My name is Cameron Morris Weber, below you will find some personal information about me if you are interested.

I was born in Chicago and when I was growing up I lived with my family in various parts of the Midwest USA (Chicago, Minneapolis, Omaha). We moved to a small city in New Mexico when my Dad bought and built-up a business there during my last two years of high school.  I of course worked for my Dad's business off and on when not in school until he sold it to do other things.

My Mom is named Elizabeth as is my sister Beth, and my Dad is William (Bill), my brother is Toby.  I am the oldest of the three Weber children.  My Grandfather Oliver Van Alyea was a doctor and he wrote a longstanding textbook on ear, nose and throat surgery. I think I inherited my Grandfather's interest, if not all of his talent, in writing. I inherited an entrepreneurial and independent spirit from both my Mom and my Dad's side of the family. 

I am lucky to have four nieces and nephews (Dorothea and Katie in Denver, Josiah and Isabel in Louisiana) and have cousins in the Midwest and on each coast of the USA.  My cousin Colleen in New York is an actor and my cousin Chris has his own wine brand in Northern California he produces from grapes grown at his Dad's (my Uncle's) vineyard. 

Cameron is a Scottish name, from my Mom's side of the family (my Grandmother's name was Elizabeth Cameron, she married Oliver Van Alyea the doctor). Van Alyea and Cameron met on a tennis court in Chicago. My mother's side of the family is also French Huguenot and Dutch.  Mom is a member of the Daughters of the American Revolution and a lover of William Shakespeare, whose work, I must admit, is mostly over my head. But I do love to play tennis.  

Weber from my father's side is obviously German (and my Dad is English too, Morris being my Grandmother's maiden name). Weber met Morris when he was a travelling salesman selling seeds to farmers in the Midwest and Great Plains. Ms. Morris worked for the largest grain silo in America, in North Dakota.  They moved to Minneapolis after being married and we used to visit Grandmother's house for the holidays when living in the area before moving to New Mexico.

I left home in New Mexico to go to college in New Orleans, a city I still love and try to visit as much as possible.  New Orleans always feels like a home-away-from-home, and several of my closest friends still live there.  It is a unique place in every sense of the word. 

Currently I am PhD student in economics and history at the New School for Social Research in Manhattan and I teach economic history and macroeconomics at St. John's University in Queens.  I also tutor people in economics and in their research and writing in the social sciences and finance areas.  Like Karl Marx and Friedrich Hayek I believe that (good) work is an important part of who we are.

I have an interest in many areas of economics but mostly political economy and the history and philosophy of economics.  I consider myself (if we must have labels) a cultural economist and an economic historian. For my dissertation I have been focusing on the political economy of art, especially the art in the USA from its catalytic start during the Great Depression of the 1930s.   I joined the Association for Cultural Economics International, as found there some great economists doing interesting work. I am also a member of the Society for the Development of Austrian Economics.  I relate to the philosophical and analytical pre-dispositions of the "Austrians", eventhough, although highly respected, they lay outside of the mainstream of the economics profession. 

The South Park Slope area of Brooklyn has been my home for the last three now going on four years. New York is a good place to call home, there will always be someone smarter and better off than you and vice-versa.  This is kind of freeing, or better said, less limiting, in certain ways.  Plus, as our poet-laureates (and here I am only slightly kidding) the Ramones, say "New York CIty really has it all."  You don't have to partake in everything the city has to offer but knowing it is there brings value. It is a stereotype to say that New York has energy, but like many stereotypes there is some truth to it. 

Before moving to New York to live and go to school I was a diplomat in Senegal (so speak a little French) and Kazakhstan (and some Russian) with the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) for a few years.  I learned alot about people and cultures living overseas. For career advancement and challenge and more sense of control over my future I quit the Foreign Service to become financial controller for USAID's $20 some billion in loan programs, a position based in DC.  After helping to build-up USAID's capacity to manage its credit portfolio I then became the chief of financial oversight and coordination at the Department of State during the State Department's financial management improvement efforts.  Despite all, George W. Bush, our first MBA President, was serious about improving government management, alot of which worked, not fiscally but managerially.

