Pope Francis' encyclical questions the ethics of market capitalism leading to climate change and inequality. It argues that the pursuit of individual economic gain, as promoted by concepts like the invisible hand, ignores the tragedy of the commons where individual actions negatively impact the common good. The document calls for balancing liberty and law to achieve justice, and regulating capital through policies like progressive wealth taxes. It emphasizes caring for our common home and appeals for a new dialogue on shaping our planet's future that includes all people.

2. ETHICS GOLDEN RULE:
Do unto others as you would
have them do unto you.
ECONOMICS GOLDEN RULE:
10/9/15
Whoever has the gold makes
the rules.

3. Prophetic Pope Francis
Market capitalism drives our global economy. Pope
Francis’ June encyclical questions the ethics of this system,
which is leading to (1) climate change and (2) an increasing
gap between the rich and the poor.
DOES ECONOMICS TRUMP ETHICS ?
200 Page Encyclical
Laudato Si:
On Care for our
Common Home.
June 2015

4. ECONOMIC IMBALNCE
• Belief in:
• “Invisible Hand,” Adam Smith (1776), which
guided the pursuit of individual gain towards the
public interest.
“The self-correcting power of the free market.”
( Alan Greenspan’s Laissez Faire Economics )
Ignoring:
• “Tragedy of the Commons,” William Forster
Lloyd (1833), in which the pursuit of individual
gain leads to abrogation of the common good.

5. Tragedy of the Commons
William Forster Lloyd (1833), Garrett Hardin (1968)
The pursuit of individual gain leads to abrogation of the
common good.
Lloyd was familiar with herdsmen who all grazed their cattle on a commons. Each
individual gained by adding more cows to his own herd. As each pursued his individual
gain, the commons became overgrazed, resulting in the tragedy malnourished cows.

6. TRADEGY OF THE
COMMONS
Individual
desire to go
everywhere
gets you
nowhere,
while
polluting.
SOLUTIONs
1. Ethics
2. Economic
Regulation,
Laws

7. Coal burning pollutes our common atmosphere for free.
This is an economic benefit for electric utility companies and customers.
The negative effects of pollution are shared by all.

8. Injustice of Coal Burning
1. Fine particle pollution from U.S. power plants cuts
short the lives of over 30,000 people/ year.
- Asthma attacks, cardiac problems and upper and
lower respiratory problems associated with fine particles
from power plants.
2. Deaths of many coal miners
- None from nuclear reactors in the US.
3. Increasing carbon doxide emissions are causing global
warming with rising sea levels and increasing weather
extremes.

9. Why Free Inhalers? Because COAL CARES. http://
www.coalcares.org/index.html
Coal Cares™ is a brand-new initiative from Peabody Energy, the
world's largest private-sector coal company, to reach out to
American youngsters with asthma and to help them keep their heads
high in the face of those who would treat them with less than full
dignity. For kids who have no choice but to use an inhaler, Coal
Cares™ lets them inhale with pride.
Puff-Puff™ inhalers are available free to any family living within
200 miles of a coal plant, and each inhaler comes with a $10 coupon
towards the cost of the asthma medication itself.

10. IMBALANCE
FOSSIL FUEL SUBSIDIES ARE 4 TIMES RENEWABLES
• Fossil fuels are reaping $550 billion a year in
subsidies (International Energy Agency 2014)
• This is 4 times the $120 billion paid out in
incentives for renewables including wind,
solar and biofuels.
• Oil Change International estimates U.S. fossil
fuel subsidies at $37.5 billion annually,
including $21 billion in production and
exploration subsidies.

11. NEED TO BALANCE LIBERTY & LAW
• “Invisible Hand,” Adam Smith (1776), which guided the
pursuit of individual gain towards the public interest.
“The self-correcting power of the free market.”
( Alan Greenspan’s Laissez Faire Economics )
• “Tragedy of the Commons,” William Forster Lloyd
(1833), in which the pursuit of individual gain leads to
abrogation of the common good.
Liberty - Laissez Faire Economics,
Balanced by
Law - Regulation, Constraint = JUSTICE
“Justice Kennedy’s jurisprudence is a constant struggle to find
the right balance between liberty and responsibility.”

