Published May 12, 2025
These remarks were given by John D. Mueller at a symposium after receiving his doctorate in economics from Corvinus University of Budapest, Hungarian Embassy, Washington, DC, 12 May 2025.
My dissertation—Scholastic Economics, Classical and Modern—is much simpler than my first book, Redeeming Economics, which had 28 chapters. My dissertation has only three chapters (plus an introduction and conclusion). My thesis is summarized in the chapter titles. I intended to deepen Aristotle’s description of human nature, that man is what he called a “rational animal.”
Aristotle had bisected moral philosophy into individual ethics and politics. But my dissertation instead follows Thomas Aquinas, who recognized that moral philosophy and economics are naturally divided into three parts, according to the social unit being described: personal, domestic and political philosophy or economy.
The first chapter explains that man is what I call a ‘Personal Animal,’—both ‘Rational’ and ‘Religious.’
About 1,700 BC, Abraham and at most a few dozen of his relatives were almost the only monotheists on earth, while nearly everyone else was a polytheist—a worshipper of several gods. Today, fully two-thirds of the world’s population who profess a religious faith are monotheists, mostly Abrahamic—Jews, Christians or Muslims—and still rising at about the same rate.
Chapter 2 describes man as a ‘Domestic Animal’—(‘Conjugal,’ ‘Money-Using,’ and ‘Social’).
Chapter 3 describes man as a ‘Political Animal’ and explains the two kinds of (in-) justice: Distributive and Commutative (In-) Justice. (Those two forms of (in-)justice are combined in the so-called Misery Index: the sum of the CPI inflation and unemployment rates.)
My conclusion describes The Human Flourishing Index (HFI). The HFI is a composite index of ten indicators intended to apply the basic principles of Scholastic Economics, which I calculated for the ten most populous countries in the world plus the 36 industrial countries in the OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development). Together they comprise about 67% of world population and about 80% of world real GDP.
I think the HFI has at least two advantages—first, to puncture the self-satisfied complacency of those who imagine that their country already provides for human excellence when in fact it does not, and second, for those who recognize a deficiency, an action plan for bringing about human excellence where it does not yet exist.
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.
