Anne Bradley, Ph.D., is an Acton affiliate scholar, the vice president of Academic Affairs at The Fund for American Studies, and professor of economics at The Institute of World Politics.
Posts by Anne Bradley
May 25, 2023
Nine times. If you’ve seen the classic ’80s film
Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, you recognize and can hear the principal’s voice. Ferris, an overconfident and overzealous teenager, has managed to ditch school with his two pals—again.
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November 30, 2022
Free Market: The History of an Idea by Jacob Soll, a professor of history, philosophy, and accounting, attempts to trace the philosophical and theoretical evolution of the free market over 2,000 years.
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October 06, 2022
Just a few years ago, very few people knew or discussed the Jones Act. Now everyone is talking about it. In a colossal but somewhat predictable fiasco, while Puerto Rico was being pummeled by Hurricane Fiona, the Jones Act prevented a cargo ship from docking off its coast to deliver some 300,000 barrels of much-needed diesel fuel.
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September 26, 2022
President Biden has signed the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), his attempt at delivering on his campaign promises of new investments to combat climate change, improve healthcare, and impose “fair” corporate taxes.
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August 30, 2022
The first iron law of economics is that we live in a world of scarcity. Because of this, economics puts constraints on our utopias. Rinse and repeat. This is how we discern between good and disastrous policies.
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August 03, 2022
The world is an economics classroom if we allow ourselves to learn from it. Every day we’re bombarded with puzzles that the economic way of thinking can help solve. One of the more recent examples of this is the infant-formula shortagethat plagued an industry already confounded by pandemic-related supply chain issues.
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July 08, 2022
If you attended Acton University, you saw the treasure trove of books for sale. Several of those books made it onto both my credit card and my summer reading list. Even if you weren’t able to join us at AU, you can still find most of the books here.
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May 20, 2022
Yesterday, Democrats successfully but narrowly passed an anti–price gouging bill in the House to address raging prices at the pump and to deliver on promises for successful climate-change legislation. Meanwhile, the Senate Natural Resources and Energy chair, Joe Manchin, continues to work toward a bipartisan climate and energy package.
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April 20, 2022
For those who’ve heard the word
a lot but are still not sure what it means, cryptocurrency is a digital asset used to make purchases. It operates using a computer network, often a blockchain, a shared ledger that acts as a mechanism to transfer value from one person to another and that records and stores information in chains of “blocks”—chronological groups rather than tables or folders like more traditional databases.
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February 14, 2022
Economics is the study of human action; it’s the study of individuals making choices. As a result, we can use the “economic way of thinking” to understand the decisions people make when it comes to all types of behavior, including dating and marriage, Spring break and Vegas vacations, and, yes, even why terrorists commit acts of violence or voluntarily die for their cause.
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