12. Tragedy of the 2009 Democratic Congress
• In 2009, the House of Representatives Passed the Markey-
Waxman Bill, “Clean Energy & Security Act”
-Cap-and-Trade: Price on carbon emissions to economically
favor wind, solar, and nuclear energy
• Environmental Tragedy: Senate did not pass it.
-Sen. Kerry (D) lost Republican Suppor
- Peabody Energy lobied agaj against it..
“We can not afford it”

13. Sweden, one of the few countries
that tax carbon, has reduced its
emissions by about twenty-three per
cent in the past twenty-five years.
During that same period, its
economy has grown by more than
fifty-five per cent.

14. 10/9/15
www.
CitizensClimateLobby.org
Revenue
neutral carbon
fee with
dividend.

15. CitizensClimagteLobby.org stated:
It was obvious from the answers that the
candidates in the recent Republican Candidate
Debate had little or no idea what Shultz was
proposing in the way of a policy –
Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) said, “We’re not going
to destroy our economy the way the left-wing
government that we are under now wants to do.”
According to a study from Regional Economic
Models, Inc., a carbon fee that is fully rebated to
households will actually add 2.8 million jobs over a
20-year period.

16. GDP growth continues while greenhouse emissions decrease.
The Weight of the World
Can Christiana Figueres persuade humanity to save
itself?
New Yorker August 24, 2015

17. 23 Oct 2015. Hurricane Patricia approaching Mexico.
Highest velocity winds recorded by satellite from
record-high ocean temperatures.

18. T
24 Aug 2005. Tropical
Storm Approaches
Southern Florida.
28 Aug 2005. Katrina,
Category 5 Hurricane,
gained energetic winds of
175 mph due to the
record high temperatures
of the Gulf of Mexico.
28 Aug 2005. Katrina,
Category 5, 175 mph
winds. Absorbed energy
from the record high
temperatures of the
Gulf of Mexico.
29 Aug 2005. Katrina
causes $100Bs damage to
New Orleans, LA
KATRINA: Tropical Storm to Hurricane

19. Physics Today, March 2012, pg. 31
NUMBER OF EVENTS WITH DAMAGE OVER $ 1 BILLION (NOAA)
2008: 9 2011: 14 Average since 1980: 3 to 4
• Since 1996 over $1 billion damage doubled
compared with the previous 15-year period.
Hurricane Katrina 2005: $146 B
Hurricane Irene 2011: $15B
Hurricane Sandy 2012: $50B

20. Prophetic Pope Francis
Market capitalism drives our global economy. Pope
Francis’ June encyclical questions the ethics of this system,
which is leading to climate change and an increasing gap
between the rich and the poor.
ECONOMICS TRUMPS ETHICS ? JUSTICE?
200 Page Encyclical
Laudato Si:
On Care for our
Common Home.
June 2015

21. GOOD NEWS WISDOM:
HIGH GDP in the US

22. 22

23. 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90
0
5
10
15
20
25
30
35
40
45
50
GDP/Capita vs. Economic Freedom
Index of Economic Freedom
GDP/Capita($K)
LAW……………………………………………….…LIBERTY………ANARCHY
Optimum Balance
US
Canada
C
o
n
g
o
N
i
g
e
r
UKFrance
Germany, Japan
S. Korea
Cuba
China
Russia

24. HERITAGE FOUNDATION
INDEX OF ECONOMIC FREEDOM (2009)
Ten Economic Freedoms for United States
91.9 Business Freedom
80.0 Investment Freedom
86.8 Trade Freedom
80.0 Financial Freedom
67.5 Fiscal Freedom
90.0 Property Rights
59.6 Government Size
72.0 Freedom from Corruption
84.0 Monetary Freedom
95.1 Labor Freedom
80.7 AVERAGE

25. BAD NEWS WISDOM:
ECONOMIC
INEQUALITY

26. Title of the
presentationInequality of capital
Thomas Piketty, Professor of Economics,
Paris School of Economics
19 December 2014
www.slideshare.net

