This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, December 4th, 2013.

I'm Caleb Brown.

The Pope has some disparaging words about capitalism,

but if the question is, how have free markets and private property impacted human well-being?

The pontiff, an influential religious leader and a head of state, may want to reconsider his remarks.

Marion Tupi is a policy analyst at the Cato Institute and editor of Human Progress.org.

We spoke yesterday.

I think the most striking thing about the Pope's comments are how different his vision of reality in the world is from my own,

where the Pope sees a lot of increases in violence for example or widespread poverty. I of course

recognize the shortcomings but at the same time I look at the long-term developments

especially in poor countries and I see a lot of good news. The Pope is clearly

a man who is deeply concerned about the poor, and I think that all of us should be deeply concerned about the poor, but it seems to me that both his analysis and his solutions to the problems in the world are not

convincing.

The Pope makes a lot of assertions without citing a single number, a single study, a single

reference about a variety of issues that I hope we can get to talk to talk about.

He makes one very specific reference to the invisible hand, which is he argues that this is a force,

paraphrasing here, that we can't really rely on anymore to achieve these ends.

The Pope is clearly very critical of capitalism or at least the kind of capitalism that I think he saw

whilst growing up in Latin America and working with

very poor people in Latin America.

What do you want to...

But I do think that the kind of chronic capitals

...