What is Gross Domestic Product (GDP)? The definition is rather straightforward: GDP is the market value of all finished goods and services, produced within a country in a year. But that’s not very useful in trying to understand the concept. In this video by Marginal Revolution University, they mend thinking ofthe economy as a giant supermarket, with billions of goods and services inside. At the checkout line, you watch as the cashier rings up the price for each finished good...

The 2016 Acton Lecture Series continued on March 3rd at Acton’s Mark Murray Auditorium with an address by Acton Research Fellow and Producer ofPoverty, Inc.Michael Matheson Miller. Miller’s topic for the day was “Technocracy and The Global Political Consensus.” Many of our current political and social challenges center around the fundamental question of what it means to be a human being, and our understanding of what it means to live an authentic human life. The answers to these questions will...

With the 2010 publication of The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Ohio State University law professor Michelle Alexander, the conversation about America’s exploding prison population singularly became focused on the intersection of race, poverty, and the War on Drugs. According to the narrative, the drug war disproportionately targets blacks in lower munities as a means of social control via the criminal justice system similarly to the way Jim Crow controlled blacks in the early...

“If you are a manual laborer, you find that the Bible has been put into your workshop, into your hand, into your heart. It teaches and preaches how you should treat your neighbor.” –Martin Luther Christian’s Library Press has now released Working for Our Neighbor, Gene Veith’s Lutheran primer on vocation, economics, and ordinary life. The book joins Acton’s growing series of tradition-specific, faith-work primers, whichalsoincludes Baptist, Wesleyan, Pentecostal, and Reformed perspectives. Veith, who describesMartin Luther as “the great theologian...

A new survey by NPR and Harvard University reports the self-reported experiences of health care consumers across the country, in states that have (New Jersey, Ohio, Oregon) and have not (Florida, Kansas, Texas) expanded Medicaid, and in one (Wisconsin) that did not have to expand Medicare. Here are seven figures you should know from the report: 1. When asked about its effects on the people of their state, more than a third (35 percent) of adults say they believe national...

The phenomenon that is Donald Trump and his presidential campaign can only truly be understood when you recognize his basic appeal: he’s bringing a brand of folk Marxism to an entirely new audience. Before we unpack what this means, we must first understand what it does not mean. Folk Marxism is not Classical Marxism, much munism. Marxism has so many varieties that even Karl Marx once said, “what is certain is that I myself am not a Marxist.” Folk Marxism...

Since its development as a political movement in the 1700s, socialism has spread to numerous nations, especially in Asia and Africa. Yet even when the U.S. government began adopting socialist policies (see: the New Deal), Americans tended to reject any direct connectionsto socialism. Why is that? One possible answer may be that America is simply too religious. As Andrew R. Lewis and Paul A. Djupe of FiveThirtyEight explain: To understand the relationship between socialist values and religion, we used the...

Oh, dear! GMO cassava can potentially feed millions on the African continent? Heaven forfend![/caption]If you grew up outside the African and South American continents you can be forgiven for thinking cassava is the latest variation of salsa music or perhaps the funky new energy beverage trendy hipsters are drinking these days. In Africa, however, 500 million individuals recognize cassava as a dietary staple much like the rest of the world enjoys potatoes and rice. Native to South America, cassava was...

Religious shareholder activist group As You Sow released its 2016 Proxy Preview last week, and it’s a doozy. Tellingly, AYS has dropped religious faith as a rationale for its climate-change and anti-lobbying efforts. From the panying press release: More 2016 shareholder proposals than ever before address climate change — pared with 82 in 2015. Of the resolutions, 22 ask energy extractors and suppliers to detail how the warming planet will affect their operations and how they will respond if governments...

Most Americans believe that it is very important for them to be a generous person. Yet almost half did not give to charity in the past year, and less than a quarter gave more than $500. That’s the latest findings in a new Science of Generosity survey. An even more disconcerting discovery is that quarter of Americans were neutral on the importance of generosity and 10 percent disagreed that generosity was not a very important quality. As David Briggs of...