Michael Munger

Professor of Political Science, Duke University. Prof. Munger received his Ph.D. in Economics at Washington University in St. Louis in 1984. He later worked as a staff economist at the Federal Trade Commission, and taught at Dartmouth College, the University of Texas at Austin and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. At UNC he directed the MPA Program, which trains public service professionals, especially city and county management. He moved to Duke in 1997, and was Chair of the Political Science Department from 2000 through 2010. He has won three University-wide teaching awards (the Howard Johnson Award, an NAACP “Image” Award for teaching about race, and admission to the Bass Society of Teaching Fellows). He is currently director of the interdisciplinary PPE Program at Duke University, working under Dr. Geoffrey Brennan who directs the joint Duke-UNC PPE Program. His research interests include the study of the morality of exchange and the working of legislative institutions in producing policy. Much of his recent work has been in philosophy, examining the concept of truly voluntary exchange, a concept for which Munger coined the term “euvoluntary.” He has created a new blog devoted to investigating examples of, and controversies about, euvoluntary exchange. His fourth and most recent book, Analyzing Policy, was published in August 2000 by W.W. Norton. He blogs at Kids Prefer Cheese and Division of Labour. Munger may be best known, however, for his podcasts playing McMahon to Russ Roberts’ Carson on “EconTalk.”