Dan Hugger is Librarian and Research Associate at the Acton Institute.
Posts by Dan Hugger
January 10, 2021
Sunday January 10, 2021, is Lord Acton’s 187th birthday. This difficult era of a global pandemic, a crisis in institutions, and civil unrest seem strange times indeed to look back on the life and legacy of a Victorian historian of ideas – but, as Lord Acton himself remarked, “if the Past has been an obstacle and a burden, knowledge of the past is the safest and surest emancipation.”
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November 13, 2020
The Acton Institute’s Mini-Grants on Free Market Economics: Research & Teaching program continues for the upcoming 2021 academic year, and the application is now live. This grant program is intended to enhance the effectiveness of research and teaching about market economics for faculty at colleges, universities, and seminaries in the United States and Canada.
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September 29, 2020
Much of our national debate around the COVID-19 pandemic and the appropriate government response to it has been framed as opposition between those who say they follow “science” and those who do not.
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September 24, 2020
In recognition of Gregory M. Collins’ outstanding research in the fields of ethics, politics and economics, the Acton Institute will be awarding him the 2020 Novak Award.
Gregory M. Collins is a postdoctoral associate and lecturer in the program on ethics, politics, and economics at Yale University.
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September 01, 2020
Widespread civil unrest, social media fueled hysteria, and political polarization have infected our public life. Vice President Joe Biden suggested on Monday that these problems have been fomented by his opponent.
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August 25, 2020
Karl Marx famously concluded in his 1845
Theses On Feuerbach with his eleventh thesis: “Philosophers have hitherto only
interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to
change it.” How this change from analysis to activism can be justified in light of Marx’s own materialist conception of history is an enduring puzzle.
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August 18, 2020
Salesforce, an American cloud-based software company, earlier this year announced an initiative to develop an artificial intelligence economist. Stephan Zheng, the lead research scientist at Salesforce Research, describes the moonshot goal of this project as to
“build a reinforcement learning framework that will recommend economic policies that drive social outcomes in the real world, such as improving sustainability, productivity, and equality.”
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August 11, 2020
On Monday, the Lebanese government resigned. Public pressure on the government had been relentless in the wake of two devastating explosions on the afternoon of August 4 at the port in the nation’s capital city, Beirut.
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July 16, 2020
On Wednesday, July 15, some of Twitter’s most prominent accounts – including those of President Barak Obama, Vice President Joe Biden, Elon Musk, Apple, and many others – were hacked in an unprecedented Twitter attack.
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July 07, 2020
In the latest issue of
The New Yorker Larissa MacFarquhar has a deeply researched and beautifully written story, “How Prosperity Transformed the Falklands.” It chronicles the history of the Falkland Islands from the early settlement of the then-uninhabited islands to the Falklands War between Argentina and the United Kingdom in 1982, as well as the economic transformation after that conflict.
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