Acton Institute Powerblog Archives

Post Tagged 'Keynesian economics'

Christianity, Socialism, and Wealth Creation

Christian churches in the West have been focused on redistribution of income rather than the creation of wealth, says Brian Griffiths in this week’s Acton Commentary. Through much of the post-war period in the West, the formation of economic policy was dominated by Keynesian activism on the part of governments seeking an increasing role in providing public services, reducing material poverty, and reshaping income redistribution. Continue Reading...

John Nash: A Beautiful Austrian Mind?

My older son’s college psychology class was recently assigned the film A Beautiful Mind, about the Nobel Prize winning economist and schizophrenia sufferer John Nash. The assignment was to watch the film, dig into Nash’s biography, and report on how the film altered Nash’s story of mental breakdown and recovery. Continue Reading...

Inflation and the Minimum Wage

In yesterday’s edition of The Transom, which I highly recommend, Ben Domenech included a discussion that places the debates over raising the minimum wage within the broader context of the effects of inflation more generally. Continue Reading...

What Economics Can’t Explain

Tyler Cowen has an interesting column in last Sunday’s New York Times, arguing that despite run-of-the-mill objections to “cold” and “heartless” economic analysis, economics is, as a science, “egalitarian at its core”: Economic analysis is itself value-free, but in practice it encourages a cosmopolitan interest in natural equality. Continue Reading...

Work, Leisure, and the Search for Daily Meaning

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 science and compound interest will have won for him, to live wisely and agreeably and well. Continue Reading...

When Politics Trump Economics

That seems to be the story, based on what Veronique de Rugy has written at National Review Online. Calling for tax increases in an economic downturn doesn’t make any sense, even under Keynesian theories. Continue Reading...