Dan Hugger is Librarian and Research Associate at the Acton Institute.
Posts by Dan Hugger
January 09, 2020
Since the passing of Gertrude Himmelfarb I have been reflecting on just how much she taught me through her voluminous historical scholarship. In this week’s Acton Line Podcast I interviewed Yuval Levin, Resident Scholar and Director of Social, Cultural, and Constitutional Studies at AEI, who was also her student.
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January 08, 2020
On a recent episode of the excellent podcast
Conversations with Tyler the economist Tyler Cowen reflected on the direction his and co-author Alex Tabarrok’s blog Marginal Revolution has taken over the last ten years:
[I]n 2009 I was still experimenting in some fresh way with blogging as a new medium and what it meant.
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December 31, 2019
I just heard some devastating news. Gertrude Himmelfarb, historian, moralist, wife, and mother, has passed. David Brooks has written a touching obituary detailing the life and legacy of this fascinating woman:
Economists measure economic change and journalists describe political change, but who captures moral change?
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December 18, 2019
In a recent Acton Line podcast I began by asking Father Robert Sirico the very large question, what is Catholic social teaching and why is it important today? He answered that the Church has always had a social teaching but that when we usually discuss Catholic social teaching today we begin with Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical
Rerum Novarum.
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December 11, 2019
This week’s Acton Commentary, adapted from my preface to the newest Acton Institute publication
The Humane Economist: A Wilhelm Röpke Reader, illustrates what makes Röpke such an interesting and vital economist:
Röpke saw his project in holistic terms involving intersecting and interdependent spheres or
orden that to be fully appreciated and understood scientifically must be examined in their economic, social, and moral dimensions.
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December 04, 2019
Senator Marco Rubio’s interest in Catholic social teaching is exciting even if confused in its economic analysis and public policy recommendations. On the Acton Line Podcast released today I discuss with Fr.
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November 27, 2019
In this week’s Acton Commentary I examine Sen. Marco Rubio’s case for “Common-Good Capitalism”:
Americans are searching for answers for the disintegration of the family, falling participation in religious and civic institutions, drug dependency, suicide, and economic dislocation.
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November 25, 2019
Stephanie Slade writes in next month’s edition of
Reason Magazine about, ‘Regulation and ‘the Right Ordering of Economic Life” according to Catholic social teaching:
The Church’s surprising lesson for partisans of big government is that the best tools for correctly ordering economic life are found in the choices of individual market actors.
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November 19, 2019
I try to guard my attention closely for, as King Solomon admonishes, “Above all else, guard your heart, for everything you do flows from it.” (Proverbs 4:23). I don’t always succeed, but on my best days I focus on things I truly wish to understand through diligent study and things which I am able to do something about.
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November 13, 2019
In this week’s Acton Commentary I explore Presidential candidate Sen. Kamala Harris’s proposal to federalize day care to align school and work schedules as, “an economic growth and child development strategy”:
Economists, politicians, and even everyday people often talk of “the economy” as if it were a separate and distinct thing from the values, choices, and actions of everyday people.
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