gives us a list of “fun” facts about the economy. Of course, “fun” is used in an ironic way, which e clear when you look at just how dreary these facts are: $1.8 Trillion: Cost Of ObamaCare’s Coverage Provisions From 2014 To 2023 (CBO, 7/30/13)$1 Trillion: The Total Student Debt Held By Americans. (Josh Mitchell, “Student-Loan Debt Slows Recovery,” The Wall Street Journal’s Real Time Economics, 12/30/13) $174 Billion:Federal Budget Deficit For The First Three Months Of FY2014. (U.S. Treasury...

Kierkegaard once wrote, “The majority of men are subjective toward themselves and objective toward all others, terribly objective sometimes–but the real task is in fact to be objective toward one’s self and subjective toward all others.” In this week’s Acton Commentary, “Discounting the Unseen,” I explore our responsibility to presume the best of others, particularly with regards to what remains unknown or assumed about them. This is a significant task given our natural propensity to excuse ourselves and to condemn...

In the latest EconTalk podcast, Nina Munk, journalist and author of The Idealist: Jeffrey Sachs and the Quest to End Poverty, talks about how she spent six years following Jeffrey Sachs and the evolution of the Millennium Villages Project — an attempt to jumpstart a set of African villages in hopes of discovering a new template for development. Munk details the great optimism at the beginning of the project and the discouraging results after six years of high levels of...

“Why, if we have made such great strides reducing poverty,” asks Scott Winship, “is there such widespread belief that, to quote Ronald Reagan, ‘We fought a war on poverty, and poverty won’?” We won the War on Poverty in the sense that the prevalence of material hardship has declined. According to Meyer and Sullivan, just 8 percent of Americans live at the low standard of living endured by a third of Americans in 1963. But it was a limited and...

The core economic challenge facing the American experiment is not e inequality per se, but rather stratification and stagnation —weak mobility from the bottom of the e ladder and wage stagnation for the middle class. These challenges are bound up in a growing social crisis— a retreat from marriage, a weakening of religious munal ties, a decline in workforce participation— that cannot be solved in Washington D.C. But economic and social policy can make a difference nonetheless, making family life...

Robert M. Edsel’s The Monuments Men: Allied Heroes, Nazi Thieves, and the Greatest Treasure Hunt in History is a terrific book regarding a part of World War II history that few are aware of. One of Hitler’s goals was to amass great art for his personal collection, and to build a museum and a cathedral in Linz, Austria. What Edsel calls a “backwater of factories and smoke” would e, in Hitler’s vision, a cultural center to rival anything Europe had...

I have a can’t miss prediction: tonight, when President Obama gives his sixth State of the Union address, he will describe the state of the union as “strong.” Admittedly, predicting that the state of our union will be described as “strong” is about as safe a bet as you can make when es to politics. Over the last hundred years presidents have described the State of the Union (SOTU) in various ways — Good (Truman), Sound (Carter), Not Good (Ford)....

Upon the recent birth of our third child, I took a brief “vacation” from “work” (quotes intended). The time spent with family was special, joyous, and fulfilling, yet given the extreme lack of sleep, the sudden rush of behavioral backlash from Toddler Siblings 1 and 2, and a host of new scarcities and constraints, it was also a whole heap of work. Needless to say, when I arrived back at the office just a week later, I felt like I...

Pete Seeger performing the Woodie Guthrie song “This Land is Your Land” at President Obama’s “We Are One” Inaugural Concert, January 19, 2009. Environmentalist, agent provocateur, leftist activist, recovering Communist and ardent redistributionist – all apply to the folksinger who died Monday in New York at the age of 94. Pete Seeger, for better or worse, answered to all of the above adjectives but it’s his legacy as a songwriter and performer for which this writer prefers to remember him....

On January 14, as Brad Chacos so perfectly put it for PC World, “a Washington appeals court ruled that the FCC’s net neutrality rules are invalid in an 81-page document that included talk about cat videos on YouTube.” Reactions have been varied. Joe Carter recently surveyed various arguments in his latest explainer. For my part, I mend the German, ordoliberal economist Walter Eucken as a guide for evaluating net neutrality, which as Joe Carter put it, “[a]t its simplest …...