FRANK M. MACHOVEC
Author & Emeritus Professor of Economics
“My philosophy of life is that, as a professor, my moral responsibility is three-fold: first, to be instrumental in assisting my students to become clear-thinking, articulate, literate, numerate adults; second, to inculcate a love of learning; and third, to inspire a prudent dose of skepticism when encountering that which is delivered as unquestionable holy writ.”
Education
Ph.D. Economics, New York University – 1986
M.A. Economics, University of Denver - 1972
B.S. Meteorology, University of Utah – 1969
B.S. Mathematics, Towson State University – 1967
Publications
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“Uncertainty: Blessing or Curse?,” Man and the Economy, Vol.II: No.2, December 2015.
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“Our Classical Macro Heritage,” The Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics, Vol. 17: No. 3, Fall 2014.
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“Paradigm Lost: The Walrasian Destruction of the Classical Conception of the Market,” in Microfoundations of Economic Growth: A Schumpeterian Perspective, Gunnar Eliasson et al., eds., Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998.
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Perfect Competition and the Transformation of Economics, London: Routledge, 1995. This book, honored in 1997 with a monetary prize from the Smith Center for Private Enterprise Studies at California State University, has been cited more than 150 times in economics publications, five law journals, and ten foreign-language books and articles.
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“The Rise and Fall of Prebischian Economics,” Southeastern Latin Americanist, Summer 1992.
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“Economic Reform in the USSR: Can an Old Dog Learn New Tricks?,” The Margin, Vol. 1: Issue 3, September 1987. Printed copies are available through interlibrary loan from UCCS Kraemer Family Library, Colorado Springs, Colorado.
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“Fear Makes the World Go ’Round: The Dark Side of Management,” Management Review, Vol. 71: No. 1, January 1982. Printed copies of Management Review, a publication of the American Management Association, are available through interlibrary loan from the University of Georgia
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“The Energy Crunch: We’ve Been There Before,” The Collegiate Forum (a Dow-Jones publication), Winter 1979. Please contact Dr. Machovec to request a printed copy by USPS.
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Southeast Asia Tactical Data Systems Interface. Top Secret 1973 study –– published with extremely limited access in 1975 –– of the quantum-leap software and hardware pioneered in the late 1960s to control, in real-time, the U.S. air operations conducted near the Chinese border during the Vietnam War. Declassified in 2008. Available online at the website of the U.S. Air Force Office of History.
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“Higher Education in Colorado in 1970: Who Paid the Costs? Who Received the Benefits?,” Intermountain Economic Review, October 1972.
Academic Life
Dr. Frank Machovec, Emeritus Professor of Economics, is proud of many things he accomplished during his 32-year teaching career at Wofford College, including his two-year departmental chairmanship. Still, he’s most proud of four things that reflect his impact on his students and the college through the years.
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An alumnus established the Dr. Frank Machovec Endowed Scholarship in December 2019. “Wofford has had several other significant financial contributions to the college in my name, but now there’s a scholarship as well,” he says.
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Conrad Heinrich ’19, winner of the 2019 Southern Conference Championship in the decathlon, and Wofford’s student-athlete of the year, named Machovec his favorite professor in a profile featured on the SoCon website. He cited Dr.Machovec’s “jack-of-all -trades” knowledge, his “cause-and-effect” method of teaching, and his accessibility to his students. The SoCon profile includes a five-paragraph Q&A with Professor Machovec.
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Victoria Biggers (Breckenridge) ’17, won the South Carolina Private Colleges Annual Top-Student Award in her senior year. She asked Dr. Machovec to serve as her college’s representative at the recognition dinner held in the state capital for all 12 nominees. He was immensely gratified.
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Zack Morrow ’16 shared a story about Machovec in the May 2019 Wall Street Journal article, “In Praise of Great Professors: Students Reflect”, for which the Journal had solicited input from its readers. Morrow wrote, “For all the talk about the importance of career readiness in education, the best professors are those who challenge their students to wrestle, and wrestle hard, with the undying questions posed by the human condition.”
