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I'll never understand economics...

I often hear this from my fellow Catholics. It is just not good enough. If you look at the encyclical Caritas in Veritatis, it is evident that the Catholic laity have a clear duty to attempt to understand the truth about economics.

Economics as taught in academic institutions is mostly a load of baloney and if you have reasonably normal thinking capacities you should not expect to be able to understand it.

The entire subject of economics has been surrounded by a fog of confusion for the past 100 years. If you are a conspiracy theorist you should be able to find good reasons why it is in some people's interest to ensure that confusion prevails amongst the populace. And that is the underlying reason for the present mess. Economic theory as presented by the so-called experts, including most politicians and journalists, is a crock of shit.

Anyhow, there is no reason why any person of average intelligence should not be able to understand economics and there is no excuse. There is material out there which explains quite clearly how the system works.

A good place to start is Progress and Poverty by Henry George which can be downloaded from the internet. A more recent though slightly technical exposition is A New Model of the Economy by Brian Hodgkinson. There are also courses run by the School of Economic Science at various centres round the country, including London, Croydon and Brighton.

In my experience, Christians in general and Catholics in particular seem content to feed the hungry and never bother to ask why there are hungry people when there is plenty of food around, or dismiss it as "a consequence of sin". If one does not bother to look beyond that glib answer then one is part of the sin.

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