John A. Ryan - Economic Thought

Economic Thought

Ryan viewed the separation of economic thought from religious and ethical rules as the root of practical economic problems faced by Americans in the early half of the twentieth century. While at St. Paul Seminary in 1894, Ryan read Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical Rerum Novarum in which he found Leo’s statement that all laborers had a right to adequate worldly goods in order to live in frugal comfort, and the state was obliged to guarantee that right.

In 1902, American Catholic Quarterly Review published Ryan's essay, "The Morality of the Aims and Methods of Labor Unions," a piece supportive of unions.

Ryan's licentiate dissertation, "Some Ethical Aspects of Speculation," investigated the morality of speculation. His Ph.D. dissertation was an influential early economic and moral argument for minimum wage legislation. It was published as A Living Wage in 1906. Ryan insisted in the text that all men had a right to a living wage, adequate to support himself and his family. Always grounding his political thought in moral theology, Ryan argued that Rerum Novarum converted the living wage “from an implicit to an explicit principle of Catholic ethics.”

Published in 1916, Ryan’s second major scholarly work was the book Distributive Justice: The Right and Wrong of Our Present Distribution of Wealth, in which he provided an examination of rent from land, interest on capital, profits from enterprise, and wages for labor in relation to moral principles. As with A Living Wage, Ryan drew on both ethical and economic reasoning; he claimed that all four agents of production — the worker, entrepreneur, capitalist, and landowner — had a claim to the finished product because each contributed an indispensable element to its production. Ryan further objected at a practical and moral level to both the Puritan industrial ethic and the “gospel of consumption” that encouraged increased consumption through the production of new forms of demand, such as luxury goods and services. Ryan again saw both these flawed economic views as the outcome of an historic separation between ethics and economic life. Ryan based his own vision of economic progress in America on equitable wealth distribution, decreased working hours, and a guaranteed minimum wage. Clear in Ryan’s economic thought was a disciplined commitment to both ethical and practical analysis of his country's economic problems.

While A Living Wage has achieved a higher degree of recognition, Ryan stated in his autobiography, “Distributive Justice is unquestionably the most important book I have written.”

In these early publications Ryan staked out an economic position that maintained the primacy of private property but spurned overly acquisitive and unregulated free market capitalism as economically unhealthy and morally bankrupt. He would argue this economic philosophy for his entire life.