The Thing Itself: Essays on Academics and the State

Michael Munger is a college professor who has taught at Dartmouth, University of Texas, UNC, and now Duke. He describes his experiences with "The Thing," or the politically centralized state, with humor and some mistakes along the way. The title comes from a famous quotation by Edmund Burke, 18th century British statesman and philosopher.

Professor Munger received his Ph.D. in Economics at Washington University in St. Louis in 1984. Following his graduate training, he worked as a staff economist at the Federal Trade Commission. His first teaching job was in the Economics Department at Dartmouth College, followed by appointments in the Political Science Department at the University of Texas at Austin (1986-1990) and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (1990-1997). 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. 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 he coined the term "euvoluntary." He has created a new blog devoted to investigating examples of, and controversies about, euvoluntary exchange. His primary blog, Kids Prefer Cheese, is an irreverent look at policy, politics, and the foibles of pundits everywhere. Russ Roberts, author of HOW ADAM SMITH CAN CHANGE YOUR LIFE and host of "EconTalk": "Mike Munger is the world's foremost scholar of unicorns. Read this book and you'll understand how people can smell the strawberries."