Machovec, who near at the end of his 20-year military career served a four-year tour at the Pentagon as director of a division of ten intelligence analysts, came to Wofford for a second career. “I’ve taught a legion of very bright students. I have maintained regular contact with many. It was highly satisfying that people who were not economics majors regularly took my courses because they heard what a different kind of teacher I am, both in style and philosophical perspective.”
Academic Reputation
Perceived as a campus lightning rod due to his regular critiques of sacred woke dogmas, Dr. Machovec has been described as “Entertaining yet unusually demanding, with unrelenting emphasis on writing proficiency, (including grammar and punctuation), critical reasoning techniques, numeracy, diagrammatical analysis skills, and the evolution of ideas."
Professor Machovec is the only Wofford College faculty member honored with a student scholarship endowed by an alumnus.
Award-Winning Book
“Professor Machovec has produced a stimulating and scholarly study that undertakes to demonstrate....that the transition to a more formalistic mode of analysis achieved rigor at the expense of some important substance. He suggests that a sharp break in the orientation of mainstream economic theory that occurred in the 1920s....served to conceal the contribution of innovation and entrepreneurship and to banish it almost totally from the analysis.... [It also] served to foster a predisposition toward government intervention....
“The book is meticulous in its adherence to standards of scholarship, and consistent in its integrity....[in that] he is careful to draw attention to evidence that does not comport with his conclusions.... [Despite several reservations], I must nevertheless end up by concluding that this is a good book, thoughtful, stimulating, and scholarly.”
Emeritus Professor William J. Baumol, Princeton University
Journal of Evolutionary Economics, August 1996
“Rarely does a book have the power to improve economists’ fundamental vision of their subject. Frank Machovec’s Perfect Competition and the Transformation of Economics is such a book. We’ve all seen dramatic testimonials on the covers of popular novels: ‘It grips the reader from the first page. . . can’t put it down. . . a real page-turner.’ Most economists will feel the same about Machovec’s work. It is genuinely exciting: one of the most important works in economics published in the past ten years.”
Professor John B. Egger, Towson State University
Podcast
Perfect Competition and the Transformation of Economics
From the Econ Journal Watch
“Scholarly Comments on Academic Economics”
Foreign Travel
One of Dr. Machovec’s passions has been foreign travel. He led numerous student groups over a 30-year period, and was in turn led by his Spanish-fluent daughter during several trips to Mexico, where they focused on key locations of pre-Columbian civilizations.
Dr. Machovec’s good fortune includes visits to Australia, Austria, Bulgaria, Cambodia, Canada, Costa Rica, Egypt, England, Finland, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Hungary, Japan, Kenya, Laos, Mexico, Morocco, New Zealand, Poland, Romania, Russia, Serbia, South Korea, Spain, Thailand, and Vietnam.
The Marble Temple, Bangkok, 2003
Life Before Academia
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Entered the Air Force in 1968: career officer for 20 years.
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Most enjoyable assignment: Weather forecaster at Loring Air Force Base near the Canadian border in remote Aroostook County, Maine, an extremely friendly area of the country. Fondly recollects the blissfulness of being newly married, going on road trips to explore small towns in the beautiful countryside, and eating the most enormous lobsters (flown from Newfoundland, Canada).
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While assigned to the Pentagon as a lieutenant colonel from 1985 to 1988, he managed a division of regional specialists (eight civilian, two military). Worked closely with counterparts at the CIA and State Department to produce Top Secret assessments (called National Intelligence Estimates) for senior policymakers on economic issues affecting national security. Regularly briefed these assessments to high-ranking generals.
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Also served as an Assistant Professor of Economics at the U.S. Military Academy, West Point, N.Y. (1979–1982), and as a mathematics instructor from 1969 to 1971 at the U.S. Air Force Academy Prep School, which is located on the grounds of the USAF Academy (near Colorado Springs).
