Piero Formica, Fellow RSA, Innvation Value Institute-Maynooth University:
Bologna, Sunday, October 1, 2017, Basilica of San Petronio, Pope Francis expressed this thought: <<Charity is never one-way; it is always circular, and everyone gives and receives something. The “Our Father” is a prayer expressed in the plural: the bread that is asked for is “ours,” which involves sharing, participation and common Responsibility. In this prayer, we all recognise the need to overcome every form of selfishness to access the joy of mutual acceptance>>. The “Our Father,” Francis emphasised, is the prayer of the poor, who are constantly increasing. In Emilia-Romagna, the percentage of families in relative poverty increased from 3.2% in 2019 to 7.4% in 2023. Antoniano’s soup kitchens provide approximately 52,580 meals per month. The city soup kitchen of Bologna distributes approximately 7,500 meals per month. With poverty on the rise, family spending decreased by 3.4% in our region. With this Pontiff gone, to what moral authority can we turn when, in the world, we are witnessing a simultaneous increase in both the availability of weapons and the prevalence of poverty? While armaments swell the profits of increasingly efficient shipowners, it is good to go back in time, between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, to pay attention to Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill, who, emphasising the urgency of addressing social issues such as poverty and social justice, were interested in social well-being and individual well-being (care and health). We are engaged in economic activities that provide well-having (material satisfaction) and do not care about the added value of well-being. We try to distribute wealth increasingly unequally and neglect social creativity. We would like to see more companies that take deep breaths, being aware that short-term visions stifle many innovative projects, discourage leadership for change, trample on investments in extroverted human inventiveness, and, last but not least, encourage financial speculation. The pro-humanistic approach to economic and social life leads to acting in the function of human prosperity, not subject to economic growth that brings poverty. Sustained economic growth does not necessarily bring more well-being. Serious pathologies accompany American economic dynamism. Compared to Europe, the United States has higher rates of homicide, incarceration, maternal mortality, under-five mortality and life expectancy.
For Pope Francis’ message of solidarity with the poor not to be lost in the void, Homo Solidalis, who promotes Economic Humanism, must enter the theatre of the economy as a protagonist. Do these two words shine as much as the speed with which they pass and vanish? And what if they were not a meteor but an imperfect utopia to land on? Imperfect because Economic Humanism envisages the vision of a better world, but does not aim for perfection. As Leo Tolstoy would say, wanting to be perfect, one will never be satisfied since there are so many challenges to face and defects to examine, which are essential. It is already a great ambition to conceive an economy that places at its centre the provision of that public good whose name is Responsibility. Embraced by Economic Humanism that favours the quality over the quantity of economic growth, Responsibility ends the exploitation and prestige conferred by money, pursued at the expense of people, all other living beings and nature, whose submission to efficiency gives them the name of “resources”.
Alongside Responsibility, we find Sharing, the other word pronounced by Pope Francis in his speech at the time. Sharing means pushing forward the frontier of imagination to self-manage, managing to design, develop and compose the things we need and then exchange them within the Sharing Communities that bring value to common goods. As Adam Smith argued in his Theory of Moral Sentiments, caring about the fortune of others and taking pleasure in seeing it, even though one does not receive any economic benefit from it, is a particular sign that we call Regard, a resource that Homo Solidalis makes its own by rejecting Egonomy, the dehumanising selfish economy.
