Last week's contribution was the first of a series of two about the annual convention of the Centesimus Annus Pro Pontifice Foundation in Rome, whose objective is the promotion, diffusion and implementation the social teaching of the Catholic Church.

This year's convention had as its theme Development, Progress And Common Good. Last week I focussed on the need to subordinate finance to politics and the need for ethical behaviour in economic decision making, especially in the current world scenario, given the prevailing uncertainty and continued speculative activities.

Another statement made at the convention and which drew a great deal of attention was about the need to have a creative minority capable of developing the future. Why such a creative minority one would ask?

One of the main reasons is that the crisis in the financial markets and the international economic recession of the last 24 months, which are the result of the practices of the last few years, have now created a conflict between the state and the market and this conflict has deformed the correct concept of what a democracy is. All too often, the state has been taken to mean the representative institutions, which it is not; while the market has been taken to mean the economy as a whole, which it is not.

Institutions are just one aspect of a representative democracy, which also includes the provision of public goods without discrimination, good laws and the correct application of those laws. Equally the market is just one aspect of economic democracy, which also includes efficiency, the correct functioning of markets and the fair distribution of wealth.

One would also need to appreciate that for a democracy to function effectively it needs a third pillar - the participative element, that is civil dialogue and social cohesion. For too many years, we have led ourselves to believe that as long as we had a Parliament that legislated and a market that was allowed to operate freely, then we had a fully functioning democracy and assured economic wealth. Today, we recognise this approach does not work and that economic development, progress and the common good require a great deal more than a parliament and a free market. Thus we have to rethink our model to strengthen the democratic process that would in turn strengthen economic growth.

Another reason why we need this creative minority is the deformation of the word "citizen". Today, we have grown accustomed to think of a citizen in a single dimension - the consumer citizen. This is leading to a dysfunction between economic wealth and employment, and it seems to matter little if growth in the gross domestic product and in consumption is not accompanied by growth in employment.

In effect, even if we were to limit ourselves to the economic aspect, the word "citizen" has more dimensions such as the working citizen, the investing citizen, the saving citizen.

These all contribute to the correct functioning of the economy as a whole and we need to move away from those economic policies that simply focus on making people consume more as a way towards economic growth.

The third reason why we need this creative minority is that we have created confusion between the end (that is the objectives) and the means (that is the methodology and the techniques). Many years ago, we used to question ourselves whether the end justified the means. One may argue the point both ways, and as no real answer was found, the distinction between the two became blurred.

Thus, we got into a situation where the creation of financial instruments (which are really a technique), became an end in itself. We forgot that economic growth had been founded on a set of values, and as those values were destroyed and rules became meaningless, economic growth continued to happen in a vacuum.

Then, we suddenly realised that techniques and methodology started to establish the objective (and not the other way round) as we recognised that the economy became a slave of the financial instruments that had been created. Hence today's situation.

All this should not mean that the invisible hand of the market cannot function or that it should not be allowed to function. What it does mean is that there needs to be an appropriate ethical framework within which this invisible hand functions. The creative minority needs to challenge the way democracies around the world are operating, to challenge the way the individual citizen has been debased to a being that is just there to consume, and to help re-establish the values within which the economy functions.