especially economists, require a brief remedial history of economics. So let me ask a another simple question. What are the economics about? Well, I think it describes from one angle what we do all day. As Jesus once noted, and I interpret this as an astute empirical observation, not divine revelation, since the days of Noah and Lot, we humans have been doing, and until the end of the world, presumably we'll be doing, four kinds of things. And he gave these examples, planting and building, buying and selling, marrying and being given in marriage, and eating and drinking. In other words, we produce, that's the planting and building, we exchange, that's the buying and selling, we give, that's the marrying and being given in marriage, and we use, that's the eating and drinking, our human and non-human goods. That's the usual order in which we act, producing, exchanging, distributing, and consuming. But as Augustine was first explained, in our planning, we follow a different order. First we choose for whom we intend to provide, which we will express by the distribution of our goods among them. Next we choose what to provide, to express our love for those persons, and finally we choose how to provide those means, which is done through production, almost always, and usually exchange. So we might say that economics is essentially a theory of providence. It describes how we provide for ourselves and the other persons we love, using scarce means that have alternate uses. But as we'll see, economics is also concerned alternative theories of divine providence, to which contradict both reason and at least Christian faith. Scholastic economics might be called AAA economics, because it began in the mid-13th century when Aquinas first integrated these four elements, production, exchange, distribution, and consumption, all drawn from Aristotle and Augustine, to describe personal, domestic, and political economy within scholastic natural law. And all were normatively measured by the two great commandments. You should love God with all your heart, and you should love your neighbor as yourself. The scholastic economic system is comprehensive, logically complete, can be stated mathematically, and suitably updated is empirically verifiable. The scholastic outline was taught at the highest university level for more than five centuries by Catholics and after the reformation, Protestants alike. Adam Smith himself was taught by his teacher, Francis Hutchison, from Samuel Pufendorf's compendium on the duty of man and citizen, according to natural law, which, as with Aquinas and the earlier scholastics, contains all four basic elements of economic theory, organized at the levels of personal, domestic, and political economy, and integrating normative with descriptive or positive theory by the two great commandments. The fact that Pufendorf was a Lutheran who wrote a critical history of the Catholic Church and that his theories were taught at the generally Calvinist University of Glasgow demonstrates that the scholastic outline of economic theory was broadly known and accepted by both Catholics and Protestants up until Adam Smith. Pufendorf was also widely read in the American colonies and recommended, for example, by Alexander Hamilton, who penned two-thirds of the Federalist Papers and who, as our first Treasury Secretary under George Washington, would reject Smith's specific economic advice to the United States in the wealth of nations. Classical economics began when Adam Smith drastically simplified the theory by cutting the four scholastic elements to two, trying to explain specialized productions, which he poetically but inaccurately called division of labor, with the elements of production and exchange alone. Smith and his classical followers, like David Ricardo, undoubtedly did advance those two elements. But Smith also dropped Augustine's theory of utility, which is necessary to describe consumption, and he replaced Augustine's theory of personal distribution, that is, gifts and their opposite crimes, as well as replacing Aristotle's theory of domestic and political distributive justice with the mere, often false assumption, that every individual, as he put it, intends only his own gain, as Smith put it in his famous invisible hand passage in the wealth of nations. In his earlier theory of moral sentiments, Smith had already banished benevolence and beneficence from rational economic theory to emotional psychology. This is how classical economics began with only two of the four elements. Today's new classical economics began in the 1870s, when three economists dissatisfied with the failure of the classical predictions, William Stanley Jevons in England, Carl Manger in Austria, and Leon Valras in Switzerland, independently but almost simultaneously reinvented Augustine's theory of utility, starting its reintegration with the theories of production and exchange. They abandoned Smith's revised outline mostly for three related reasons. Without the theory of utility, classical economists were unable to answer some important questions. They made predictions about others that turned out to be spectacularly wrong, and Smith's so-called labor theory of value directly fostered Carl Marx's Disastery-Ironius Economic Analysis. Although schools of neoclassical economics have since multiplied, all are derived from these three. Personal gifts and distributive justice were central to scholastic economic theory, both early and late, as I mentioned. Yet they are not taught in any neoclassical school, except by claiming them to be disguised forms of consumption production or exchanges. In my book, I note that neosclassical economics is