John Komlos

John is Professor Emeritus of Economics and of Economic History, University of Munich. He has also taught at Duke, Harvard, North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the University of Vienna, and in Switzerland. Born during the siege of Budapest during the last days of World War II, he became a refugee twelve years later during the famous uprising, and grew up in Chicago where he received PhDs in both history and in economics from the University of Chicago. He studied with the Nobel-Prize winning economic historian Robert Fogel who suggested that he study the impact of economic processes on human biology. Komlos devoted most of his academic career developing and expanding this research agenda, which culminated in his founding the field of “Economics and Human Biology” with the journal of the same name in 2003. Through that research program he became a humanistic economist and has been writing about current economic issues including blogging for PBS from a humanistic perspective. His textbook Foundations of Real-World Economics advocates for a “Capitalism with a Human Face”.