John D. Mueller

John D. Mueller is the Lehrman Institute Fellow in Economics and Director of the Economics and Ethics Program at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. Mr. Mueller specializes in the relation of modern economic theory to its Judeo-Christian and Greco-Roman origins, its practical application to personal, family, and political economy, and the interaction of economics, philosophical worldviews, and religious faith. He is also an adjunct senior research fellow at the Social Futuring Center.

Mr. Mueller retired in January 2015 as president of LBMC LLC, a firm in Washington, D.C. specializing in economic and financial-market forecasting and economic policy analysis. He has more than 35 years’ experience in those fields. Besides investment managers, Mr. Mueller has advised many American and foreign economic policymakers on monetary policy and exchange rates, policies for reducing unemployment, and income-tax, welfare and Social Security reform. He is author of Redeeming Economics: Rediscovering the Missing Element (ISI Books, 2010; updated paperback, 2014). From 1979 through 1988, Mr. Mueller was economist and speechwriter to then-Congressman Jack Kemp, mostly as Economic Counsel to the House Republican Conference (caucus) of which Kemp was chairman. In that capacity he drafted bills originating some key features of President Ronald Reagan’s tax cuts of 1981 and Tax Reform Act of 1986 and of Kemp’s 1988 presidential campaign. Mr. Mueller graduated in 1974 from Haverford College, and after his children completed their education, received his master’s degree in applied economics in 2019 from the University of Maryland, and in 2020 became a doctoral candidate in economics of Corvinus University in Budapest.

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View a video on a special issue of the Society and Economy Journal, featuring commentary from Mr. Mueller:

• with Hungarian subtitles: https://youtu.be/6alU4PA0kYY
• with Chinese subtitles: https://youtu.be/8gOgrMnh19w

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Reviews of John D. Mueller’s Redeeming Economics: Rediscovering the Missing Element, ISI Books, Wilmington, DE, 2014 [2010]

Jennifer Roback Morse, “How the ‘A-Team’ Redeems Modern Economics,” The Family in America, Volume 24 Number 3, Summer 2010

Kevin D. Williamson,  “Summa Economica,” National Review, October 18, 2010, Issue

William E. Dean, Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies, XXIII, 2011: 207-209 (PDF)

David Colander, Middlebury College, Journal of Economic Literature: Vol. 49 No. 3 – Book Review, JEL 2011–0025 (Abstract | PDF)

Joseph Lawler, “A Review of Redeeming Economics,” First Things, January 2011

Kevin Clark, “Redeeming Economics” (PDF)

William English, “Still Awaiting Redemption,” The Intercollegiate Review, Spring 2011, 55-58, First Principles

Ryan T. Anderson, “Dismal Science Redeemed: What’s Gone Wrong,” The Public Discourse, May 4, 2011; “Dismal Science Redeemed: Where to Go from Here,” May 6, 2011

Troy Gibson, “Redeeming Economics, a review,” The Reformed Mind, 23 June 2011

Father John Flynn, L.C., “Can Neo-Scholastics Transform Economy? A Rediscovery of the Human Element on the Horizon,” Zenit.org, September 18, 2011

Matthew McCaffrey, “Surveying Recent Literature on Economic Theory and Morality,” Journal of Markets and Morality, Vol. 15, No. 1, pp. 179-200 (2012)

Brian Douglass, “Ite ad Thomam: John Mueller’s Return to a Solid Foundation for Economics,” The Distributist Review, 2012

J. Daniel Hammond, Wake Forest University, Faith and Economics, 59 (Spring 2012): 73-77

Rev. James V. Schall, S.J., “Economics—When the Truth Really Matters,” Aleteia, November 22, 2014

• See also “Schall’s List of Longer Books to Keep Sane By,” on which Redeeming Economics appears

Tamás Halm, Közgazdasági Szemle (monthly journal of economics of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences), 2017

James M. Kushiner, “The Wealth of Families: The Realization of Adam Smith,” Touchstone, February 22, 2019

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Peer-Reviewed Journal Articles and Submissions

Social Futuring, Modern and Ancient (PDF)

Submitted to World Futures: The Journal Of New Paradigm Research

Rueff’s Laws of Unemployment and Inflation (PDF)

Submitted to Theoretical Economics

Recession and Depression

Published in American Governance (2016)

Federal Budget Deficit

Published in American Governance (2016)

Comment on Michael V. Szpindor Watson’s “Mueller and Mises: Integrating the Gift and ‘Final Distribution’ within Praxeology”

Published in Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics 18, no. 2 (Summer 2015)

The ‘Missing Element’ in Modern Economics

Published in Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics 18, no. 2 (Summer 2015)

Why “AAA Economics” Has Legs

Mueller, J. (2013), “Mueller’s redeeming economics”, A Research Annual (Research in the History of Economic Thought and Methodology, Vol. 31A), Emerald Group Publishing Limited, pp. 109-118.

Finn’s “Nine Libertarian Heresies” and Mueller’s First Lemma: Economists Complain Exactly Insofar as They Are Unable to Explain

Published in Journal of Markets and Morality 14, no. 2 (2011)

How Does Fiscal Policy Affect the American Worker?

Published in The Notre Dame Journal of Law Ethics and Public Policy (Vol. 20, No. 2, Spring 2006, pp. 563-619) (2006)

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AAA Index

The AAA Index, or Index of Human Flourishing (IHF)

Presented at 17th Annual Conference, Doctoral School of Economics, Business and Informatics, Corvinus University Budapest

AAA Index Project Listing on ResearchGate

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