starting, and I predict that it will continue to revolutionize economics once again in coming decades by replacing its lost cornerstone, the theory of distribution, simply because, as with the theory of utility, including this essential element, does a far better job of empirical description. To go a bit deeper, let me explain the structure of scholastic economics in more detail before considering the theories and underlying philosophies of classical and neoclassical economics. To explain the two great commandments, Augustine had started from Aristotle's definition of love that is willing some good to some person, but he drew an implication that Aristotle had not, namely every person always acts for the sake of some person or persons. For example, when I say I love vanilla ice cream, what I really mean is I love myself and I use or consume the vanilla ice cream to express that love and, in preference, say to strawberry ice cream or Brussels sprouts, which reflect my separate scale of preference according to utility. Augustine also introduced the important distinction between what he called private goods, like bread, which inherently only one person at a time can consume, and public goods, like a performance in an ancient amphitheater, a modern radio or television broadcast, national defense enforcement of justice, or even this lecture, which, at least within certain limits, many people can simultaneously enjoy because they are not, in Augustine's words, diminished by being insured. That is, if the acoustics and technology are good enough, the fact that the people in the front row can hear what I'm saying does not diminish from the ability of the people in the back row to hear the same message. So in other words, Augustine's crucial insight is that we humans always act on not just one, but two scales of value or preference, love and, well, one for person's ends and the other for other things as means, the scales of personal love and utility, respectively. Moreover, we express our inner preferences for persons with two kinds of external act. Since man is a social creature, Augustine noted, as he put it, human society is knit together by transactions of giving and receiving, end of quotation. But these outwardly similar transactions may be of two essentially different kinds, sale or gift. Generally speaking, we give our wealth without compensation to people we particularly love and we sell it to people that we don't in order to provide for those we do love. For example, if Joe Salerno, on behalf of the Lou Church Foundation and the Mises Institute, pays me an honorarium to present this lecture, it's because our ends disagree. I esteem Joe and his family, but I want to provide for my family, not his, and just as he wants to provide for his family, not mine. So the ends differ, but the means overlap. Since it's always possible to avoid depriving others of their own goods, this is the minimum of love expressed as benevolence or good will and the measure of what Aristotle called justice in exchange. But our positive self-love is expressed by the utility of the goods we provide ourselves, like my vanilla ice cream, and our positive love of others is expressed with beneficence, doing good or gifts. Conversely, hate or malevolence, ill will is expressed by the opposite of a gift, maleficence or crime. The image on the cover of my book is Gustav Dure's engraving, Arrival of the Good Samaritan at the Inn. I chose it because transcending nationality and religion, the parable illustrates all the possible economic transactions we can have with our fellow man, as described by Augustine. The robbers beating a man and leaving him for dead illustrate crime. The priests and the Levite who pass them by illustrate indifference. The innkeepers bargain with the Samaritan, illustrates justice in exchange, and finally the Samaritans, devotion of time and money, to restore the beaten man to life illustrates a gift, so crime, indifference, just exchange, and gift. This is the range of possible transactions. The social analog to personal gifts is what Aristotle called distributive justice, which amounts to a collective gift. It's the formula that social communities like a family or political community under a single government, necessarily used to distribute their common, that is jointly owned, goods. Both a personal gift and distributive justice are kind of transfer payment. Both are determined by the geometric proportion that matches distributive shares with the relative significance of the person's sharing in the distribution, and both are practically limited by the fact of scarcity. These possible transactions are traced by the curve that I have labeled Augustine's personal distribution function, which traces the relationship between persons and things. This is the missing element. The bottom scale represents the shares of our own wealth, and the vertical scale represents the number of people among whom we share it for purposes of his illustration. I assume that we love others equally, but in fact we can and do love other people unequally. Before my wife and I married, our individual behavior approximated the point that modern economics assumes for everyone at which a person consumes all the goods purchased with that income. After I got married and before our children were born and while they were young, I earned nearly all of our family's income, and assuming we shared equally, it meant that I was loving two people equally with myself. But then we had three children and so our income had to be divided first three and then four and then five ways. The more people among whom we share our scarce resources, the less we can use ourselves. In