FRANK M. MACHOVEC
Professor, Department of Economics
Royal Palace, Bangkok, Interim 2002
Contact Avenues
Office: Daniel 219; Home phone: 864-585-9881; office phone: 864-597-4586 (Sept-May). Dr. Machovec is a compuphobe, but, as a courtesy, he answers emails (though oftentimes not with alacrity). Please send snail-mail correspondence to: Campus Box 51, Wofford College, Spartanburg, SC 29303.
Personal Profile
Raised in Baltimore, where he attended parochial and public schools; doctorate from New York University; divorced; loves the South (has lived in Alabama, Texas, and Virginia); also loves the West (has lived in Colorado, Utah, and Nevada). Supporter of the traditional campus culture that has made Wofford a wonderful place to come of age. Hobbies include collecting magazine advertisements from the golden era of electric toy trains (1930-1960). Fondest memories: crabbing in the Chesapeake Bay and attending the Christmas Show at Radio City Music Hall in Manhattan. Most inspirational cities: Prague and Vancouver. Favorite composers: Dvorak and Rachmaninoff. Favorite meal: Frank's Famous Chesapeake Bay Imperial Crabcakes (prepared by Chef Francois).
Academic Reputation Among Students
Entertaining yet unusually demanding: unrelenting emphasis on writing skills, critical-reasoning skills, numeracy, diagrammatical-analysis skills, and the interdisciplinary evolution of ideas. Perceived as a campus lightning rod for his willingness to defend politically-incorrect positions.
New-Frontier Intellectual Interest
Sociobiology (also known as Evolutionary Psychology): The study of the origins of socially-constructed institutions that are products of experiential learning (for example: contract law and private property) –– versus the package of culturally-transcendent human dispositions and /or reactive mechanisms that were atavistically hard-wired either through mutation or serial Darwinian adaptations, such as grammatically-structured language, the phenomenon of diminished incremental satisfactions from consuming successive units of the same product, the strong preference for present versus future pleasures, and the non-anatomical aspects of gender embedded by the selection process because they enhanced survival of the human species. (Suggested reading: The Moral Animal, by Robert Wright; Human Universals, by Donald Brown; The Origins of Virtue: Human Instincts and the Evolution of Cooperation, by Matt Ridley; Marc Hauser, Moral Minds; and Plagues of the Mind: The New Epidemic of False Knowledge, by Bruce Thornton.)
Courses Taught at Wofford
Econ 201/202: Principles of Economics
Econ 302: Intermediate Macroeconomic Theory
Econ 322: Money and Banking
Econ 401: International Trade
Econ 402: International Macroeconomics
Econ 441: Comparative Socioeconomic Philosophies
Econ 450: Senior Seminar
Econ 480: Seminar on Entrepreneurship and Social Progress
Econ 493: Mathematical Economics
Foreign Travel
Austria, Bulgaria, Cambodia, Canada, Costa Rica, Czech Republic, Egypt, England, Finland, Hong Kong, Hungary, Japan, Kenya, Laos, Mexico, Morocco, New Zealand, Poland, Romania, Russia, Serbia, South Korea, Spain, Thailand, Vietnam
Life Before Joining Wofford in 1988
Career Air Force Officer for 20 years, most recently at the Pentagon, Washington, D.C., 1985-1988. Managed a division of regional specialists (eight civilians, two military). Worked closely with counterparts in the CIA and State Department to produce Top Secret intelligence assessments for senior policy-makers on economic issues affecting national security. Regularly briefed these assessments to top-ranking generals. Also served as an assistant professor of economics at the U.S. Military Academy, West Point, N.Y., 1979-1982.
Membership in Professional Organizations
American Economics Association
Association for Comparative Economic Studies
International Joseph Schumpeter Society
History of Economics Society
Society for Economic Anthropology
Western International Economics Association
Current Research
Nearing completion, after ten years of lucubration, of a 500-page book to be titled German Cultural Contributions on Value, Law, and Social Order. Estimated publication: 2011.
Publications
"Mises, Monopoly, and the Market Process," Cato Journal, Fall 1999.
"Paradigm Lost: The Walrasian Destruction of the Classical Conception of the Market." in Microfoundations of Economic Growth: A Schumpeterian
Perspective, Gunnar Elliasson et al., eds. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998).
Perfect Competition and the Transformation of Economics, London: Routledge, 1995. (Honored in 1997 with a monetary prize from the
Smith Center for Private Enterprise Studies at California State University. Also, this book has been cited more than 100 times, not only in
economics publications, but also in ten law journals and ten foreign-language books and articles.)
"The Rise and Fall of Prebischian Economics," Southeastern Latin Americanist, Summer 1992.
"Economic Reform in the USSR: Can an Old Dog Learn New Tricks?", The Margin, September 1987.
"Fear Makes the World Go 'Round: The Dark Side of Management," Management Review, January 1982.
"The Energy Crunch: We've Been There Before," The Collegiate Forum (a Dow-Jones publication), Winter 1979.
"Higher Education in Colorado in 1970: Who Paid the Costs? Who Received the Benefits?," Intermountain Economic Review, October 1972.
Campus Presentations
April 2009: Defended the anti-anthropogenic explanation of planetary warming during a “Campus Conversation” on the scientific debate over the cause of the 185-year trend of rising earth temperatures.
October 2008: Explained the causes of the 2008-2009 mortgage crisis during a faculty panel discussion on “The Economic Meltdown.”
April 2008: “Attacking the Vampire Thesis: A Critique of Those Who Contend that the Modern-Day Underdevelopment of Poor Nations Should Be Blamed on the Colonial Abuses of the Past.”
November 2007: “Armistice Day (November 11): The Forgotten Sacrifices of the Veterans of the First World War.”