27. 27
This presentation is based upon
Capital in the 21st century
(Harvard University Press, March 2014)
This book studies the global dynamics of income and wealth distribution since 18c in 20+ countries; I
use historical data collected over the past 15 years with Atkinson, Saez, Postel-Vinay, Rosenthal,
Alvaredo, Zucman, and 30+ others; I try to shift attention from rising income inequality to rising wealth
inequality
•The book includes four parts:
Part 1. Income and capital
Part 2. The dynamics of the capital/income ratio
Part 3. The structure of inequalities
Part 4. Regulating capital in the 21st century
•In this presentation I will present some results from Parts 2 & 3, focusing upon the long-run evolution of
capital/income ratios and wealth concentration (all graphs and series are available on line: see
http://piketty.pse.ens.fr/capital21c)

28. GINI INDEX IS A MEASURE OF ECONOMIC EQUALITY
GINI = 0 Income completely equal
GINI = 1 One person owns everything = INJUSTICE
Germany, Scandinavia, Japan, etc. have more income equality than the US.

29. 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90
0
5
10
15
20
25
30
35
40
45
50
GDP/Capita vs. Economic Freedom
Index of Economic Freedom
GDP/Capita($K)
LAW……………………………………………….…LIBERTY………ANARCHY
WHY MY DAUGHTER MOVED TO THE UK & MY FRIEND’S SON TO CANADA.
US
Canada
C
o
n
g
o
N
i
g
e
r
UKFrance
Germany, Japan
S. Korea
Cuba
China
Russia

30. GINI INDEX IS A MEASURE OF ECONOMIC EQUALITY
GINI = 0 Income completely equal
GINI = 1 One person owns everything = INJUSTICE
Germany, Scandinavia, Japan, etc. have more income equality than the US.

31. 31

32. 32

33. 33
Conclusions
• The history of income and wealth inequality is always political, chaotic and unpredictable;
it involves national identities and sharp reversals; nobody can predict the reversals of the
future
• The ideal solution: progressive wealth tax at the
global scale, based upon automatic exchange of
bank information
• Other solutions involve authoritarian political &
capital controls (China, Russia..), or perpetual
population growth (US), or inflation, or some mixture
of all.

34. 34

35. Reagan Tax Cuts
70% to 28%
OUR NATIONAL DEBT INCREASED IN 1980
WWII Ends
Won Cold
War

36. 36

39. WWII POSTER
How we defeated
Hitler Germany
and Japan’s
Rising Sun (1945).
Paid off its debt
(1980).
Patriotism against
enemies is the
Social Capital
that bound us
together.

40. January 2011
Investigation of the 2008 Economic Crash

41. BALANCE LIBERTY & LAW
ECONOMICS & ETHICS
• “Invisible Hand,” Adam Smith (1776), which guided the
pursuit of individual gain towards the public interest.
“The self-correcting power of the free market.”
( Alan Greenspan’s Laissez Faire Economics )
• “Tragedy of the Commons,” William Forster Lloyd
(1833), in which the pursuit of individual gain leads to
abrogation of the common good.
Liberty - Laissez Faire Economics,
Balanced by
Law – “Progressive Wealth Taxes”
“Justice Kennedy’s jurisprudence is a constant struggle to find
the right balance between liberty and responsibility.”

42. BALANCING SCIENCE & SPIRIT
ECONOMICS & ETHICS
President Reagan’s Treasury Secretary George Shultz
Revenue Neutral Carbon Fee & Dividend
CitizensClimateLobby.org
Paul H. Carr, Ph. D.
Web page: www.MirrorOfNature.org

43. (3) Nov 2nd
: Balancing medical
science & near-death spirituality
Are near-death experiences Proof of
Heaven? This is the title of neurosurgeon
Eban Alexander’s 2012 book.
Neurologist Oliver Sachs, MD, author
of Hallucinations, has a naturalistic,
scientific explanation of Dr. Alexander’s
near death experience.
(4) Cosmology & Creation
(5) Higgs Boson & God Particle

44. Does economics impact what we
consider ethical?
Why was slavery not an ethical issue until the
beginning of the industrial revolution? St. Paul wrote:
"Slaves obey your earthly masters (Ephesians 6:5).”
For Karl Marx, economics was the basic determining
factor of human history and of what is regarded as
ethical.