the extreme, it is literally the case that no one has greater love than to lay down on his life for his friends. True, it is something that can be done only once, yet it is done almost every day, for example, in Iraq or Afghanistan when a soldier hurls him or self on an explosive device to save the lives of colleagues. Now that our kids are grown and I retired from economic and financial forecasting, my wife's and my income are more equal again. But at every stage, no matter where the income came from, my wife and I faced the same choice. How much money would we devote to each person's needs? The kids play clothes, replacing my suit or my wife's dress or paying for tuition. This figuring out of the family and judgment budget is what Aristotle meant by domestic distributive justice, which as I said, amounts to a kind of joint gift. Likewise, what Congress is arguing about in setting the federal budget is a similar exercise in political distributive justice. In all cases, the question is, from whom does the money come and to whom does it go? Now by good fortune, good fortune for me anyway, a bright young PhD candidate named Michael Spindore Watson is presenting a paper tomorrow at a session two on the history of economics titled Mueller and Mises, Integrating the Gift and Final Distribution within Proxiology. I met Michael a couple of years ago in Krakow when he participated in what's called the Terzio Millennial Seminar, a two-week summer institute founded by George Weigel, Father Richard Newhouse, Michael Novak, and Father Maciej Zemba, a protege of Karol Wojtywa, who became John Paul II. Each year the TMS produces about three dozen graduate school-age participants from North America, Poland, and Eastern Europe, some 800 so far. For the past several years, I've been one of the lecturers, having succeeded Michael Novak. When I met Michael Watson, because of his interest in the Austrian school, I challenged him to show me where there is within it any theory of distribution properly so-called personal gifts and their opposite crimes, as well as the theory of what Aristotle called distributive justice. Without prejudging to moral session, including Michael's attempt to show how a theory of gifts might be constructed within proxyology, his combing of the Austrian school seems to confirm that I have identified a real gap in economic theory. He summarizes, I concede that Austrian literature neglects the gift and distributive economy, but are you that Ludwig von Mises gave us the concepts required to develop a theory of the gift, autistic exchange from which I develop a theory of the gift, so I invite those who are interested to come to the session tomorrow. Perhaps an additional word of explanation is needed about some of the finer differences among the economic schools. Earlier I showed a simplified version of the differences among the different schools of economics, but a more nuanced classification indicates that Mises is widely interpreted at least, as having dispensed with the theory of equilibrium. The basic idea is that equilibrium implies an equality of values exchanged, when in fact each party in an exchange engages in an exchange because he believes that he will gain, so thus exchange would seem to constitute an inequality. I think that Philip Wicksteed adequately clarified this problem by carefully analyzing the dynamic nature of exchange. As Wicksteed noted, the demand for any exchangeable economic good comprises not only the potential consumers, but also the producers of that good. For example, let's suppose that a family lives in a dairy farm and also likes to drink milk. To earn its living, the family sets out deliberately to produce far more milk than it could possibly consume for its own use on the expectation that it will be able to sell the surplus to others for whom milk stands higher in the scale preferences than on the scale of the producing family. Thus both the quantity of the milk that the dairy farm family sells and the quantity that it keeps for its own use are a single continuous function of the marginal significance of milk to that family relative to the market price. The process by which all the parties adjust their holdings of certain goods through exchange in light of prevailing market prices is what makes the market as a whole tend towards equilibrium, a state in which everyone in the community who owns any of the desired and exchangeable goods comes to share exactly the same relative preference. If that point wherever reached, exchange would cease because no one could further improve his position by exchanging goods that he values less at the prevailing market price for the goods that he values more. But because most human needs are dynamic, that is however sated we become by eating and drinking, everyone gets hungry and thirsty again. Sooner or later, most markets never reach that point but are always tending toward it. Let me switch hats for a moment. I retired in January from 26 years of quenching the moment to the numbers for an economic and financial market forecasting from LBMC LLC. Basically, after failing to persuade U.S. economic policy makers to reform monetary and fiscal policy, four of us started a business essentially to predict the market consequences of those mistakes as they continued. So what caused the great recession? The worldwide real estate and commodity boom and bust was caused, I believe, by the dollar's role as the world's chief official reserve currency. The great French economist Jacques Rouef was the first economist to describe the drawbacks of John Maynard Keynes' plan to use one nation's domestic currency, like the U.S. dollar, as an international