The aspects of institutions’ influence on economic growth and the priorities of their development are studied in the article. Two complementary analytical techniques are suggested. The first one, based on the discrete institutional alternatives method, is aimed at the "institutional design"...

Thomas Aquinas can serve as a resource for conceptions of human happiness and practical reason that resist the flatness characteristic of Max U. While Aquinas shares with economists the notion that humans act in order to achieve desirable ends, and that their desire is infinite, he differs from...

This piece is a prologue to a symposium, cosponsored by the Acton Institute, that asks its contributors: Does professional economics need enrichment by religious or quasi-religious thinking? Many common criticisms of professional economics propose the incorporation of richer concepts and...

Mainstream economists are currently under fire because they did not foresee the financial meltdown of 2007. This article suggests that many of the shortcomings of neoclassical economics come from its overly narrow understanding of the human person. Economists could turn to the higher discipline...

Is economics unduly flat? Perhaps, sometimes. But part of the power of economics comes from the parsimony of its approach to human nature. If and when we search for more complex approaches, we will need to understand the tradeoffs involved in choosing between that power and simplicity and the...

I trace the arc of my thinking about political economy and Christian theology from my early interactions with the work of Richard Whately and Frank Knight to more recent economic and theological reflections on innovation. The general theme is that life is more than economics, despite the...

Mainstream economics is constrained by methodological individualism, which ignores many aspects of human existence and interaction. Methodological individualism itself propagates certain attitudes and outlooks that can become self-fulfilling by channelling human behaviour into the simplistic...

In this paper I reflect upon my life as a Christian and how it has connected to my work as an academic economist. I examine how my parents, teachers, colleagues, mentors, collaborators, and friends have influenced my path thus far. I outline five roles that may potentially be played by...

Experiences as a student of psychology and economics led me to question the second-class status of the non-testable. Attention to ‘being’ was insignificant relative to attention given to ‘doing’. Religion and philosophy seemed better suited to capture the internal struggle over one’s...

Religions come with risk-​managing interdicts and heuristics, and they carry such interdicts and heuristics across generations. We remark on such facets of religion in relation to a propensity among some decision scientists and others to regard practices that they cannot understand as being...