History of Financial Crises 1637 to Present

John Komlos is Professor Emeritus of Economics and of Economic History at the University of Munich, Germany. Over the course of his academic career, he also held visiting positions at Duke University, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the Vienna University of Economics and Business, the University of St. Gallen, and since 2013, at Harvard University's Division of Continuing Education. Born during the siege of Budapest in the final days of World War II, Komlos became a refugee twelve years later during the Hungarian revolution and grew up in Chicago. There, he earned two PhD degrees from the University of Chicago, in history and in economics. His mentor was the Nobel Laureate Robert Fogel, who encouraged him to explore how economic processes affect human biology. Komlos devoted much of his career developing this interdisciplinary research agenda, ultimately founding of the field of economics and human biology with the journal of the same name in 2003. Through this research program, Komlos came to embrace a humanistic approach to economics, recognizing that conventional economic models often fail to capture the lived realities of economic life. Since the financial crisis of 2008, he has written extensively on current economic issues from this human-centered perspective. His textbook, Foundations of Real-World Economics: What Every Economics Student Needs to Know (Routledge: 2014, 2019, and 2023) advocates for a vision of capitalism with a human face. In Komlos's view, a more just and compassionate form of capitalism is possible: one that reduces stress, inequality, and precarity, and enables people to lead more secure, meaningful lives in a truly democratic society.