Michael Miller—Acton Institute

Michael Miller is a Research Fellow and Director of Media at the Acton Institute in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Previously Miller directed the U.S. and international seminars for Acton, coordinating and speaking at conferences around the world.

Michael Miller—Media Work and Writing

Miller has some ten years of international experience and has lived and traveled in Europe, Asia, Africa, and Latin America. He has been published in The Washington Times, The Detroit News, The LA Daily News, Crisis and Real Clear Politics. He appears as an expert in three Zondervan DVD Series, Effective Stewardship, The Birth of Freedom, and Doing the Right Thing, a six part video series in ethics. His research interests include political economy, moral philosophy, economic development, and political theory.

Michael Miller—Academic Background

Before coming to Acton, Miller spent three years at Ave Maria College of the Americas in Nicaragua where he taught philosophy and political science and was the chair of the philosophy and theology department. He received his bachelor's degree from the University of Notre Dame, has an M.A. from Nagoya University's Graduate School of International Development (Japan), an M.A. in philosophy from Franciscan University, and an MBA in International Management from Thunderbird (The American Graduate School of International Management). He is on the board of the Dietrich von Hildebrand Legacy Project. 

• Michael Miller on Unintended Consequences of Good Intentions

  You know, people have said, “We’ve got to do something.” When they look at the reality of poverty, they say, “We’ve got to do something, even if it doesn’t work.” But what they’re forgetting is that sometimes they might do things despite all their best intentions that actually hurt the poor, that actually make the situation worse than it was before.

• Michael Miller on Foreign Aid “Getting the Person Wrong”

  While there are some success stories, aid has been largely ineffective. Now why is that? John Paul II said that “The primary fault of socialism was anthropological in nature.” What he meant was, socialism failed because it got the person wrong. Well, I would argue that aid failed because it gets the person wrong.

• Michael Miller on Foreign Aid and Trade Barriers

  You’ve got Europe and the United States giving hundreds of millions of dollars in aid. But you also have Europe and the United States protecting markets to not allow these developing countries to get access to their markets, say in agriculture.

• Michael Miller on the Freedoms and Foundations to Succeed

  What all people in the developing and the developed world need, are the foundations to allow them to live out their freedoms and live out their responsibilities, to fail and to succeed. And if you give people that foundation, then they’re going to create success, they’re going to create wealth that no state could ever create.

• Michael Miller on Asking the Wrong Question

  We need to move away from thinking about poverty and the causes of poverty, and start to move to the real question: what causes wealth?