There is a kind of trendy “green” simplicity that is a luxury only paratively wealthy can afford, says Dylan Pahman in this week’s Acton Commentary. But there is a movement catching steam that might perfectly encapsulate a type of solar-powered simplicity: The tiny house movement is a recent trend in the United States for building and living in eco-friendly domiciles about half the average size of an apartment. Graham Hill, a tiny house architect, described his philosophy in the New...

Madison Root is an enterprising young lady. She knows braces are expensive, and wants to help pay for them. So, she went to her uncle’s farm, cut and bundled mistletoe and headed to the downtown Portland, Ore. market to sell it for the holiday season. And then she ran into the long arm of bureaucracy. …a security guard told her that she had to stop selling due to a city ordinance that bans such activity in a park “except as...

Pope Francis’ Apostolic Exhortation Evangelii Gaudium continues to stimulate conversation, especially in the arena of economics. According to Francis X. Rocca at the Catholic News Service, many are heralding the pope’s call for doing away with “an ‘economy of exclusion and inequality’ based on the ‘idolatry of money.'” Sam Gregg, Acton’s Director of Research, weighed in on the pope’s economic viewpoint. There’s plenty of evidence out there, from the World Bank for example, suggesting that the number of people in...

The Acton Institute is co-sponsoring the ‘Cure Our World’ Conference, sponsored by the Catholic Business Executives Group (CBEG) for Christian business leaders. The conference will take place in Bangkok, March 20-22 of 2014. There will be many interesting speakers, including Acton president and co-founder, Rev. Robert A. Sirico. Read on for how to get the “early bird” discount. Here are seven reasons why you consider participating in this conference: To learn, meditate and inculcate the social teachings and wisdom of...

I find the new investigative essay by journalist Michael J. Totten about Havana before and munism poignant and beautiful, a must-read for anyone interested in munism and the universal hunger for liberty. The long essay is worth every word, but I’ve excerpted a few of the most arresting passages here: The rotting surfaces of some of the buildings [in the tourist district] have been restored, but those changes are strictly cosmetic. Look around. There’s still nothing to buy. You’ll find...

After reading ment thread in which her online friends plaining about poor people’s self-defeating behavior, Linda Walther Tirado wrote an articled titled “Why I Make Terrible Decisions, or, Poverty Thoughts,” which chronicled her struggles with near abject poverty. I think that we look at the academic problems of poverty and have no idea of the why. We know the what and the how, and we can see systemic problems, but it’s rare to have a poor person actually explain it...

Last night on CNBC’s The Kudlow Report,PovertyCuredirector and Acton Research Fellow Michael Matheson Miller joined host Lawrence Kudlow and Rusty Reno, Editor of First Things magazine, to discuss the position of the Roman Catholic Church on global capitalism in light of Pope Francis’ Apostolic Exhortation ‘Evangelii Gaudium.’ The video is embedded below. ...

A Rube Goldberg machine, contraption, invention, device, or apparatus is a deliberately over-engineered or overdone machine that performs a very simple task in a plex fashion, usually including a chain reaction. When each of my five kids hit 5th grade, they had to build a Rube Goldberg machine. It had to include a pulley, a lever…each of the simple machines. Thankfully, my children have an engineer father. Had it been left up to me, they would have gone to school...