Religion & Liberty Online Archives

Public Policy

July 26, 2010

Religious Development

Bill Easterly has a brief reflection on the role of religion in global societies, a role that must be taken into account by development ‘experts.’ Speaking of his experience at an Anglican worship service in Ghana: I think it’s something about how to understand people’s behavior, you need to understand how they see themselves. Continue Reading...
July 23, 2010

Humans are not Economic Automata

Courtesy Evangelical Outpost and the always-interesting 33 Things, here’s a video on the strangeness of the economics of incentives and punishments: The lesson here is that people in real life, body and soul, are not simple rational economic actors who respond only to material realities. Continue Reading...
July 23, 2010

Privacy and Public Persons

This week’s Acton Commentary from Rev. Gregory Jensen, “Finding the Balance: Privacy and the Civil Society,” is a thoughtful reflection on the place of privacy in our modern life. I have recently made the claim that public persons, such as police officers and politicians, have a somewhat different claim to privacy than private persons. Continue Reading...
July 20, 2010

Stop! Think! Go!

Wired magazine had a lengthy feature in 2004 on a new brand of transit design, specifically the kind that eschews signage and barriers, preferring instead more subtle signals. In “Roads Gone Wild,” Tom McNichol profiles Hans Monderman (now deceased), “a traffic engineer who hates traffic signs.” Continue Reading...
July 19, 2010

Fair Trade: Rhetoric and Reality

The NYT Freakonomics blog notes that the Fair Trade movement does not exist independently of the laws of economics: But the problem with Fair Trade coffee is that as the program scales up, the alternative market ethics it wants to sustain collapse. Continue Reading...
July 13, 2010

Still not Beyond Petroleum

Here’s OpenMarket: Plain and simple economics — not the alleged machinations of Big Oil or Congress’s unwillingness to put a price on carbon – explains why America remains dependent on petroleum. Continue Reading...
July 12, 2010

Walk, Pedal, Drive

Some of the assumptions built into the mainstream international aid and development movement are puzzling. Among them is the faulty assumption that the comparison that matters most is how the developing world is doing in relation to the developed. Continue Reading...
July 08, 2010

Reflections on Christianity and Economic Research

Judith Dean, currently an international economist at the U.S. International Trade Commission, has a worthwhile exploration of the relationship between Christian faith and economic research (HT). It’s up at the InterVarsity site for the Following Christ conference and is titled, “Being a Good Physician: Reflections on Christianity and Economic Research.” Continue Reading...