Dr. Victor V. Claar is associate professor of economics at Florida Gulf Coast University in Fort Myers, where he holds the BB&T Distinguished Professorship in Free Enterprise. He studied business and math as an undergraduate at Houghton College in upstate New York, and earned his masters and doctoral degrees in economics at West Virginia University.

Professor Claar is an affiliate scholar of the Acton Institute, as well as a member of the Foundation for Economic Education's Faculty Network. He is a Fulbright Scholar, having spent a year teaching economics to graduate students in the former-Soviet republic of Armenia.

Professor Claar has a long, impressive record of publications, including his influential book, Economics in Christian Perspective: Theory, Policy and Life Choices, now in its tenth printing and recently translated into Chinese. His forthcoming book with coauthor Greg Forster, The Keynesian Revolution and the Rise of Economic Materialism: We're All Dead, is under contract to be published in early 2019 by Palgrave Macmillan.

While you may have heard that economics was once dubbed the "dismal science," Professor Claar's work demonstrates that this field is quite the opposite, especially when it does what Professor Claar does: combine sobering analysis and Christian principles to offer a vision of hope. Professor Claar is also the author of Fair Trade? Its Prospects as a Poverty Solution, an incisive, thoughtful work that challenges us all to rethink how we buy what we need and want.