Stephen T. Worland

Worland was born in Neoga, Illinois and began his education in the Neoga public schools. During World War II, he served in the United States Navy on the USS Idaho (BB-42) battleship. He held a B.A. and a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Illinois. His dissertation, completed in 1956, was on the economic thought of St. Thomas Aquinas. Worland held faculty appointments at Michigan State University and the University of Dayton before he joined the University of Notre Dame in 1957. He taught at Notre Dame for 30 years. In 1987, he joined the College of Saint Benedict and Saint John's University faculty for two years as the first occupant of the Clemens Chair in Economics and the Liberal Arts.[1][2] He died in Columbus, Indiana in 2017.[3]

Worland's research and writing focus on defining and clarifying economic justice as a social and moral concept.[4] Worland was an adherent to neoclassical welfare economics and analyzed the writing of Aristotle through the eyes of modern economics.[5]

In his Scholasticism and Welfare Economics book, Worland demonstrated that welfare economics shares the philosophical premises of scholastic economic reasoning and helps clarify the significance of economic efficiency in the scholastic doctrine of the just price.[6] In the Justice: Views from the Social Sciences book, to which he contributed the Economics and Justice chapter, Worland examined classical economics, Marxism, and neoclassical economics, and concluded that distributive justice cannot be achieved in a market society without considering more than simply contributions to production.[7]

Worland's research often focused on Catholic social teaching. For example, his 2001 Just Wages article in the journal First Things explains the teaching of the Catholic Church regarding a living wage for workers.[8] In his 1994 presentation to The Association for Christian Economics, Worland wrote that although there should be no such thing as "Christian Economics" or "Catholic Economics," as "Christian faith will not produce a body of economic knowledge different from that to be discovered by honest, secular scientific effort,” the Judeo-Christian message makes an important and unique contribution to an understanding of a modern market society.[9]

Worland wrote that economics should be taught in such a way that students learn about the real-world problems of injustice and human development, and not just the theory and mathematical underpinnings of economics. In 1975, in Forum for Social Economics, he wrote that at Notre Dame, where he taught, a decision was made to restructure the Ph.D. program to focus on socioeconomic issues and social justice, and to teach and research the fundamental problems of social economy that "should be a major concern for every economist with a truly humane interest in his profession."[10]

In 1987, Worland was awarded the Reinhold Niebuhr Award, an annual award that honors a faculty member or college administrator whose work and life promote or exemplify social justice.[11]

In 1993, Worland was awarded the Thomas F. Divine award. Named for one of the founding fathers of the Association for Social Economics, the Thomas F. Divine Award is presented annually to an Association member who over a lifetime has made important contributions to social economics and the social economy.[12]