I spend a lot of time thinking about what I'm doing vs. what I could be doing, and what's important in life -- finding meaning in life, rather than looking for The Meaning of Life. Several books have helped draw my thoughts together, including Melissa Everett's Making a Living While Making a Difference, which I read more than 10 years ago, and two I read more recently: the Dalai Lama's Ethics for a New Millennium, and Viktor E. Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning. Here are some thoughts:

I recently read an interesting book by James Tooley called The Beautiful Tree: A Personal Journey Into How the World's Poorest People Are Educating Themselves, published by the Cato Institute.

I recently read The Green Collar Economy, by Van Jones (with a forward by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.). I think President Obama must have read it too, since the ideas he's been talking about lately for fixing the economy are basically the same as what Jones sets out in his book. This is a good thing, in my opinion. Here are the main points from this book:

I have been thinking a lot lately about economic growth. It seems like the news media, and practically everyone else, assumes that if the economy is growing, it's a good thing, and if it isn't, something terrible is occurring. This assumption has been bothering me for a while, and I recently read a book that put my vague uneasiness into words: Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future by Bill McKibben. In this book, McKibben makes the following points:

I recently read a book called The Middle of Everywhere, by Mary Pipher. In it, Ms. Pipher shares stories of refugees who were settled in Lincoln, Nebraska over the past 10-20 years.

I finally finished reading Chalmers Johnson's book Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic, which prompted me to think about the differences between the United States that our founding fathers envisioned, and wrote into the Constitution, and the United States we are living in today. Here are some thoughts.

In my earlier Where We Send Money post, I collected some facts about where the US government is sending aid, but didn't say too much about those facts. Here are a few thoughts.

My main reason for starting this blog was to collect some thoughts and facts about foreign aid, though I will probably put some unrelated posts in the blog as well.