Karl Muth

Karl Muth is a commentator, economist, and legal academic.

His academic interests include the economics of governance, the portability of risk attitudes across domains, risk measurement and mitigation, and other topics. His thoughts on these issues have appeared in a wide range of publications, from The Journal of Private Equity to the Oprah Winfrey Show to the second edition of the academic text Controversies in Globalization.

Karl studied law in the Netherlands and in the United States and holds J.D. and M.B.A. degrees, the latter with a concentration in Economics from The University of Chicago. He earned his M.Phil./Ph.D. from the London School of Economics; his dissertation was entitled “Three Frameworks for Commodity-Producer Decision-Making Under Uncertainty.” Prior to his doctoral work, Karl was an Executive-in-Residence at the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business and he is currently a Lecturer in Economics, Law, Organizational Behavior, Public Policy, and Statistics at Northwestern University. He divides his time between the United States and Europe.

Post Archive

03 December 2013
Karl Muth talks generally about proxy variables and then focuses in on race as a proxy variable for social and economic class, arguing it is a troubling one and (mis-)used far too…
28 November 2013
Karl Muth explores how America remembers WWII. The American narrative for the Second World War focuses, oddly, more and more on the war in Europe. From Saving Private Ryan to…
15 November 2013
Karl Muth explores the relationship between statistics, hypotheses, headlines and policies. When I roam around the Internet, I collect statistics. And LOLcats (hey, quit looking…
06 November 2013
Karl Muth argues that the story of beef is an interesting one because it involves the ultimate trade-off in agrarian societies. To understand why, we have to go back to the…
29 October 2013
A life-changing experience for me was taking an advanced applied microeconomics course as a masters student with Profs. Gary Becker, Kevin Murphy, and Ted Snyder. My research…
23 October 2013
Economists have made the news this week. From Eugene Fama’s important work at the University of Chicago finally being rewarded with a Nobel Prize to the rise of Janet Yellen…
18 October 2013
I write this in London, but this blog post covers a criticism intertwined with the recent history of the NRA, or National Rifle Association, a membership advocacy group in the…
09 October 2013
Karl Muth offers his opinion on the growing debate around income inequality. There’s a big to-do about income inequality in the U.S. and U.K. Let’s establish a few things up-front…
03 October 2013
For those who tuned in for yet another TRIPS rant about how people are dying from AIDS in Africa because of American patent laws, you can tune out now. That’s not the point…
23 September 2013
For those who have not recently read Shelley’s “The Revolt of Islam,” a poem written in 1817, I recommend it. I first read the poem, composed in a dozen cantos,…
05 September 2013
Karl Muth explains why recycling the old is far from a new idea. In 2004, Chrysler launched the 300C saloon (which did not, unlike its 1960’s predecessors, have 300…
31 July 2013
I remember, and fondly, walking with my mother from the old promenade in Wan Chai westward toward King George V Park. It is a fascinating walk that millions of people have taken,…
23 July 2013
I recently finished writing an article for a law journal on the anti-homosexuality law in Uganda. It focuses on the evolution of this law from a legislative history standpoint,…
21 June 2013
Once upon a time, gentrification meant the import of yuppies into areas previously inhabited by working-class people. Yuppies (a term used so freely that many forget it was…
17 June 2013
I think of Detroit as the municipal, financial, legal equivalent of Schrödinger's cat. It is at once alive and dead. It is locked in a strange twilight zone between the two.…