Welcome to another edition of The Mueller Report!
It’s been quite a while since my last newsletter. Things have been rather hectic in the Mueller household over the past two months from finishing up the semester, finishing an academic article, being solo with the kids for a weekend, fixing our shower, the roof of the garage, patching the ceiling, preparing for our expedition to Colorado, traveling, and starting to exercise regularly again.
Another class of students graduated from King’s two weeks ago. These graduates had at least half their college career in a post-Covid world, but they persevered! I interviewed five graduating PPE seniors as part of our accreditation process to see how well they could answer questions related to our learning objectives for Politics, Philosophy, and Economics.
Although no student answered everything quite the way I hoped, I was still impressed in each interview by at least one of their answers and, perhaps more importantly, their poise and thoughtfulness. They readily admitted when they didn’t remember or know an answer. And they also were able to recall a wide variety of information and ideas and express them in a generally coherent manner.
Here are the questions I and a colleague asked them:
Economics
Inflation is currently at a 40 year high. Please discuss what inflation is, what causes it, and why the Federal Reserve has begun slowly raising interest rates to combat it. Bonus: how do the Fed's actions relate to asset prices and federal government deficits and debt?
What kinds of effects do trade barriers, like tariffs on Chinese imports or sanctioning of Russian companies and commodities, have on the U. S. economy? Who will benefit and who will lose should these trade restrictions continue for a long period of time?
Philosophy
Please discuss a couple important connections and tensions between Christianity and philosophy over the past two millennia.
How does Philosophy differ from other disciplines in their methodology and their subject matter?
Politics
Describe a couple key political ideas relevant to the Enlightenment and to the American Founding and what thinkers talked about them.
What kinds of questions would adherents to different schools of Constitutional interpretation have for the current Supreme Court nominee, Ketanji Brown?
Without going into much detail or commentary at all, here are some other questions and topics that have been on my mind recently:
What is going to happen to financial markets as the Fed raises interest rates and sells $95 billion of its assets every month?
How much will interest payments on the federal debt of $30 trillion dollars increase as rates rise? An effective rate of .5% means $150 billion dollars annually. An effective rate of 3% means $900 billion dollars annually! And it only goes up from there…
Does the U. S. government want the conflict between Russia and Ukraine to end or do they hope to bleed Russia in an interminable conflict? Is risking escalation, pushing Russia into the arms of China, and creating significant global economic disruptions - particularly with regard to the availability of wheat and of critical chemicals for fertilizer - worth making their military a bit weaker and their government a bit poorer?
What fallout will the Supreme Court decision in Dobbs have? When will the person responsible for leaking a draft of Alito’s opinion be found and how much will they be punished? Hopefully soon and severely. Will this ruling galvanize the left and give them a fighting chance of not getting completely trounced in the midterms this fall?
How soon will inflation begin falling? And will the economy enter a recession? Data released a week or so ago reported that the economy shrank in the 1st quarter of 2022. If it shrinks again in the 2nd quarter we will officially enter a recession (stagflation is the 70s term for stagnation, or recession, and inflation occurring simultaneously).
What will happen to housing prices? Will the nominal increases in interest rates on mortgages reduce effective demand for houses? Another way of putting it is: will nominal rates rise more quickly than nominal income? Interest rates moving from 3% to over 5% represent a 70% plus increase in interest costs for borrowing the same amount of money.
How far will Biden be able to go in transferring student college debt to the taxpayers? And how much will that change the landscape of funding and recruiting for higher education?
How far will stock prices fall and how long will they take to recover?
These are lots of questions I would love to know the answers to…Perhaps it gives you a few more things to think about as well. Feel free to leave comments or to drop me a line directly if you want to discuss any of this.
I hope to write again next week with a more substantive reflection!