From 1990 to 2010, the global poverty rate dipped from 43% to 21%. The Economist explains why the rate halved in twenty years: How did this happen? Presidents and prime ministers in the West have made grandiloquent speeches about making poverty history for fifty years. In 2000 the United Nations announced a series of eight Millenium Development Goals to reduce poverty, improve health and so on. The impact of such initiatives has been marginal at best. Almost all of the...

“We poverty junkies spend a lot of time examining the fruits and the roots,” says Mark Weber at PovertyCure, “But what of the soil?” Tyler Cowen also recently noted that economists don’t talk nearly enough about soil, despite their contributing to some of the biggest problems in the entire world. The problems can be seen in the European Union’s Institute for Environment & Sustainability recently published Soil Atlas of Africa. Robin Grier highlights some of the findings: 1. “While Africa...

We live in a society that really wants us to feel good. We have weight-loss programs, 24-hour gyms, hair color for men and women, and scads of “self-help” books. We laugh at videos on the internet of people doing dumb stuff, just so we know we are better than that. If we’ve got a job, a reasonably well-trained dog and no parking tickets to pay, we are good. Right? John Zmirak begs to differ. He takes us to an imaginary...

Rabbi Meir Soloveichik, a professor at Yeshiva College in New York, says religious liberty does not mean we need to water down our beliefs in order to get along. Rather, he says that people of different faiths must learn to live as both “stranger and friend“: The rabbi explained that “America is the first country in a long time founded around an idea,” and that religious freedom “is the philosophical lynchpin of what lies at the heart of American ideals.”...

Russell Moore on how Abraham Kuyper predicted the era of Madison Avenue’s culture of art and mammon: [James Bratt] writes that Kuyper saw the bination of “Art as captured by Mammon.” Here the bined to a mercialized, lowered, prostituted, feeding the pulsion for excitement, excess, and the erotic.” In this, Bratt contends that Kuyper was hitting close to explaining the contemporary rise of Madison Avenue as a cultural force, “the marriage of Art and Mammon that mercial advertising.” Here’s where...

Acton’s Director of Research, Samuel Gregg, has a column in the latest issue of Legatus magazine. In it, he recognizes the plishments and Catholic faith of one of America’s Founding Fathers, Charles Carroll. Carroll, the only Catholic signer of the Declaration of Independence, was an established businessman, and signing the Declaration was a risky move. It literally put his entire fortune at risk. mercial interests extended far beyond those of the typical Marylander of his time. They ranged from grain...

Acton University is fast approaching. As a way to greet our speakers and attendees we’ve placed this billboard on 131 South near the Wealthy St. Exit. If you’re in Grand Rapids, be sure to check it out! ...

Back in January, I was interviewed for the podcast Conversations On Orthodoxy. After some wonderful editing, the interview has recently been posted. In particular, the focus of the interview is mostly on how I went from an American Evangelical upbringing to ing a convert to the Orthodox Church. However, I wanted to link to it here because it concludes with some thoughts about my work at Acton. In particular, I talk about Acton’s vision for a free and virtuous society,...

Leaders from Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia, the U.S., and UK will meet at Lough Erne in Northern Ireland for the G8 Summit June 17-18, 2013. These international negotiations among the world’s largest economies provide opportunities to discuss the fluidity of trade between nations but also provokes public protest. All over social media, various groups are set to organize protests about the global trade conference because capitalism and international trade are viewed as evil. For example, the “Stop G8...

German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble is a frustrated man. With unemployment rates in Germany hovering at around 8 percent, and Greece and Spain at almost 60 percent, he believes the EU is on the brink of “revolution.” His answer is not to scrap the welfare model however; he wants to preserve it. While Germany insists on the importance of budget consolidation, Schaeuble spoke of the need to preserve Europe’s welfare model. If U.S. welfare standards were introduced in Europe, “we...