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Home  >  Publications  > 
Personal Economy
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Dismal Science
By John D. Mueller
Posted: Thursday, April 6, 2006
Freakonomics asks all kinds of interesting questions but, like modern economics generally, is ill-equipped to provide the right answers to those involving gifts or crimes.  Its authors famously -- but wrongly -- claim, for example, that legalizing abortion lowered homicide rates 15-20 years later by eliminating infants who would have become murderers.  In fact, it raised the homicide rate almost at once by turning their fathers back into men without dependent children.  Freakonomics relies on the "economic approach to human behavior," which blinds it to the near-perfect trade-off between homicide and economic fatherhood -- something easily observed by economists using the original "human approach to economic behavior" of Aristotle, Augustine and Aquinas.   [Read More]
The End of Economics
Or, Is Utilitarianism Finished?
By John D. Mueller
Posted: Monday, April 15, 2002
Most modern economists assume that economic choice involves only the means and not the ends of human action. The reason seems to be that most modern economists are ignorant of the history of their own discipline. Leading economists attempt to explain all human behavior, including love and hate, as a maximization of "utility." But historically and logically, an adequate description of economic choice has always required both a ranking of persons as ends and a ranking of scarce goods as means. What is missing from modern economics is an adequate description of the ranking of persons as ends.   [Read More]
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EPPC on Book TV
Weigel Featured on "In Depth"

On Sunday, June 1, EPPC Distinguished Senior Fellow George Weigel was featured on C-SPAN2/Book TV's program "In Depth."

Click here to view the program online.   


Religion and the Media
Michael Cromartie
Faith Angle Conference -- May 2008

EPPC Vice President Michael Cromartie moderated a series of discussions in May at the semi-annual Faith Angle Conference sponsored by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life and held in Key West, Florida. Transcripts of the informative talks are now available online.


 American Evangelicalism: New Leaders, New Faces, New Issues -- D. Michael Lindsay, author of Faith in the Halls of Power: How Evangelicals Joined the American Elite, describes eight fallacies or misconceptions he held as he began his book.

 Religious Voters in the 2008 Election: What It Means for Democrats, Republicans -- William A. Galston, a senior fellow at The Brookings Institution and an assistant for domestic policy in the Clinton administration, discusses the importance of the Catholic vote in 2008.

 How Our Brains are Wired for Belief -- What does brain science add to age-old debates about the existence of God and the value of religion? Can political parties and religious groups use scientific insights to influence the beliefs of others? Dr. Andrew Newberg and Mr. David Brooks raise these questions and share their insights with journalists.