economics 45
Beyond the Mechanism: An Economist Grapples with Statesmanship
When we refuse to engage our fellow citizens, we are also taking a public position. There is such a thing as non-partisan economics. But there is no such thing as…
Private Tyrants, Public Remedies: A Review of Sohrab Ahmari’s Tyranny, Inc.
The “freedom to walk away” from at-will employment seems, in many cases, to be the “freedom” to launch yourself into the unsteady winds of “joblessness and financial misery,” particularly if…
The New House, The New Life
I fear that neither liberals nor most self-styled conservatives want to reexamine the habits, both economic and sexual, that have impoverished the working class, set the middle class on the…
When Work Disappears: A Review of The Other Side of Prospect
Certainly there is a need for a national conversation and national solutions... But reading The Other Side of Prospect, one is left with the sense that the ultimate authors of…
The Sinister Agenda Behind “The Economy”: A review of We Built Reality: How Social Science Infiltrated Culture, Politics, and Power
Continuing to base economic and government models around a reductive view of homo economicus will trap us within the inhumane “reality we have made.”
Between Port Royal and Patagonia
Being wealthy doesn’t make Chouinard a better representative of the values that he shares with Berry, but recognizing that Berry is not alone and that these values can be brought…
Grace is the Currency of the True Economy
Theologians have long used the language of economics to help explain God’s ways. They often focus on redemption as a kind of transaction. I think this is just one aspect…
Imagining Humane (Household) Economies
Hirschfeld’s assessment of what we as Christians should and should not accept in mainstream economics, informed by her training in both economics and theology, is thus a most welcome resource.
“Ora et Anti-Labora”? Kathryn Tanner on Finance Capitalism
The mighty cosmos of the modern economic order determines, with overwhelming coercion, the style of life not only of those directly involved in business but of every individual who is born into…
On the Costs and Rewards of Planting Trees
I have just planted two apple trees from what my local nursery calls their “Posterity Collection,” heritage varieties grafted onto a slower-growing but durable and long-lived rootstock so that the trees…
Messing About in Boats
In the nautical classic The Wind in the Willows, Ratty tells his new acquaintance Mole, “‘Believe me, my young friend, there is NOTHING—absolutely nothing—half so much worth doing as simply…
Backyard Beekeeping
I had long resisted adding ten thousand new livestock to our less than two acres. I had listened to beekeepers’ tales of bears and had read enough about varroa mites…
The Demise of Virtue in Virtual America (Front Porch Republic Books)
Entrance:Virtual America’s Convention Hall Demise—1) the conveyance of an estate 2) transfer of the sovereignty to a successor 3) a: death b: cessation of existence or…
New ANAMNESIS Symposium: “Views on Hawthorne, Simms, History, and Progress.”
Many FPR readers will enjoy the new symposium, "Views on Hawthorne, Simms, History, and Progress," in ANAMNESIS, A Journal for the Study of Tradition, Place, and 'Things Divine.'
Running for President? How About Running Somewhere Else.
Holland MI. As if my beloved state of Michigan hasn’t had enough problems, we now have Republican presidential candidates skittering across our fair soil and bucolic shorelines, plugging up our phone…
New Symposium on Distributism
Porch readers will be interested in the new online symposium on distributism that is now on ANAMNESIS, A Journal for the Study of Tradition, Place, and 'Things Divine.' This includes…
We Have Met the Enemy, and He is Us
One has a free choice of whether to take one's cocaine in crystal or powdered form. However, while this may be a free choice, it is never a choice of…
The Mosh-Pit of Philosophy, the Pedestal of Science, and a Plate of Green Beans
Last Saturday, I had the pleasure of addressing the ISI Conference at Taylor University, “Whose Capitalism? Which Free Market? Exploring the Moral Dimensions of the Market.” My message to the…
Wendell Berry and the Great Economy
Economics has become a totalizing system claiming the power to explain all things. It is as much a religious system—by another name—as is Berry's Great Economy.
Naive Experts: Economists and the Real World
If your doctor had this same track record of diagnosing and treating disease, you’d be dead by now.
Castles Built on Sand
Even for the average homeowner, ownership all too often is imagined as a way of gaming income flow and consumption over a lifetime, accumulating enough to spend down before one…
Hot Tub Economics
The ideology of free trade and managed society continues to destroy the prospects of a prosperous American in the Twenty-First Century. Let us dig down and return to the one…