Anne Rathbone Bradley, Ph.D., is the George and Sally Mayer Fellow for Economic Education and the academic director at The Fund for American Studies. In addition, she is a professor of economics at The Institute for World Politics and Grove City College. She is also a visiting professor at George Mason University and has previously taught at Georgetown University and Charles University in Prague. She is currently an Acton affiliate scholar and a visiting scholar at the Bernard Center for Women, Politics & Public Policy.
Dr. Bradley is the co-editor and author of Counting the Cost: Christian Perspectives on Capitalism, For the Least of These: A Biblical Answer to Poverty, and Be Fruitful and Multiply: Why Economics Is Necessary for Making God-Pleasing Decisions,
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. Continue Reading...
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. Continue Reading...
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. Continue Reading...
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. Continue Reading...
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. Continue Reading...
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. Continue Reading...
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. Continue Reading...
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. Continue Reading...
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. Continue Reading...
Generally, the topic of inflation is considered dry and uninteresting, but it is one that has garnered much attention and debate over the past year. There are competing narratives as to what inflation is and why it matters, and even whether the U.S. Continue Reading...
