Neoliberal Economic Policy and the Rise of Right-Wing Populism

John Komlos is Professor Emeritus of Economics and of Economic History, University of Munich. He also taught as a visitor at Harvard, Duke University, University of North Carolina, as well as in Vienna and St. Gallen (Switzerland). His mentor was the Nobel-Prize winning economist 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 of 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 realizing that conventional economics does not reflect well the way the real economy functions. Since the financial crisis of 2008 he has been writing about current economic issues from a humanistic perspective. His textbook, Foundations of Real-World Economics (2rd edition, Routledge, 2019), advocates for a “Capitalism with a Human Face".

Chapter 1: Policy Mistakes of Historical Proportions Destabilized the Political System and Lead to the Rise of Right-Wing Populist Movement, 1981-2016.- Chapter 2: The Decline of U.S. Manufacturing Employment since 1980.- Chapter 3: The Financial Crisis of 2008 and Estrangement from the System.- Chapter 4: Tax Policy and the Rise of Populism.- Chapter 5: What Went Wrong with the American Elites? Elites and The Rise of Right-wing Populism in the Neoliberal Era.- Chapter 6: Displaced Worker Angst and Far Right Populism.- Chapter 7: Coming of Age: Think Tanks and the Rise of Right-Wing Populism.- Chapter 8: The Urgent Need to Delegitimate Laissez-Faire Ideology.- Chapter 9: Understanding populism in the post-industrial society: the case of the European Union.- Chapter 10: The Political Economy of Viktor Orbán's Illiberal Democracy, 2010-2023.- Chapter 11: Economic populism in Four East-European countries: A Polanyian countermovement?.- Chapter 12: Left Behind in Saxony and Ohio: An Explorative Case Study of East and West between Transformation and Populism.