Economics and Social Problems

July 05, 2019

Is income inequality acceptable?

In the past few weeks, democratic presidential hopefuls outlined income inequality fixes anywhere from $1,000 per month basic income to free college and single payer healthcare. While many operate on the assumption that income equality results in a fair economic system, I do not. Continue Reading...

July 01, 2019

Is social media the source of our social problems?

The British economist John Kay made a powerful argument in his 2011 book Obliquity: Why our goals are best achieved indirectly that the best way to achieve any complex of broadly defined goal is indirectly through a gradual process of risk taking and discovery. Continue Reading...

June 03, 2019

Are rising education and healthcare costs our own fault?

Alex Tabarrok, professor of Economics at George Mason University and co-author of the Marginal Revolution blog, has co-authored a new book with Eric Helland exploring why prices have risen so sharply in healthcare and education. Continue Reading...

May 30, 2019

Rev. Robert Sirico on socialism and the religious left in the Detroit News

The Detroit News has published an opinion piece by Fr. Robert Sirico on our increasingly contentious public discourse, socialism, and the religious left titled ‘The dangers of creeping toward socialism’: The popes have traditionally condemned socialism in the strongest possible terms as being incompatible with Christianity, because its concept of society itself is utterly foreign to Christian truth. Continue Reading...

May 28, 2019

Video: Cory Booker makes the case for school choice in Grand Rapids (October 2000)

Sen. Cory Booker, then a Newark city councilman, made the case for school vouchers at an Acton sponsored October 2000 event at the Wealthy Theater in Grand Rapids saying, “The cost of not doing the program is having continuing generations of kids chained to failing schools when they could be easily liberated if the parents were given the right to choose where they go with their money.” Continue Reading...

May 28, 2019

LBJ’s Great Society lives on

Forget Ronald Reagan and John F. Kennedy, Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton as well. And do the same regarding Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower. The most consequential American president since the end of World War II was Lyndon Baines Johnson. Continue Reading...

May 24, 2019

Robbing Pietro to pay Paolo? The zero-sum game in Italy’s welfare state

Robbing Peter to pay Paul. This is an idiomatic expression about bad – or at least disappointing – economics. Curiously, it was born within the context of the Church’s supposedly poor financial administration of its properties. Continue Reading...

May 20, 2019

Is Facebook a monopoly the government should break up?

Chris Hughes, a co-founder of Facebook and co-chairman of the Economic Security Project, has recently written an impassioned plea in the New York Times calling for the government to break up Facebook. Continue Reading...

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