Karl T. Muth

Karl T. Muth taught at Northwestern University for over a decade and was the youngest person ever to teach across five disciplines at that university (economics, law, organizational behavior, public policy, and statistics). In 2021, he joined the University of Chicago, where he teaches the popular New Venture Strategy course at the Booth School of Business.

In his newest book, he confronts the topic of suicide and argues from historical, legal, philosophical, and public policy perspectives that suicide should not only be destigmatized, but seen as superior in most cases to natural death. He was the lead author of Charity and Philanthropy for Dummies from the eponymous yellow-jacketed self-help series and contributed chapters to a variety of academic anthologies assigned in leading economics and public policy graduate programs, including The Oxford Handbook of Global Policy and Transnational Administration (Oxford U. Press) and Controversies in Globalization (CQ Press).

Muth's writings also appear in a variety of academic journals, from Harvard's Blackletter Law Journal to Harvard's Kennedy School Review to the Journal of Private Equity and the National Lawyers Guild Review; his coauthors have included sitting judges and an Assistant Attorney General. Having studied law at the undergraduate level in the Netherlands, Muth earned JD and Masters degrees in the United States (the latter with a concentration in Economics from the University of Chicago), followed by MPhil and PhD degrees earned in the UK at the London School of Economics; after completing his PhD, he was part of the Emerging Leaders program at Harvard's Kennedy School.

An avid traveler, Muth has visited over fifty countries, including two on the days they became countries; a multilingual person but not a linguist by training, he is deeply interested in the study of languages, how language describes and guides thought, and how transliteration distorts or fails to fully transmit perception.