David Ruccio — "Such an economy kills”

Marxian Notre Dame economics professor David Ruccio reviews Evangelii Gaudium and its implications. Nice analysis by Professor Ruccio, and a good blueprint for change by Francis in which he sets the objectives but not the means, since different countries will have to address these goals in their own way based on context.

... Francis, without providing institutional details, outlines a general approach to work that simply cannot be provided by the current wages system. It creates an opening to imagine a radical reorganization of the economy, at both the microeconomic and macroeconomic levels, in which workers participate in making the fundamental decisions in their workplaces and the economy as a whole is coordinated (might we say planned?) so that existing inequalities and forms of exclusion are eliminated.

In the end, Evangelii Gaudium suggests a fundamental reorientation of the current economic debate: to admit the devastating effects of current economic arrangements on the broad masses of the population and to take up the imperative of restructuring the economy in the interests not of the tiny minority at the top but of those at the bottom who are subjected on a daily basis to processes of exploitation, oppression, and exclusion.

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"Such an economy kills”
David F. Ruccio | Professor of Economics University of Notre Dame Notre Dame