Erwin Dekker

Affiliate Faculty

History of Economic Thought, Austrian Economics, Chicago School Economics, Jan Tinbergen, Economics of the Arts

I grew up in Hoorn, 30 kilometers north of Amsterdam in the Netherlands. In 2002 I started my undergraduate studies at the University of Amsterdam in Political Science and Economics. In both fields I was especially attracted to the intellectual history courses. In 2006 I moved to London for the MSc program at the London School of Economics in the Philosophy of the Social Science. After some wandering I started my PhD under the supervision of Arjo Klamer in the summer of 2008, first as external PhD-student and later as PhD-lecturer at the Erasmus University. I graduated in January 2014 with a dissertation on the cultural and intellectual milieu of interwar Vienna and the Austrian School of Economics. I turned my dissertation into a book during a post-doc at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, it was published as The Viennese Students of Civilization in 2016 (Cambridge). Most of my teaching has been in the Cultural Economics & Entrepreneurship program at the Erasmus University in Rotterdam in which I taught the applied economics of the arts as well as the more heterodox approach to cultural economics which seeks to combine insights from the humanities with economic theory. In 2017 I started another post-doc project at the Erasmus School of Economicsto write the intellectual biography of the first Nobel Prize winner in economics, the econometrician and idealist Jan Tinbergen. The resulting book is Jan Tinbergen and the Rise of Economic Expertise (CUP, 2021), or in Dutch 'Jan Tinbergen. Een econoom op zoek naar vrede.' (Boom, 2021). Over the years I became more interested in economic sociology and institutional economics, two interests which come together in the edited volume (with Pavel Kuchar) Governing Markets as Knowledge Commons (CUP, 2021). In the summer of 2021 I left the Erasmus University and joined the Mercatus Center at George Mason University as Senior Research Fellow. I am currently working on a cultural history of social thought in Chicago between 1920 and 1970.

Selected Publications

Books by me

Dekker, Erwin and Valeria Morea. Realizing the Values of Art: Making Space for Cultural Civil Society. Cham: Palgrave. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-24598-5

Dekker, Erwin and Kuchař, Pavel. 2021. Governing Markets as Knowledge Commons. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108692915

Dekker, Erwin. 2021. Jan Tinbergen (1903-1994) and the Rise of Economic Expertise. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Dekker, Erwin. 2016. The Viennese Students of Civilization: The Meaning and Context of Austrian Economics Reconsidered. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.