Activating the Economic Processes to Meet Human Material Need and to Satisfy Human Wants

Abstract

All economic systems are organized around four economic processes — production, distribution, exchange, and consumption — and four economic functions — transforming, moving, transferring, and using. A fifth central function, which derives from the other four but is not subordinate to them, is providing employment opportunities. The fmal purpose of the system is to meet the two principal aspects of human material need — physical need and the need for work as such — and to satisfy human wants.

The economy in fact is only one aspect and one dimension of the whole of human activity. If economic life is absolutized, if the production and consumption of goods become the center of social life and society’s only value, not subject to any other value, the reason is to be found not so much in the economic system itself as in the fact that the entire sociocultural system, by ignoring the ethical and religious dimension, has been weakened and ends by limiting itself to the production of goods and services alone.

Centesimus Annus, chapter 4.