Finance and the Human Person
Geoffrey Friesen
Associate Professor Finance, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
Friesen traces the intellectual history of three strong, self-limiting assumptions about the human person made in finance models. These assumptions facilitate tractable analytical solutions to many complex financial problems, but ignore important determinants of human relationships and value creation within the firm. Friesen highlights three of these factors: the inherently social nature of wealth creation; the role of human motivation and engagement at work; and the nature of value creation that accompanies a sense of transcendent or higher purpose. By integrating both the interior and exterior dimensions of the human person, the model draws upon Catholic social teaching to incorporate both the “logic of costly effort” and the “logic of engagement” into a more fully human model of the firm.
