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Giraud, Gaël; Renouard, Cécile eds., 20 Propositions pour réformer le capitalisme. Flammarion, Paris, 2009,
375 pp.
This is what might be called “a French Catholic generation’s book on the economy”. Its authors are academics who are also executives and analysts active in some of the most relevant battlefields of contemporary economic theory and practice: finance, risk assessment, game theory, non-linear models and ethics. All these fields came into being between the mid-‘50s and the beginning of the ‘70s, a fifteen-year period that in sociology would constitute a generation. Three of the authors are Catholic religious: the two coordinators of the volume (a Jesuit and an Assumptionist sister) and one of the collaborators (a Xaverian sister). The rest are family men and women with an impressive range of professions, working in education, financial institutions, or business.
The book consists of twenty chapters each of which argues and defends a proposal concerning the need for reorganization of globalised capitalism. A large number of these proposals treat of financial markets, business practices, and the public policies related to these—in effect, they go right to the “heart” of the global economy. When finances are in a crisis of massive proportions, then the resulting threat to the system is not just sectorial, but total. Other proposals address more general aspects of contemporary capitalism, such as the social responsibility of business, the internalization of all costs, salaries, taxation and its possible “globalization,” social integration, and environmental safeguards.
The book is conceived in such a way that questions of principle are left in the background: this allows problems to be analyzed with technical precision and highly concrete proposals to be made, some of which even touch on the institutional or societal mechanisms pertinent to each case. With such an inclination toward concrete proposals, the book provides good material for discussing what might be most effective and practicable in the present global context. This book is not a doctrinal discourse. The elements of principle, while certainly a component of a modern-day Catholic vision of the economy, are to be sought here in the foundations and sensibilities that undergird the analysis and provide it with inspiration and perspective, but without interfering with the technical discussion. In this sense, the book sets a new style for Christian participation in the economic debate.
The 20 proposals are addressed to persons who already know something about the contemporary economy. A glossary at the end of the volume helps the non-specialist reader to understand the technical terms used; in most of the chapters only the most indispensable of these terms are used. Nevertheless, a minimal understanding of the mechanisms of international finance and commerce are necessary to follow the argument in many of the chapters, and familiarity with the language of neoclassical microeconomics and with the criticism of that theory helps in reading other chapters. This book is not written in popular language, but is oriented to analysts, commentators, and decision-makers. Nevertheless, it offers many points that would make interesting discussion for theologians, philosophers and social scientists.
The common starting point of the authors as spelt out in the introduction is the recognition of the inadequacy of business ethics, understood as the individual commitment of the agents to abide by the established rules of the game in order to keep the global economy at reasonable levels of stability, efficiency, and justice. The current crisis shows that the key to the sustainability of the global economic system needs to be sought in the reform of those rules of the game. It is simply impossible to trust in the spontaneous self-organization of the economic system, given the presence of massive externalities, great asymmetries of information, and strong positions of market power and their ability to influence political power. All those factors reveal the enormous distance that exists between the truly relevant markets (the financial included) and what is considered the ideal model of perfect competition.
In the first chapter of the book the diagnosis of “inadequacy” is applied to the ability...
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Raúl González Fabre is a Jesuit of Venezuela and an engineer and philosopher: Doctor in Philosophy, USB (Caracas); Industrial Engineer, UNED (Madrid); Civil Engineer, UCAB (Caracas). His areas of interest are very wide: theory of economic justice, microeconomics, economic anthropology and psychology, theory of war and peace, refuge and migrations. In several of his assignments he has provided formation on socio-political issues to grass-roots church groups since 1987. A member of the Jesuit Latin-American Group of Philosophical Reflection since 1992, he has published several articles in the books of the group and in other collective works and journals. He has been coordinator of the Jesuit Refugee Service (JRS) in Latin America (1997-1999) and policy officer of JRS in Zambia (2000-2002). Since 2003, he has been a fellow of the Instituto de Investigaciones Económicas y Sociales, Universidad Católica Andrés Bello (Caracas), and teaches Ethics and Economics at the School of Economics of the same university.
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| Issue 7.1 |
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India’s Peaceful Rise
in World Politics
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