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. Continue Reading...
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. Continue Reading...
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. Continue Reading...
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.” Continue Reading...
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. Continue Reading...
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. Continue Reading...
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. Continue Reading...
It is a universally acknowledged truth that there are deep-seated problems with social media. Academics have written books against it; once venerable institutions are being torn asunder by it; individuals are being demonized on it; and all the while, we are spending more and more of our lives on it. Continue Reading...
Six professors affiliated with universities across the United States have been awarded funding to support faculty research and advance course development.
The Acton Institute Mini-Grants on Free Market Economics program accepts proposals from faculty members at colleges, seminaries, and universities in the United States and Canada in order to promote the scholarship and teaching of market economics. Continue Reading...
Mike Solana, the vice president of the Founders Fund, has written a compelling account of the social consequences of the dominance of social media as a means of communication in this digital age titled, “JUMP.” Continue Reading...
