Introductions

Before I begin writing this Substack, I thought I would briefly introduce myself. I’m an economist who works at the intersection of economics, ethics, sustainable development, and Catholic social teaching. Back in January, I published a book called Cathonomics: How Catholic Teaching Can Create a More Just Economy with Georgetown University Press. I hope to develop some of the themes of the book here.

A child of working-class parents, I grew up in Ireland. I was the first in my family to go to college—Trinity College Dublin. I then attended Columbia University to get my Ph.D. in economics. After that, I went to work at the International Monetary Fund (IMF), where I eventually spent two decades. For about half of this time, I was a speechwriter to the Managing Director.

But I became somewhat disillusioned with economics during the global financial crisis. Whereas most economists viewed this as a technical crisis in need of technocratic solutions, I saw it as a moral crisis requiring a root-and-branch reform of the entire economic system. I became especially disillusioned by neoliberalism and market ideology and sought answers in a different place.

That different place was Catholic social teaching. I devoured the social encyclicals, and familiarized myself with the thought of Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, the Church Fathers, and the Italian civil economy tradition. This journey eventually took me out of the IMF.

In 2015, I took a leave of absence from the IMF to work with Jeffrey Sachs at Columbia University. While there, I worked on an initiative called Ethics in Action. This met at the Vatican and brought together a wide range of people—religious leaders, philosophers, theologians, economists, development experts, labor leaders, activists—to develop a shared ethical basis for the challenges of sustainable development. There will be a book coming out soon, and I am one of the editors.

I’ve also been involved with an initiative, centered at Fordham University, on redesigning business and economic education to infuse it with better values than those of homo economicus—the self-interested rational economic man who seeks to maximize his subjective preferences without limit. In this vein, I’ve been teaching a class at Fordham—a new approach to economics melded with ethics and Catholic social teaching.

So that’s who I am. I will be writing here about once a week, chiefly on economics and Catholic social teaching. I hope you will find these musings interesting.