Bruce Koerber

Bio

Bruce Koerber is a writer and economist working in the classical-liberal, Austrian tradition and the originator of 'Divine Economy Theory.' Born in 1956 in Pittsburgh, he studied Austrian economics in Auburn, Alabama in the mid-1980s, where the Ludwig von Mises Institute had recently made its home, and became a charter member of the Institute. He reports that in 2004 a dream-image prompted him to deductively develop, over seven years, a four-book framework spanning macroeconomics, microeconomics, ethical economics, and economic justice. His writing -- much of it free at divineeconomytheory.com -- treats honest enterprise and 'work in the spirit of service' as ethically central, directly informing his session topic on the moral architecture of markets.

The big questions

The kind of questions this session opens up.

1. In a single week a market can produce the most generous and the most ruthless behavior imaginable. Which of the two is the real one?
2. Are markets moral, immoral, or simply mirrors -- and if they are mirrors, what are they showing us about ourselves?
3. Can you build ethics into the architecture of an economy, or must decency always be chosen one person at a time?
4. Where does honest competition end and the rigging of the game begin, and why do we so often confuse the two?