45. 45

47. Can our “free” economy survive the
increasing gap between the rich and the
poor?
The MIT Press Book, "Polarized
America: The Dance of Ideology &
Unequal Riches," concludes that
increasing income inequality is correlated
with increased political polarization.
Income inequality contributes to the
revolutions sweeping the Arab world.

48. “The Answer My Friends is
Blowing in the Wind”
Growing in the United States
– In the last 5 years, average annual growth rate of 22%
– In both 2005 and 2006, the second -largest source of new
generation capacity in the US trailing to natural gas
– Provides less than 2% of total electricity consumption
– Analysis for 20% energy saturation is underway

49. Islamic Declaration on Global Climate Change.
More Important than Pope Francis’ Encyclical?
The Islamic Declaration on Global Climate Change was launched by leaders from 20
countries at the Islamic Climate Change Symposium in Istanbul on August 17-18, 2015.
The Declaration presents the moral case, based on Islamic teachings, for the world’s
1.6 billion Muslims and people of all faiths worldwide to take urgent climate action to
replace fossil fuels with renewables. There a 1.2 billion Roman Catholics.
Muslim countries in the Persian Gulf are major oil producers & largest per-capita
emitters.
Indonesia, which is predominantly Muslim, is among the top ten carbon emitters if
land-use change and forests are taken into account.
Muslim countries, such as Pakistan and Bangladesh, are also threatened acutely by
more-frequent periods of extreme heat and floods.
Bangladesh, whose population of 159 million is living 1 -3 feet above sea level, has
installed more than 3.5-million solar home systems in the country's rural areas.
Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates has, in recent years, grown into a hot spot
for solar research.

50. Pope Francis Encyclical
25. Climate change is a global problem with grave implications: environmental,
social, economic, political and for the distribution of goods. It represents one of the
principal challenges facing humanity in our day.
St. Francis helps us to see that an integral ecology calls for openness to categories
which transcend the language of mathematics and biology, and take us to the heart
of what it is to be human.
If we approach nature and the environment without this openness to awe and
wonder, if we no longer speak the language of fraternity and beauty in our
relationship with the world, our attitude will be that of masters, consumers,
ruthless exploiters, unable to set limits on their immediate needs.
By contrast, if we feel intimately united with all that exists, then sobriety and care
will well up spontaneously. The poverty and austerity of Saint Francis were no mere
veneer of asceticism, but something much more radical: a refusal to turn reality into
an object simply to be used and controlled.

51. Humanity still has the ability to work together in building our common home. Here
I want to recognize, encourage and thank all those striving in countless ways to
guarantee the protection of the home which we share. Particular appreciation is
owed to those who tirelessly seek to resolve the tragic effects of environmental
degradation on the lives of the world’s poorest. Young people demand change.
They wonder how anyone can claim to be building a better future without thinking
of the environmental crisis and the sufferings of the excluded.
14. I urgently appeal, then, for a new dialogue about how we are shaping the
future of our planet. We need a conversation which includes everyone, since the
environmental challenge we are undergoing, and its human roots, concern and
affect us all.
There are too many special interests, and economic interests easily end up
trumping the common good and manipulating information so that their own plans
will not be affected.
Economic powers continue to justify the current global system where priority tends
to be given to speculation and the pursuit of financial gain, which fail to take the
context into account, let alone the effects on human dignity and the natural
environment.

52. VII. A VARIETY OF OPINIONS
60. Finally, we need to acknowledge that different approaches and lines of thought
have emerged regarding this situation and its possible solutions. At one extreme,
we find those who doggedly uphold the myth of progress and tell us that
ecological problems will solve themselves simply with the application of new
technology and without any need for ethical considerations or deep change. At the
other extreme are those who view men and women and all their interventions as
no more than a threat, jeopardizing the global ecosystem, and consequently the
presence of human beings on the planet should be reduced and all forms of
intervention prohibited. Viable future scenarios will have to be generated between
these extremes, since there is no one path to a solution. This makes a variety of
proposals possible, all capable of entering into dialogue with a view to developing
comprehensive solutions.
61. On many concrete questions, the Church has no reason to offer a definitive
opinion; she knows that honest debate must be encouraged among experts, while
respecting divergent views. But we need only take a frank look at the facts to see
that our common home is falling into serious disrepair.