An article in the Christmas issue of The Spectator make a surprising and bold claim: It may not feel like it, but 2012 has been the greatest year in the history of the world. That sounds like an extravagant claim, but it is borne out by evidence. Never has there been less hunger, less disease or more prosperity. The West remains in the economic doldrums, but most developing countries are charging ahead, and people are being lifted out of poverty...

“Why are you going to business school?” my friend asked, with some concern, “It seems like such a waste of your time. Why not study history or philosophy or the Great Books or something you’d enjoy.” It was a good question. I mitting myself to spending two years going to school full-time (while working full-time) to get a degree in a subject—business administration—in which I didn’t feel particularly passionate. But I felt that God was calling me to go to...

It was once said that the sun never set on the British Empire. The Brits colonized vast areas of the earth, civilizing exotic places with the likes of afternoon tea and cricket. Oh, and happily using up natural resources along the way. Those days are gone, but we’ve entered a new era of colonialism: renting the wombs of women in exotic places to fulfill a desire to have a child, under any circumstances. And now the natural resources are the...

Zero-sum: It’s thinking that if you have more, I have less. One more baby in a family is one more mouth to feed, and less food for everyone else. One new business opens up on the block, and all the rest of the businesses suffer. The guy in the cubicle next to you gets a raise, and you get nothing, because there’s nothing left. Except that it’s wrong. Lots of people know it, too. P.J. O’Rourke knows it, and he...

Every Wednesday we publish the Acton Commentary,a weekly article that covers topics related to Acton’s mission. As es to a close I thought it would be worth highlighting the mentaries that have been produced by Acton Institute staffers over the past year. The following list includes articles published in 2012 by Ray Nothstine, an associate editor at Acton and managing editor of Religion & Liberty: February 01, 2012 Playing Politics with Unemployed Veterans June 06, 2012 Calvin Coolidge and the...

Every Wednesday we publish the Acton Commentary, a weekly article that covers topics related to Acton’s mission. As es to a close I thought it would be worth highlighting the mentaries that have been produced by Acton Institute staffers over the past year. The following list includes articles published in 2012 by various Acton Institute staffers: Kishore Jayabalan, director of Istituto Acton February 08, 2012 Obamacare vs the Catholic Bishops May 02, 2012 Vatican Affirms ‘Supernatural’ Purpose to Work Life...

Matt Mitchell at Neighborhood Effects offers an interesting perspective regarding the fiscal cliff. As we hurriedly approach the edge, Mitchell’s insights ought not to be ignored, whatever the e of today’s last minute meeting at the White House. Evoking the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come from Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, he writes, At the risk of mixing metaphors, we should think of the fiscal cliff as the Ghost of the Fiscal Future. It is a bleak lesson in...

Over at AEIdeas, James Pethokoukis challenges our attitudes about work and leisure by drawing a helpful contrast between economists John Maynard Keynes and Deirdre McCloskey. First, he points to “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren,” in which Keynes frames our economic pursuits as a means to a leisurely end: Thus for the first time since his creation man will be faced with his real, his permanent problem-how to use his freedom from pressing economic cares, how to occupy the leisure, which...

In the New York Post, Acton Research Director Samuel Gregg looks at “the spread throughout America of economic expectations and arrangements directly at odds with our republic’s founding” and asks what the slow walk to “Europeanization” means for the long term. Gregg: Unfortunately there’s a great deal of evidence suggesting America is slouching down the path to Western Europe. In practical terms, that means social-democratic economic policies: the same policies that have turned many Western European nations into a byword...

The Choice of Hercules between Virtue and PleasureEli Horowitz over at Rust Belt Philosophy takes up my post from earlier this week, “The Christ Child and a Culture of Birth.” For the moment we can leave aside the accusations of racism latent in my view, as my demographic concerns are related to replacement levels and not to the question of majority/minority demographic shifts. I do want to address one claim from Horowitz about the nature of cultural privilege, though. His...