France’s 200 roads to serfdom

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Want to ‘change the world’? Embrace the glories of economic scale

As the latest crop of college graduates enters the workforce, many are coming fully loaded with grandiose plans for “social transformation,” “giving back to their communities,” and “making a difference.” Unfortunately, such phrases have become slippery slogans based on a cultural imagination that is far too narrow in its basic assumptions. Continue Reading...

6 Quotes: G.K. Chesterton on freedom and virtue

Yesterday was the 144th birthday of G.K. Chesterton. In his honor, here are six quotes by the great British writer on freedom and virtue. On defending virtue: “The act of defending any of the cardinal virtues has today all the exhilaration of a vice.” Continue Reading...

Are the culture wars unique to our times?

Culture wars are incredibly complex with overlapping conflicts that are often confused and conflated, says John D. Wilsey in this week’s Acton Commentary. For the past five decades, Americans have waged what has been commonly referred to as a “culture war.” Continue Reading...

The NHS and the spell of the White Witch

In The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, C.S. Lewis described the dreary state of Narnia under the curse of the White Witch as “always winter but never Christmas.” His assessment may soon apply to the National Health Service (NHS), whose annually intensifying “winter crisis” threatens to become permanent, according to the UK’s leading doctors’ association. Continue Reading...

An introduction to the Solow Model

Note: This is post #80 in a weekly video series on basic economics. The Solow model was named after Robert Solow, the 1987 winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics. Among other things, the Solow model helps us understand the nuances and dynamics of growth, says Alex Tabarrok of Marginal Revolution University. Continue Reading...