On Fridays we bring you the week’s best from around the web. In this week’s collection we highlight a new conservative approach to poverty, advice for avoiding unhappiness, and more.
1. Expanding Opportunity in America: A Conversation With House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan: On Thursday at AEI, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) outlined a new, “sweeping” (in the words of Brookings’ Ron Haskins) plan to fight poverty.
2. People Are What Matter Most in Business by Bruce Kasanoff, Forbes
Sure, numbers matter. Technology matters. Efficiency matters. But they don’t matter nearly as much as people do. To succeed in business, you have to understand and value people. It really is that simple.
3. Love People, Not Pleasure by Arthur Brooks, New York Times
Love people, use things. Easier said than done, I realize. It requires the courage to repudiate pride and the strength to love others—family, friends, colleagues, acquaintances, God and even strangers and enemies. Only deny love to things that actually are objects. The practice that achieves this is charity. Few things are as liberating as giving away to others that which we hold dear.
4. America’s First World Inequality Problem by Sita Slavov, U.S. News & World Report
The National Basketball Association has an income inequality problem. The highest-paid players make upwards of $20 million per season, while the lowest-paid ones make a measly half a million. Of course, these facts probably don’t bother you too much. It’s understandably hard for most of us to get excited about income inequality among NBA players when even the poorest members of this group make many times what we do.
5. Need Some Summer Reading? Check Out These Five New Faith, Work & Econ Reads by Greg Ayers, Institute for Faith, Work & Economics
“Visions of Vocation” is full of deep reflections on two central questions: 1) How can we know the world with all its brokenness and still love it? 2) Knowing what we know about the brokenness in the world, what will we do?
