Political Economy · Public Finance · History of Economic Thought
PhD student in Economics, Colorado State University
I study the guard economy — the military, police, carceral, surveillance, and supervisory labor that holds a society together. My work asks why public resources in the U.S. have increasingly flowed toward control, and what that shift costs our society.
About
I came to economics through philosophy, international studies, management and entrepreneurship, and roughly two decades teaching and working before returning for my doctorate.
My research sits at the intersection of public finance, political economy, and the history of economic thought. I treat the resources a society spends guarding itself — policing, prisons, private security, surveillance, and the supervisory labor of the workplace — as an economic category worth measuring on its own terms, and I trace how the balance between the guard economy and other types of social spending has shifted over time.
Before enrolling in my PhD program I taught economics, political science, management and entrepreneurship as adjunct and visiting faculty. I have also worked in management, marketing/communications, and community development, including U.S. State Department fellowships in Nigeria and Ethiopia.
Research
Every society spends part of its resources keeping itself in order. Some of that spending answers real needs; much of it is the cost of holding unequal arrangements in place — what the classical economists called unproductive labor. I work to define the guard economy precisely, measure it in public and private budgets and national accounts, and read it back through the theorists who first tried to name it.
Every economy spends part of its resources standing guard. That cost is my subject.
How economists have understood guard labor depends on how they understood knowledge itself. This paper reads that history and argues for a complex, dynamic-systems treatment of guard labor's contradictory effects on profitability, against the static-equilibrium framing it usually receives. In revision for submission to History of Political Economy.
A measurement-driven account of how municipal spending in the United States has tilted from care toward control, and what drives the shift. Accepted for the IAFFE 34th Annual Conference, Cali, Colombia.
Reading Smith and Marx together on unproductive labor, this paper argues that guard expenditure stands in a contradictory relation to accumulation — propping up profitability through imperial structures while dragging on the underlying profit rate — and closes on what a more multipolar order might return to the societies that have been paying for hegemony.
Talks & Conferences
Teaching
I currently teach economics at two institutions: as a graduate teaching assistant in microeconomics at Colorado State, and as an online adjunct instructor for Albright College, where I've taught Economics for Managers at the MBA level and Statistical Analysis for Economics and Business at the undergraduate level.
I spent roughly two decades as adjunct and visiting faculty, teaching economics, political science, management, ethics, and entrepreneurship across the undergraduate and MBA levels.
My teaching spans the Kelley School of Business at Indiana University, Ivy Tech Community College, and Purdue University Fort Wayne, with courses ranging from government and business to U.S. foreign policy to international business and managerial economics.
Contact
I'm currently available for adjunct teaching and research collaborations, online or in the Fort Collins area.
Department of Economics
Colorado State University
Fort Collins, Colorado