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

10 February 2012
Many of today’s amazing things H.G. Wells imagined years earlier: electrical tools capable of reviving the unconscious, manned space travel to and from the moon, machines…
03 February 2012
A year ago, at Aman’s Amanjena resort in Morocco, I was thinking the global ruling class is slowly deconstructing its calendar. The monied migration, once defined by events…
27 December 2011
After attending the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix at Yas Marina Circuit, I spent a bizarre weekend with a friend wandering around a place with a ruler who criminalised the formation of…
17 October 2011
I was chatting on Skype today with my friend Walter, a fellow University of Chicago alumnus living in East Africa. Walter lives in Kenya and I live in Uganda – our countries…
06 October 2011
The news that northern areas of Kenya were suffering famine came as a surprise to analysts on many fronts. Kenya is seen as a stable East African growth economy and Nairobi, its…
18 September 2011
IKEA, the world’s largest furniture manufacturer, made a large donation today to help starving people in the Dadaab refugee camp in Kenya. Well, that’s what…
16 September 2011
It’s the tension that characterised Twentieth Century economics: freshwater versus saltwater.  A few of America’s great economics programmes, all of them near…
23 August 2011
  The current strategy to contain the spread of nuclear weapons depends upon the technological infancy of the "bad guys."  In essence, it is assumed that…
17 May 2011
The IMF is one of the most misunderstood (and poorly explained, to spread the blame a bit) institutions in finance. This week, while I was in New York, it was thrust into the…
31 March 2011
Black with gold lettering. It feels heftier than most passports, maybe due to the thicker paper used on the visa pages. Before it is born, it is simply black vinyl and a dozen…
24 March 2011
How much does popular music influence society? How does it shape society’s image of itself? How does it change a society’s image of other societies? It’s been…
19 March 2011
The Libyan problem isn’t a problem to be solved by policymakers. It’s a problem to be solved by financiers. Bankers stand a far better chance of helping the Libyan…
16 March 2011
Whether I’m travelling in a developed or developing country, one of the common features of news reports is the presence of ratios, often termed the “something…
16 March 2011
As a third-generation graduate of the University of Chicago, nuclear power has a special place in my thinking about policy. The University of Chicago Maroons (the university…
14 March 2011
On the face of it, they are similar. New Orleans, USA had been under threat of serious hurricanes for over a century. The fault lines running along the Japanese coast were…