Personal Profile
Professor Machovec was raised by hard-working parents who sacrificed to ensure that each of their three children could attend St. Dominic’s School for eight years, whereupon they benefited enormously from, first, the then-standard Latin-Grammar curriculum style of the Catholic educational system, and second, from the strict instructional methodology of the demanding Sisters of Charity whose staffed his parish school. His parents also insisted that all of their children acquire a four-year college degree, and all of them did so.
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Graduated from the Baltimore Polytechnic Institute in 1963.
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Married, with one child, a daughter.
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Loves the civility of the South (has lived in Alabama, South Carolina, Texas, and Virginia); also loves the West (has lived in Colorado, Utah, and Nevada).
Hobbies include studying ancient civilizations and the earth’s climate history since the planet’s ice-ball stage. Also enjoys collecting magazine advertisements from the golden era of electric toy trains (1930–1960). His warmest memories:
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Crabbing with his parents in the Chesapeake Bay.
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Traveling from Baltimore by train with his brother in 1964 to spend four days at the New York World’s Fair.
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Touring Thailand in 1972 with his wife, Patricia, when she visited him during his tour of duty in Southeast Asia.
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Attending the magical Christmas Show with his wife and daughter in 1981 at Manhattan’s Radio City Music Hall.
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Traveling to competitions throughout the East coast and watching his daughter (with fatherly pride) as she competed for over a decade wearing elaborately decorated, custom-designed, and hand-sewn costumes lovingly made by her mother, a professional seamstress.
Fun facts:
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Most inspirational city: Prague.
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Favorite preserved-in-time American small town: Victor, Colorado.
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Favorite composers: Dvorak and Rachmaninoff.
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Favorite films: “Witness for the Prosecution” (1957) and “Prometheus” (2012).
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Favorite courses taught: Pure Theory of International Trade, Money & Banking, and Principles of Microeconomics.
Primary Intellectual Interest Outside of Economics
Dr. Machovec's fascination with sociobiology began when he encountered the ideas of Nobel-Prize winner Friedrich Hayek, who emphasized the dangers faced by society when its intellectuals fuel the inherently atavistic desire of people for an idealistic communalism that’s possible only in very small groups, such as families. Within societies, by contrast, relationships must be largely impersonal, governed by the rules that have evolved over many generations to ensure peaceful commercial intercourse despite our predatory heritage and despite the innateness of our insatiable appetites.
Sociobiology is 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 hard-wired either through mutation or serial Darwinian adaptations, such as grammatically-structured language, the territorial impulse, self-interest, the propensity to specialize, the reciprocity reflex, the strong preference for present versus future pleasures, and the phenomenon of diminishing incremental satisfactions from consuming successive units of the same product.
Suggested Reading:
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The Moral Animal by Robert Wright
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Human Universals by Donald Brown
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The Origins of Virtue by Matt Ridley
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The Property Species: Mine, Yours and the Human Mind by Bart Wilson
Membership in Professional Organizations
American Economics Association
History of Economics Society
International Joseph Schumpeter Society
Mont Pelerin Society
Society for Economic Anthropology
Southern Economics Association
Western International Economics Association
Current Research
Dr. Machovec has recently completed a highly interdisciplinary study, written for philosophical laymen, entitled “An Economist’s Deconstruction of Martin Heidegger –– An Influential Progenitor of the ‘Smashing Impulse’ Feared by Friedrich Hayek.” The final edit is approaching 900 pages. Publisher submission is targeted for 2024. A findings summary was presented in November 2022 at the annual conference of the Southern Economics Association.
Research and writing are complete on a 300-page manuscript: “Uncannily Similar Utopian Futures Envisioned by Pro-Capitalist Herbert Spencer and Anti-Capitalist Karl Marx.” Editing will begin in 2025.
Additionally, nearing completion is a 700-page retrospective of the financial meltdown of 2008. The main focus is the package of egregious government policy errors that jointly were the meltdown’s seminal cause.
Contact Information
Electronic communications will be responded to through a personal assistant. Traditional hard-copy letters will receive ink-and-paper responses in time-honored cursive.