Achieving the CST Vision under Conditions of Scarcity

One of the core lessons of economics is that we live in a world of scarce resources. The tools of economics, in many respects, thus are designed to help us make the best possible choices as to how to allocate those resources among competing claims. When we turn to the large social issues and public policy questions to which CST addresses itself, however, we frequently fail to recognize that tough choices about resource allocation must be made. As Bjorn Lomborg observed in a WSJ ($) op-ed today:

Strangely, this basic concept has been almost absent in debate about one of the most important choices the world makes: how we spend money designed to improve living standards around the globe. This money is most obvious in overseas development and aid spending, but is also achieved through trade policies, the funding of research into diseases, investment in environmental protection, peacekeeping missions and maintaining the U.N. apparatus. The cash has often tended to follow the public's attention from disaster to catastrophe -- indeed, the "cause of the hour" changes as fast as the media can set up cameras in another hotspot. Today's fears about climate change are yesterday's concerns about overpopulation, and tomorrow's outcry for a response to famine. ...

In an ideal world, we would have the money and the political capital to do everything. We would be able to end malnutrition, illiteracy and refugee problems, halt climate change, stop global conflicts, and wipe out corruption. But we live in the real world, where we must focus our efforts to achieve even some of these things. We have a stark choice. We can continue to prioritize without acknowledging that we are doing it. Or, we can work out a rational framework for our spending that makes some more sense.

Towards that end Lomborg and the Economist have gathered 9 world-class economists to formulate the so-called Copenhagen Consensus. (The Economist's coverage of the project is indexed here.)

It is an interesting and worthwhile project. Yet, I am somewhat skeptical of asking economists to formulate priorities, as opposed to merely asking them to advise policymakers. One is reminded, for example, of Harry Truman's despreate cry for "a one-handed economist!"

More to the point, perhaps, one is reminded that the tools of economics are far better suited for determining whether a particular state of affairs is allocatively efficient than for deciding whether such a state achieves other important values cherished by CST, such as distributional justice, virtue, and the protection of all life. Granted, as Judge Richard Posner continues to assert, "[t]he great power of wealth maximization, and of economics generally, is in clarifying the costs and benefits of a proposed course of action, eliminating or at least reducing the element of factual uncertainty, and in that way minimizing, the area of genuine irreducible moral debate." Richard A. Posner, Rebuttal to Malloy, 24 Valpariso L. Rev. 183, 184 (1990). Yet, I take it that as Catholics we must insist on leaving room for allocative efficiency to be trumped by what Judge Guido Calabresi famously referred to as "Other Justice."

Here I take the liberty of paraphrasing Catholic public intellectual Paul Johnson’s defense of capitalism:

The divine plan was indeed that we should enjoy the fruits of the earth and of our own industry, and [wealth maximization] is the best way we have yet devised to organize the latter. But it was equally the divine plan that God should be worshiped and obeyed and, not least, feared. The fear of the Lord, in short, is the beginning of [economic] wisdom, as of any other kind.

Whether that balance is achievable by policymakers in a Fallen world, of course, is a separate question (and one I addressed with skepticism in my contribution to Christian Perspectives on Legal Thought).