Around the time I started the MBA program at the University of New Mexico I had a 'vision' that public service might be a good way to earn a living. I started the government as an accounts payable clerk and near the end of my first 6 months in Washinton I ran into someone in the elevator (par hazard - by accident - as the French say) and showed her some things I was writing. My friend showed these writings to her boss, and then a bit later I was promoted to a policy analyst, evaluating and writing policies for implementing legislation and all that. I worked in Washington in various jobs for about three years, which included my first trips to Africa.  (Mali is beautiful, one never forgets the red earth, big sun, natural foods and the gentleness of the people in Bamako.) 

I then appplied for and was accepted into the Foreign Service with USAID, where my first posting was to Dakar, geograhpically the most western part of the African continent, and a thriving, interesting metropolis in its own right. 

I worked for USAID on projects in many countries, mostly in the areas of economic and public sector reform.  For example I helped to establish the housing mortgage market in Kazakhstan after 70 years of the communist regime and helped to encourage small business lending in Guatemala after their 35 year civil war, both through the offering of partial loan guarantees (which should be noted are different than the 100% government mortgage guarantees at the heart of today's financial crisis).  I also worked on risk-assessment criteria for the guarantees in conjunction with the President's Office of Management and Budget and helped to establish procedures to better account for taxpayer monies in our foreign affairs operations. Alot of money was being spent in the ex-Soviet Union and it wasn't being managed as well as it could have been.  Some of this work (especially working with people from all over the world) I found quite rewarding. 

But I also found that the higher-up one becomes in government the more one sees how democratically-mandated rules are bent or ignored.  This then helped me to view with a critical eye those that call for government help in creating some sense of a common good or in solving people's problems, especially when those calling for this government action have never worked for the government for anything other than a short-term politically-appointed position.  Idealization of people or institutions might be best curtailed with a healthy scepticism, although of course not cynicism. 

Many things bring joy in addition to family and friends, work and ideas. I sometimes think the music of John Coltrane is the closest we will get to the voice of God, next to our own personal love relationships and family.  Shostakovich is supremely profound and sublime as are the works of Beethoven and Mahler. I also enjoy rock music, mostly people from the UK, NYC, Detroit and San Francisco from the 1960s and 1970s. NIck Cave and the Bad Seed's The Boatsman's Call I think is one of the most beautiful records ever conceived (along with John Cale's Paris 1919), however I don't know if most people would really call these records 'rock'.  And I like Shostakovich's 8th and 10th Symphonies the most, as well as Coltrane's A Love Supreme and Giant Steps. 

I am a self-taught musician, except Jim Koblick taught me how to play the blues - the basis for most "western" music - and how to record music.  I have played in many bands and always will enjoy playing music with friends. Jim teaching me the blues patterns really opened my eyes to the logic of music and I try to reciprocate by helping others who are learning to play. Mostly though I like playing the accoustic guitar and writing songs, Hank Williams and Syd Barrett being heros in this regard.  

Here is something I wrote about politics, culture and music, which was published in Liberty magazine.

In 2007 I wrote a small book called Economics for Everyone.  It is only about 65 pages, the idea is to have written something that clarifies important points about economics for, yes, everyone, but especially those who haven't had the opportunity or interest enough in economics to learn about it.  Higher levels of economics can be very complicated mathematically and technically, but fundamental economic ideas which do effect everyone's day-to-day lives could be better disseminated. That's why I wrote Economics for Everyone, really for some people I love who hadn't had the opportunity to study economics.  I think it is a good primer on economic fundamentals and on the unresolved debates in economic policy, but then again of course I am biased. 

I enjoy science fiction, biographies and autobiographies and sometimes the classics. At one time I read most Sartre, Camus, Jean Cocteau and F.S. Fitzgerald, Norman Mailer and Virginia Woolf voraciously in a brief period of time when working at a gas station in Northern California.  I have read books by or about Dmitiri Shostakovich, Marlon Brando, Marilyn Monroe, Pablo Picasso, Anthony Keidis, Johnny Thunders, Friedrich Hayek, Ivan Turgenev, Iggy Pop, Kurt Vonnegut and Man Ray, to name a few.  Lately my tastes run to the fiction of Charles Dickens and the Russian novelists of the 1800s.  And a good day is one where I can study math for a few hours; mathematical economics can be simple beauty, if not really applicable to the institutional problems we face today. 

