I’m pleased to announce that Hendrik Van den Berg has agreed to blog for Policy of Truth. Hendrik is an Emeritus Professor of Economics at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln. He’s currently a Lecturer in Economics in the Department of Economics at Mt. Holyoke College in South Hadley, Massachusetts. He also happens to be on the Editorial Board of Reason Papers.

PoT is a little philosophy-heavy, so I thought it’d be nice to bring someone on board from another discipline, but Hendrik’s approach to economics is normative enough in focus to make a nice fit with PoT’s focus on political philosophy. Here’s the biographical blurb from the Mt. Holyoke site:

Professor Van den Berg teaches economic growth and development as well as international economics. He received B.A. and M.A. degrees in economics from the State University of New York at Albany and his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in economics from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Prior to obtaining his doctorate degree, Van den berg served as a Foreign Service Officer at the U.S. Embassy in Managua, Nicaragua in the position of Commercial Officer, and at the U.S. Trade Center in São Paulo, Brazil, as Market Research and Promotion Officer. Hendrik has published many articles and is currently examining the biases of neoclassical economics and the influence of the neoclassical paradigm on the fields of international economics and economic development.

Here’s his CV.

He also backs Bernie Sanders’s proposal for a $15 minimum wage by the year 2020.

What’s up with this blog, anyway? First we’re worried about fish. Then we’re worried about adjuncts. Derrick’s carrying on about empathy and refugees and what not. We already had a Marxist, and our resident classicist turns out to be a vegetarian opponent of strip clubs. Just when you thought we were going respectable–with Potts–we manage to haul a left-wing economist into our midst. Are things ever normal here? I mean, seriously, what next?