Immanuel Church elder Matt Waldrep once posted this on Facebook: “It is no aid to anyone to simply state that we ought to pray for God’s will to be done in a circumstance about which he has already spoken plainly in his word, especially if there is an implicit call to action for you. Yes […]
“Hocus Pocus Charles Kochus” Is Not An Argument
Inside Higher Ed runs an article on the Koch conspiracy narrative from defenders of Democracy in Chains. So far, there are no attempts to engage with critics who have pointed to the book’s crippling flaws of interpretation and analysis. It’s just repetitions of the “hocus pocus Charles Kochus” spell from the little-known forthcoming volume of […]
An X-Prize Proposal: Can You Falsify Darwin?
As a Christian, I find myself increasingly dismayed with the anti-science or pseudo-science that pervades a lot of theological discourse. I was refreshed when I read Dinesh D’Souza’s What’s So Great About Christianity? In particular, I enjoyed his chapter on the theory of evolution in which he stated that it is perhaps reasonable to infer […]
Dry Clothes Are A Capitalist Achievement
It was wet. It was cold. It was miserable. It was New Year’s Day and we just got home from church and lunch out with friends. Birmingham was a rainy, chilly mess, and it was not the kind of day where people want to spend a lot of time outdoors. As I changed out of […]
Recent Reads
“Recent” as in “I read these in early March.” Tyler Cowen, The Complacent Class. This is a depressing volume from a self-described optimist. It’s a useful exploration of trends in productivity given that it’s easy to focus on the sector that is most dynamic (information technology). Elsewhere, Cowen has discussed other sectors—government, schooling—where productivity is […]
The Plague of Contented Mediocrity
In February 2015, Leroy Butler gave a speech at Samford University on “Diversity in Missions.” It raises unique challenges at a University that was only integrated in the late 1960s and that is still overwhelmingly white and overwhelmingly affluent. I wasn’t surprised but I was frustrated to see that from my vantage point, it seemed […]
Taking a Three-Year-Old to Tunica: A Reflection
We moved from Memphis, Tennessee to Birmingham, Alabama in 2012, and I had to go back to Memphis to take care of a few things earlier the week. I decided I would take my then almost-four-year-old son, Jacob, so we could spend some time indulging his greatest passion: riding elevators. After a few minutes with […]
The Role of High Gas Prices
Price “gouging” is not a moral issue. It’s an economic issue with *beneficial* humanitarian consequences. Counterintuitive as it may seem, high gas prices from natural disasters send two very powerful signals into the market: they tell gas producers to produce more, and they tell gas consumers to consume less. After disasters, the news wires fill […]
A Drug War Peace Dividend?
Should we bring back “Just Say No” and ramp up the drug war, especially as more states decriminalize recreational marijuana use? As I have written before, drug prohibition is (literally) “a textbook example of a policy with negative unintended consequences” most visible in the extensive criminal underground and widespread violence associated with prohibition. What can […]
My Favorite Economics Education Resources
Here’s a list of some of my favorite Econ Ed resources: MRUniversity. I teach from Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok’s Modern Principles textbook. This site features loads of videos and mini-courses that can be adapted to any econ course. LearnLiberty. I’ve made a lot of videos for LearnLiberty, which is an online project of the Institute […]