My favorite thinkers include Thomas Szasz, Karl Marx, Thorstein Veblen, F.A. Hayek,Cicero, Karl Popper and Paul Virilio.  Not all of their work is easy to read, nor is it any of it of course the unquestionable truth but their ideas are worth it when you want to put forth the effort.  James Buchanan is my favorite living political economist and I have been lucky enought to have spoken with Mr. Buchanan a couple times at George Mason University, he is what you would call a southern gentleman.  There are other economists I like alot too but these are too numerous to mention.  It is safe to say that Allen Parkman, who was my MBA advisor at the University of New Mexico, is the person who got me the most interested in studying economics as a discipline, and Allen has become a friend in Albuquerque.

I like modern art, and the history of it and the ideas of the people that created it, especially Russian art and the Parisian school from the 1920s and 1930s. Man Ray is a favorite, his paintings and writings more than his photography.  I think my favorite painter is Amrita Shergil, I discovered her when in India.  Here is something a friend sent me (thank you Chris) about art and the television show Bewitched which is very well done.  I have been to the modern art museums in Athens, Madrid, Dakar, Paris, Chicago, New York, Boston, Krakow, Vienna, London, Amsterdam, Munich, Venice, New Delhi, and San Francisco, and I was born on the same day as Pablo Picasso and as well Richard Lloyd from the New York rock band Television (and too the classical liberal Benjamin Constant).

Politically (philosophically) I am a libertarian, though I try not to wear it on my sleeve.  I think maybe knowing that I am politically-biased towards limited government - not least because of seeing thwarted life-options for decent people in the post-colonial world often due to the "crowding out" of private and self-employment by the neo-colonial (quasi- and otherwise governmental) development institutions and the mentality 'development' creates culturally, and in seeing the fatal conceit of power in Washington DC - allows me to be aware of these views and be forwarned with an attempt to be open-minded with the political views of others (however wrong they may be :-) ). 

In Brooklyn I have been working with the Libertarian Party and I maintain the BrooklynLP.org website.  I have appeared several times on the Brooklyn-based cable TV show Hardfire (like Andy Warhol said everyone has their 15 minutes of fame).  The first couple of times on the show was to present Economics for Everyone and now I do the show to discuss economic issues when the producer asks me to or when I have a topic I think would be of interest.  In January 2009 I gave a speech to the Manhattan Libertarian Party annual meeting about the creation of the welfare state in America, which is available on youtube.    

 I do a periodic blog, called Workers of the World Relax, however I am not a very good blogger as don't spend enough time on it due to scholarly pursuits and deadlines when school is in session.  Plus a blog can be mostly opinion and it is good to emancipate oneself from one's own opinions from time-to-time as it is too easy to get tied down in dogma.  Plus to be honest, I am "old school", I would rather be out enjoying the city or reading books than messing around on the computer, except for writing. 

I am not sure that Aristotle had it right when he said that one of the highest ideals is for man to serve his fellows through public service.  I think perhaps that that might be backwards and the best we can do is to fight the corrupting powers of the state.  Local governments are ok, we live in those spaces and have some incentive and opportunity to be aware of what government is doing. It is national governments, the nation-state, which can be detrimental to our well-being. 

Veblen knew this, and said that the what a nation-state does best is war.  Cicero was way ahead of his time too in his writings on the foolishness of the self-seekers who do what they do in the name of a government for the people or for the perceived 'betterment' of others. I think Aristotle did have it right when he said that the ethical life is the best life, the one that leads to human flourishing.  

Lastly, but most importantly, I have been lucky to have friends, many long-lasting and from different walks of life and different parts of the world.  My true friends are more wise, knowledgeable, talented, creative and forgiving than I am in many areas.   And for this, again, I am thankful.

Smithsonian Museum of American Art, June 2008, photo by evw.

In Denver with Dorothea and Katie, June 2009, photo by ewf.

In Greece Summer 2007, photo by N. Time.

At the Hirshorn Gallery Summer 2005, photo by Ray D.