reserve asset instead of gold. Predicting episodes of commodity price and inflation using what I've called the world dollar base has been my bread and butter until I retired from forecasting. But I have also noted similar peculiarities when monetary authorities issuing currencies, not typically used as fiscal reserves, borrow from other central banks. That happened, for example, in the European Monetary System in 1992, in Mexico in 1996, and in Israel several times since the Second World War. The same was also true of Argentina's 2001 Peso crisis, which scarred a generation of Argentines, including then-Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio, who is now Pope Francis. Although I won't describe it in detail, it deserves. The chart shows that Argentina aired by trying to peg its Peso to the U.S. dollar, not by acquiring, but rather by borrowing, official dollar reserves, and using the proceeds to finance domestic lending, mostly to the government. Therefore, as a policy matter, I repeat a proposal which Lewis Lerman and I have made for the past few decades. All countries seeking to end the boom and bust cycle should join in supporting reform of the international monetary system, which would pay all outstanding dollar and other official reserve currencies, and restore prompt settlement of payments in gold, a system that worked well for hundreds of years, and can do so again. So both the Great Recession of 2007 to 2009 and the Argentine Peso collapse were caused by bad economic policy, which means bad economic policy makers, and such crises will continue until policy makers cure what the great French economist Jacques Rueff called the monetary sin of the West, this term for the reserve currency. This brings me to my final set of considerations. How should we understand the relationship between scholastic economics and Catholic social thought? In answering this question, I think it's helpful to distinguish the history of economics, that is the economic theory used by economic thinkers to describe any economic activity, to distinguish it from economic history, that is how the economic aspect of society develops. For example, the progressive transition in the United States, in fact in most other countries, since its founding, from agriculture to industry to services. Roughly speaking, scholastic economic theory is the analytical toolkit that the popes have used to discuss the new pastoral challenges of economic history as it unfolds. I use as a proxy for economic history the per capita income shown here in the U.S., Russia, Latin America, Western Europe, China, India, Africa, and the world. And I insert the AAAs, Aristotle, Augustine and Aquinas, and other economic thinkers, including the neoclassical theorists, where they belong in this timeline. Catholic social thought is relatively recent. It may seem that all encyclicals on economics are abstract, but in fact they're always tied to an analysis of some concrete historical event. The first encyclical of the Church's modern social thought in 1891 was called Ray Noirum, literally of New Things, in which Pope Leo XIII dealt with the new social and political challenges raised by industrialization. While affirming the right of private property and predicting the failure of communism, he insisted on the dignity and rights of workers and the need to protect the weakest by government intervention, if necessary. Several subsequent encyclicals further developed and applied this analysis as conditions changed. In the 1960s, after the decolonization of Africa, Asia, and Central and South America following the Second World War, the horizons of the Church's social thought widened to embrace the emerging so-called Third World. Moved by the poverty he witnessed on his travels, Pope Paul VI argued in Populum Progresio, the development of peoples, that the social question has become worldwide. I suggest two simple changes regarding the teaching of economics. First, that every university economics department restore the previous requirement that to get a degree in economics you have to have mastered its history. No matter how badly history of economics was taught, no competent textbook now begins any later than Aristotle or excludes the scholastics. Separately, I have suggested to American Catholic bishops and educators that every Catholic educational institution at every level re-familiarize itself with scholastic economics. The teaching of economics is in a story state among Catholic colleges because most simply copied the deliberate amnesia of secular economics departments. I predict that the first change that is restoring the history of thought requirement would go a long way towards curing what's wrong with secular economics today. And then the second would make Catholic economists competitive or more competitive and remove Catholic social doctrine from the sidelines and place it at the center of national and international debate. How am I doing on time? Okay, good, great. Though it seems to be a minefield, I don't see how I can avoid commenting on Pope Francis's views on economics. Last year, Judge Napolitano did a little over this lecture and he opened by remarking that in, he's Catholic, also remarking that he had received in confession a penance of five rosaries which, since each rosary contains more than a hundred separate prayers, is unusually severe. My typical penance is a kiss from my wife who usually figures in whatever malfeasances I have. The judge explained that his offense was wishing that Pope Francis be delivered speedily to heaven. Pope Francis has not yet issued a social and cyclical, though he has addressed economic subjects, especially