A Peculiar Pontifical Pick

A newly appointed member to a body meant to promote Catholic teaching endorses legalizing abortion and advocates a tendentious form of economic interventionism.

L ike many people, I was puzzled when the Pontifical Academy for Life (PAL) announced in October that one of its new members was the economist Mariana Mazzucato, a professor at University College, London.

My puzzlement arose from the fact that about 30 seconds of internet browsing suffices to indicate that the Italian-born and New School for Social Research–trained economist does not hold to the Catholic teaching that human life should be protected from the unjust use of lethal force from conception until natural death. Given that one of the PAL’s purposes is to uphold and promote this rather important feature of Catholic teaching about human life — a teaching, I’d add, that draws its force primarily from what reason and science tell us about when a distinct human being comes into existence — it seems strange to appoint someone seemingly at odds with this long-standing Catholic teaching to such a position.

Defenses by Vatican officials of Professor Mazzucato’s appointment were, not to put too fine a point on it, rather lame. All that Pope Francis could bring himself to say was, “She is a great economist from the United States, I put her there to give a little more humanity to it. Women carry their own, they don’t have to become like males.”

Given that, by my count, 38 of the 163 ordinary and corresponding members of the Pontifical Academy are women, one must wonder how their combined femininity didn’t apparently add sufficient humanity to the PAL’s ranks. As for economists, there are plenty of pro-life female economists, Catholic and non-Catholic, from economically developed and developing nations who could have been made members of the Academy.

So why pick Mazzucato?

I suspect that there were two reasons. One is that Pope Francis once mentioned he had read one of Mazzucato’s books and enjoyed it. Vatican officials are as anxious to please the boss as any other bureaucrat. Appointing her is thus a good career move for those clerics who think in such terms. Second, Mazzucato is undoubtedly a well-known economist, primarily because of her views concerning the state’s role in fostering innovation in the economy.

Since Adam Smith’s time, modern economics has always affirmed that government and law have parts to play in economic life. In Part V of his Wealth of Nations as well as in his Lectures on Jurisprudence, Smith identifies functions like securing rule of law and property rights and the provision of public works as some of the more important of the government’s economic roles.

These are not small responsibilities. No economy can generate wealth over long time periods in the absence of, say, rule of law. These government tasks, however, are not primarily what Mazzucato has in mind.

In books like The Entrepreneurial State, Mazzucato argues that the state has taken the lead in bringing about some of the most innovative technological and economic developments to shape our times. Given government contributions to, she argues, the emergence of things like the internet and the iPhone, the state should be even more in the business of directing and fostering economic innovation and development.

In other words, Mazzucato is a confirmed dirigiste. That’s further underscored by some of her other writings. These are full of condemnations of austerity policies as well as that ubiquitous bogeyman of the Left (and now much of the American and European Right) otherwise known as “neoliberalism.”

Mazzucato is careful to specify that she’s not in the business of trying to abolish capitalism. But she does want many more-systematic government interventions into the economy designed to produce more innovation, as well as to deliver outcomes that she considers fairer than those delivered by lightly regulated markets.

But however much these ideas and the platforms from which Mazzucato expresses them (the United Nations, the World Economic Forum, etc.) might impress a certain type of Vatican official, there is nothing especially revolutionary or original about Mazzucato’s proposals. In fact, she’s arguing for something deeply conventional: a set of economic propositions traceable back to the late 18th century as well as to 19th-century economists such as Friedrich List. It’s commonly called “industrial policy.”

In these pages and other writings, I’ve detailed the many problems and the persistent failures associated with industrial policy. These range from the way that industrial policy fosters cronyism and outright corruption (Pope Francis’s Argentina being one of the world’s very worst cases) to its simply false supposition that government officials can somehow obtain the knowledge that they would need to be able to outguess markets.

Let me focus, however, on the problems with Mazzucato’s specific claim that governments can and should breed innovation through industrial policy. The primary difficulty with this position is a serious one: its lack of empirical merit.

Studies abound in the economic literature that highlight the difficulty in establishing connections between government intervention and innovation. In their analysis of the evidence for the state-as-innovator, “Bureaucrats or Markets in Innovation Policy?,” Karl Wennberg, Nils Karlson, and Christian Sandström found that “there is weak empirical support in the many hundreds [of] empirical studies and related meta analyses evaluating the effectiveness of active industrial and innovative policies.” Their findings are supported by another study of the same question, The Myth of the Entrepreneurial State, authored by Deirdre McCloskey and Alberto Mingardi. They point out that innovation is, by definition, unpredictable. And if they are unpredictable, then they are unplannable.

One of Mazzucato’s favorite examples of alleged government-driven innovation — the internet — illustrates the case. If the internet had a forerunner, it was the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET). This platform was created by a U.S. Defense Department agency as a military-networking device to be used by academics and government agencies.

Note, however, that no one created ARPANET with the objective of eventually developing the internet. In his book Permissionless Innovation, Adam Thierer illustrates that it was only after the Clinton administration permitted open-market commercialization of this technology that the modern internet became possible. Indeed, the same administration consciously adopted an anti–industrial policy approach to this area.

In short, there is no straight line between ARPANET and the internet’s emergence. A similar picture emerges from Harvard economist Shane Greenstein’s comprehensive and nuanced study of the internet’s development. He illustrates that the internet emerged largely from below through innovation by private actors. Greenstein underscores the “absence of any large, coordinating government planner” driving the internet’s growth. Nor, he notes, was there any government department overseeing its design and construction. A similar story may be told of the relationship between government-sponsored science projects and the iPhone.

I could go on and illustrate how industrial policy has failed time after time to spur innovation in countries like Japan or supranational entities like the EU, as well as highlight the methodological difficulties in establishing causality between industrial policy and specific economic outcomes. I’d wager, however, that very few people working in the Vatican know how tendentious Mazzucato’s most central economic claims are.

Certainly, Catholic social teaching doesn’t express in-principle opposition to state intervention into the economy. But it also purports to be attentive to the knowledge attained via social sciences like economics. And the evidence concerning the relative economic ineffectiveness of state efforts to spur innovation as well as the ways in which such programs foster rent-seeking of the worst kind is overwhelming.

Then again, no one would describe a concern for evidence or logic as especially characterizing the Holy See these days. Whether it is ethics or economics, it appears that confusion, emotivism, and obfuscation are mostly in, while reason, coherence, and clarity are largely out. In some cases, any emphasis on the importance of reasoned reflection is deemed prima facie evidence of “rigidity.”

Alas, this state of affairs is unlikely to change so long as the governance style in Rome remains what one priest friend of mine calls “Buenos Aires on the Tiber.” The Mazzucato appointment represents yet another own goal for the Holy See that is an entirely logical consequence of ongoing dysfunction in the Vatican — one that, in this case, has proved good for neither the cause of life nor reflection on sound economics.