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 […]
Archives
-
Nudge, Nudge
25 Sep 2013
-
Study War No More? No, More.
19 Sep 2013
Washington, DC, aside from its various political denizens, is always full of opportunities to hear interesting lectures, speeches and debates on myriads of topics. Last night my daughter and I attended a debate at the Library of Congress entitled “Freedom, Security and America’s Role in the World.” It was sponsored by the Koch Institute and […]
-
Explaining the Christian World(View) of Politics
15 Sep 2013
Our Bereans@thegate blog has as its aim the engagement of Christian thought with the spheres of politics, economics and culture. But it has occurred that perhaps the readers of the blog may not have a full sense of why and how we write what we do. In other words, many of the posts are about […]
-
That’s likely to be the result in the U.N.’s upcoming Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) “fifth assessment report,” if this sneak preview reported in the WSJ is true. Indeed, the benefits of global warming could be greater than the harm: Therefore, the new report is effectively saying (based on the middle of the range […]
-
Capitalist Virtues: An Oxymoron?
12 Sep 2013
I am in the middle of reading a couple of really interesting and controversial books on capitalism. One is Deidre McCloskey’s The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for An Age of Commerce. University of Chicago Press, 2006. This is a big book on big subject, a grand sweep type of book with high ambition. McCloskey is currently a […]
-
Back to Obamacare
11 Sep 2013
It’s hot here in DC, really hot–96 degrees and humid. How did people function here before air conditioning? Wait, they didn’t. Government was much smaller and those who could left town for the summer. Jefferson had two homes in Virginia. Congress had a longer vacation. Those were the good old days. But here we are […]
-
Christianity, Culture and Russell Moore
10 Sep 2013
I had the privilege of attending the inauguration in Washington, DC of Russell D. Moore as the new president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention. The service (and it was a worship service more than merely an inauguration) at the historic Capitol Hill Baptist Church. Speakers included a former […]
-
Random Thoughts
07 Sep 2013
Actually I have two topics, one more important and the other just an illustration of how bureaucractic organizations can become pathological or dysfunctional. So let’s begin with Syria. My colleague Mark Smith enumerated well the various issues and positions on the question of whether we should use force against Assad’s ruling regime. It is indeed […]
-
A very interesting and a very telling bit of research from Sentier Research was released two weeks ago. Sentier analyzes data from the Current Population Survey to estimate trends in median household income. Yesterday, Steven Moore at the Wall Street Journal, published an op-ed piece based on Sentier’s analysis: Obama’s Economy Hits His Voters Hardest. During […]
-
Ronald Coase-RIP
04 Sep 2013
It is a sad but joyous day to report the passing of another economic giant. Ronald Coase was a seminal figure in economics, a Nobel Laureate who truly changed the way all of us think about the world. It is sad with the loss of any great figure, and yet Professor Coase was not quite […]
Bert Wheeler
Jeff Haymond
Marc Clauson
Mark Caleb Smith
Tom Mach