At least indirectly, through this excellent short video by Arthur Brooks. Arthur is one of our favorite social scientists here at Bereansatthegate.com; he is also President of the American Enterprise Institute. Arthur summarizes social science research on what drives happiness; well worth your review. Earned success…that’s the key. What enables this? A free enterprise economy: […]
Archives
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The Secret to Happiness….revealed within
16 Dec 2013
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Not fair! How many times did we hear, or say, that when we were children and someone thought they were not being treated fairly, whatever that meant to them? We are hearing it again, from grown-ups—well, I think they are grown-ups. We hear it from the Occupy Wall Street crowd (what is left of them), […]
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What Republicans Need or Don’t Need
05 Dec 2013
Mike Murphy has written a provocative editorial imploring the Republican Party to seize the moment. He is to be applauded for encouraging the party to act, but his proposal represents well the current debate among Republicans regarding how to move forward. For Murphy it is about dispatching the old, uncomfortable positions on social issues like […]
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Much of our current political polarization is explainable by the conflicting visions underlying each side; visions that Thomas Sowell suggests reflect a basic understanding of the way the world works. In many cases, people with similar values will nevertheless disagree with each other because they view the world differently. Yet there are also questions of […]
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The jury is still partly out on the immediate fate of the Affordable Care Act. After the heroic filibuster of Ted Cruz, the Senate ended debate and voted overwhelmingly to re-insert the funding language for “Obamacare” into the overall spending bill. The vote was 79-19, so there were many Republicans voting with all of the […]
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Nudge, Nudge
25 Sep 2013
Economics is often thought of as a quasi-hard science; a field where number crunching and rationality yield positive and true results. While Ph.D.s in the field acknowledge that it is often hard to account for all the variables, in the past they would argue that if it were possible to account for all factors, a mathematical […]
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The Politicization of Marriage
29 Aug 2013
J.D. Vance wrote an interesting piece in the recent issue of National Review on the importance of mobility as an indicator of opportunity in America. His point is that while we may be seeing some signs of life in the economy due to growth—that growth does not necessarily mean that opportunity is expanding. According to […]
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A Moral Case for Markets?
20 Aug 2013
Some of you who read this blog and some who have read the recent works by Robert Sirico and Arthur Brooks know that the need of the hour seems to be to make a moral case for markets. Nearly everyone admits their efficiency and ability to create massive wealth. But the criticism on ethical […]
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The Gay Marriage Debate is Not Over
20 Aug 2013
Michael Emerson and Laura Essenberg (both at Rice University) recently publicized a white paper on American attitudes toward marriage. The paper is based on a two-wave panel study that examined respondents in both 2006 and in 2012. These sorts of panel data are a gold-standard approach to examining change over time. Most surveys are simple […]
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From atop Olympus, which now sits at the corner of First and East Capitol in Washington, D.C., Justice Anthony Kennedy, in his infinite wisdom, let loose his latest thunderbolt, United States v. Windsor. In the majority opinion, Kennedy decreed Section 3 of the Defense of Marriage Act (1996) to be unconstitutional, thereby rendering the federal […]
Bert Wheeler
Jeff Haymond
Marc Clauson
Mark Caleb Smith
Tom Mach