Matthew Peterson’s Not-So-Modest Proposal on Student Debt
Everybody agrees student loan debt is a large problem. In the United States approximately $1.5 trillion is currently owed by around 45 million people at an average…
Some Vagaries and Evagaries of Avarice
The image that always comes to mind for me when thinking about the vice of greed, or avarice, is that of Scrooge McDuck entering his vault and…
Russia’s Capitalist Realism
Russia’s Capitalist Realism. Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Chekhov. Vadim Shneyder. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2021. Russia’s Capitalist Realism breaks new grounds in the studies of nineteenth-century Russian…
Taleb and Business Ethics
Many of this semester’s readings will be taken from Antifragile by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. He first rose to fame with his 2007 book Black Swan, the title…
The Journey Home: Wilhelm Röpke and the Humane Economy
Two Greek words define my topic: nostos and oikos. The first—from which we have ‘nostalgia’—denotes return to the home, and it is the great theme of Homer’s…
Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can’t Explain the Modern World
Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can’t Explain the Modern World. Deirdre N. McCloskey. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010. According to McCloskey, a change in the common…
Calculated Values: Finance, Politics, and the Quantitative Age
Calculated Values: Finance, Politics, and the Quantitative Age. William Deringer. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018. How is that we are beholden to numbers? We view…
Commerce and Manners in Edmund Burke’s Political Economy
Commerce and Manners in Edmund Burke’s Political Economy. Gregory M. Collins. Cambridge University Press, 2020. It can only be fortunate for us and the future of…
How China Escaped the Poverty Trap
How China Escaped the Poverty Trap. Yeun Yuen Ang. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2016. How can poor and weak societies escape poverty traps? What comes…
The Symmetrical House of Form: The Economics of Being and The Struggle for Existence in Prehistory (Part II)
Time present and time past Are both perhaps present in time future, And time future contained in time past. - T.S. Eliot Burnt Norton[1] Prologue In…
The Economy of Funerals and Aunts
The office of the Vice President, FDR’s second veep John Nance “Cactus Jack” Garner allegedly said, is not worth a bucket of warm spit. What do vice…
Saint John Henry Newman, Sacramental Economist
One might not think of the newly-canonized Catholic Saint John Henry Newman as a patron of businessmen or investment bankers. After all, in “Christ the Quickening Spirit,”…
Röpke’s Conundrums Over the Natural Family
Wilhelm Röpke was an unusual free-market economist working in a difficult time. I believe that we should see him, first of all, as a product of 1914,…
The Guilds of The Middle Ages: An Example of Practical Subsidiarity
The concept of the guild, or occupational group, as its modern version has sometimes been called, is one of the most distinctive features of Catholic socio-economic thought. …
Decentralism and Subsidiarity: Applications to Society and Culture
There can be no such thing as a “global village.” No matter how much one may love the world as a whole, one can live fully in…