in his apostolic exhortation, Evangelii Garium, the joy of the gospel, in which he argued that inequality is the root of all social ills. Pope Francis, I think, is first of all a pastor and a good one, but I consider it possible that he will never publish a social and cyclical. The main reason begins not with Jorge Bergoglio as pope or as priest, but rather with Jose Bergoglio, the man. The National Catholic newspaper, our Sunday visitor, noted recently that, in his words, he is and always will be simply himself. The truth is that Pope Francis is simply 78-year-old Jorge Bergoglio. As he said in an interview with the Argentine newspaper La Nación in December, upon his election he told himself, Jorge don't change because the change at your age would make a fool of yourself. There seems to be a little disagreement about Jorge Bergoglio's Myers-Briggs personality type. Pope Francis is an ESFJ that is an extrovert. As he put it, I cannot live without people, I need to live my life with others, an extrovert who masters the details about people, also an F, a feeler rather than a thinker, and a J that has someone who is decisive. In biblical terms, rather than a contemplative like Mary of Bethany in the Gospels, Pope Francis is like Mary's sister Martha, something of bossy boots who applied guilt and shame to Jesus himself. According to the evangelist Luke, Martha was distracted with much suing and she went to him, that is to Jesus, and said, Lord do you not care that my sister has left me to serve alone? Tell her to help me. The irony, says a well-placed Jesuit at the Vatican, quoted by Austin Ivory in his biography The Great Reformer, the irony is that this Pope, great agent of decentralization in the church, is personally the most centralized Pope since past the ninth, lived from 1792 to 1878. Everything has to cross his desk. Pope Francis is not unreflective about his personality tendencies, particularly acting without adequate deliberation and without adequate consultation. As he told one interviewer, this is a quotation, the first thing that comes to my mind if I have to make a decision is usually the wrong thing. I have to wait and assess looking deep into myself, taking the necessary time. He similarly, the Pope similarly remarked that while he was the head of the Argentine Jesuits, as he put it, I did not always do the necessary consultation. My authoritarian and quick manner of making decisions led me to have a serious problem. Pope Francis further calls his hyperactivity in trying to control every situation, playing Tarzan, saying to myself look how many things I can do. A comparison of Pope Benedict XVI, Easter card from a few years ago with Pope Francis from this year, suggests that Pope Francis' mental identification with both Christ and Tarzan is not entirely fanciful. However, fideism and introspection alone are insufficient bases for reflection on either economics or Catholic social doctrine. Pope Benedict's immediate press assessor, John Paul II, memorably wrote, faith and reason are like two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of truth. And God has placed in the human heart a desire to know the truth, in a word, to know himself, so that by knowing and loving God, men and women may also come to the form of truth about themselves. Pope Francis describes himself as an anti-rationalist. As a result, while he was strong on moral theology, that is, revealed theology, I think it's fair to say that he's weak on moral philosophy. To follow John Paul II's metaphor, it is simply not possible to fly with only one wing, except perhaps in circles. As Wilhelm Rupke observes in his great book, A Human Economy, economically ignorant moralism is as objectionable as moralicalist economism. Ethics and economics are two equally difficult subjects, and while the former needs discerning an expert reason, the latter cannot do without human values. While Pope Francis' excreation of morally callous economism is often justified, he has also occasionally fallen into economically ignorant moralism. Yet his main point, I think, is a good one. He says, the church's ministers must be merciful, take responsibility for the people, and accompany them like the good Samaritan, who washes, cleans and raises up his neighbor. This is pure gospel, he says. One must make allowances for the fact that Pope Francis is not an economist. He says in Evangelii Gaudium that business conducted for the common good is a noble vocation. And the chart of per capita income by country and region strikingly illustrates the stark difference in living standards between the United States and the European Union, and those whom Pope Francis calls the marginalized. This is a logarithmic scale so that difference between each of those lines is a tenfold difference in income. So in conclusion, I'm afraid that I've covered a lot of ground. I hope to have explained the significance of the fact that the missing element is still missing in modern economics. I have suggested the monetary flaw that caused the Great Recession, as well as the 2001 peso crisis. I hope also to have shed some light on the mutual and incomprehension of Pope Francis and economists of nearly all schools. The missing element is necessary to explain our interpersonal relations of love and hate, which are expressed by either a gift or the opposite of a gift, which is a crime. This missing element is also necessary to understand and explain Catholic social doctrine. And finally, I hope my explication of the parable of the good Samaritan may shed some light on the practical implications of what someone inspired by Pope Francis had called a Samaritan church. So thank you.