Acton Institute Powerblog Archives

Post Tagged 'economics'

October 14, 2013

Deneen and Creative Destruction

Among many other bizarre claims in his most recent article at The American Conservative, Patrick Deneen writes, Today’s conservatives are liberals — they favor an economy that wreaks “creative destruction,” especially on the mass of “non-winners,” increasingly controlled by a few powerful actors who secure special benefits for themselves and their heirs…. Continue Reading...
October 07, 2013

A Failure to Save

This first appeared in my newsletter, Economic Prospect, in late 2008. Looking back after five years I still like it. The American failure to save is matched by our insistence on spending to have it all. Continue Reading...
September 27, 2013

Surplus = Happiness, Deficit = Misery

Joe Carter points to a Lifehacker article that sums up two basic equations that lead to the creation of wealth (with what I consider to be a clarifying correction applied in the first formula): Income spending = surplus Surplus x time = wealth Likewise, Wilhelm Röpke, in his A Humane Economy, points to two equations arising from classical literature that connect surplus with happiness and deficit to misery (the Micawber Principle). Continue Reading...
August 29, 2013

Maximizing labor, minimizing wages

For this week’s Acton Commentary, ahead of Labor Day weekend, I write about “working harder and smarter,” lessons we can learn from Ashton Kutcher and Mike Rowe. One of the implications of connecting hard work with smart work is that the difficulty of work on its own does not determine its value in the marketplace. Continue Reading...
August 27, 2013

Samuel Gregg: Reduced Freedoms? A Review Of ‘Becoming Europe’

Becoming Europe, the latest book from Acton’s Director of Research Samuel Gregg, has been reviewed by Books & Culture: A Christian Review. Theodore Roosevelt Malloch, a research professor at Yale University’s Center for Faith & Culture, begins his review with a series of question, including, “Will entrepreneurship vanish in America, as it has, more or less, in Europe? Continue Reading...
August 23, 2013

The Economics of Profiling

I ran across this video yesterday (courtesy of ESA), which I thought presented some interesting challenges and issues: The video was presented on Upworthy as an example of something “all white people could do to make the world a better place,” that is, use their white privilege to address injustices. Continue Reading...