Posts by Samuel Gregg
January 28, 2026
What ultimately drives economic growth and development? Is it culture, institutions, norms, innovation, technology, or some combination of all these things and other factors? Is there any way in which we can organize societies that will allow them to escape mass impoverishment?
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August 19, 2025
As political divisions widen across the American right on topics ranging from the proper conduct of economic policy to the United States’ relationship with the rest of the world, considerable attention has been given to the ensemble of ideas given the label “fusionism.”
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December 03, 2024
If you ask most people today what caused the 2008 financial crisis and the subsequent “Great Recession,” my suspicion is that the answer would be something like “untrammeled and unregulated financial markets.”
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November 04, 2024
A decade or so ago, I boarded a Miami flight headed for Detroit and found myself sitting next to a short, elderly, Latin American gentleman. Throughout the flight, we exchanged the usual pleasantries that characterize such travel.
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September 04, 2024
F.A. Hayek’s
The Road to Serfdom (1944) is often portrayed as a mid-20th-century economist’s restatement of a 19th-century case for unreconstructed laissez-faire economics. Anyone who has read the text, however, knows that this is a serious misrepresentation of Hayek’s most famous book.
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October 05, 2023
If there is anything we have learned about Pope Francis’ commentaries on issues ranging from economics to the environment, it is that they invariably add up to a by-now predictable mixture.
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September 19, 2023
What is progress? How and where does it occur? Such questions are not easy to answer. Debates about the nature of progress have given rise to entire theories of historical development.
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June 29, 2023
If there is anything that makes people nervous about capitalism, it is surely the prospect of instability. Whether it is the boom-bust cycle or severe financial crises, the up-and-downs that seem to be part-and-parcel of life in market economies make us nervous.
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November 15, 2022
As far as centuries go, the 20th was remarkable for many things, not least among which were wars fought on a scale unprecedented for their destructiveness, as well as convulsive debates about economics and economic policy.
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September 07, 2022
It’s no secret that the modern American conservative movement is divided today. Issues like the role of government, the place of the nation-state, and the extent to which free markets should prevail in economic life have become major points of fracture across the right that seem unlikely to be resolved soon.
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