Claar to serve as Arkadelphia Rotary Club guest speaker, Feb. 21, 2014

The Arkadelphia Rotary Club will meet Friday, February 21, 2014, at Western Sizzlin, 106 WP Malone Drive, for its weekly meeting. Dr. Victor Claar has been invited to serve as guest speaker and will speak regarding free trade. Fair Trade--including goods like fair trade coffee--is an enormously popular idea in Christian and secular circles alike. Who, after all, could be against fairness? Victor V. Claar, however, raises significant economic and moral questions about both the logic and economic reasoning underlying the fair trade movement. In this monograph, Claar suggests that, for all its good intentions, fair trade may not be of particular service to the poor, especially in the developing world. Rotarians and guests are invited to attend. For more information on the guest speaker, please read his brief biography below. 

VICTOR V. CLAAR, Ph.D., is professor of economics and teaches courses in economics to both undergraduate and graduate students. He recently was a Fulbright Scholar at the American University of Armenia—a landlocked country at the intersection of Turkey, Georgia, Azerbaijan, and Iran—where he conducted research and gave lectures to graduate students. 

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 sixth printing and recently translated into Chinese. One reviewer said of the book’s authors, “they demonstrate an impressive breadth of vision [and] deftly move from the big picture and macroeconomics to the care for the individual and restoring hope for the least of these.”

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.