Duc Hien Nguyen, economics
Photo by Will Draxler ’26.
By Jeremy Powers ’24
Duc Hien Nguyen has just bought themself a car. Having lived in cities most of their life, it’s the first car they’ve ever bought. They need it to get around Mount Desert Island and to College of the Atlantic, where, as the new Cody van Heerden Chair in Economics and Quantitative Social Sciences, they’ll spend the coming years teaching young human ecologists that economics is about more than dollars and cents.
“We need radical socio-economic change, and education is one of the most effective paths towards peaceful change,” Nguyen said. “The changes that we need should be informed by a new way of thinking that emphasizes not so much the individual quest for maximizing profit, but deals more with what we actually value as people, as community, as society.”
Nguyen’s interest in exploiting alternative methods of visualizing and studying economics blossomed after they graduated from the University of Toronto and landed a job as an economic consultant. It was then that Nguyen experienced the lack of nuance surrounding questions of privilege, gender, and power dynamics in mainstream economic thinking.
“Conventional economics tends to take for granted the distribution of power, the distribution of resources. It doesn’t ask dynamic questions. It assumes, for example, that some people are rich and some people are poor, but it doesn’t consider how that division between rich and poor came about in the first place,” they explained. “To me, it’s not interesting.”
What does interest Nguyen is building a new generation of young economists who are conscious of these important ambiguities. “Political economy really focuses on the interplay between money and power. I focus on sort of leading the student to think a lot more about how we can change this interplay. We’ll start with foundational economic theories and concepts, but then we go further and look behind the scenes to see what’s there and what we can do about it.”
So far, Nguyen said, they’ve really enjoyed the class discussions they’ve been having as students work through the process of dissecting economic models. “Folks have appreciated the insights that economics theories and models can provide, while remaining clear-eyed about the models' limitations and potential for misuse,” they said.
Nguyen’s next two classes are an introductory class on macroeconomics and a class titled Conversations with the Ghost of Marx, which will look at the global variants of the capitalistic economic system through a Marxian lens. For the spring, plans are still a bit loose, but they said that they’re interested in teaching a class on the economics of data and artificial intelligence.
“College of the Atlantic really embodies the kind of community that I value. We really truly care for each other; we do not value marketability and profitability so much that we are trampling upon the most magical people to make way for ourselves. That's not the ethos and the ethics of this community,” they said.
Nguyen holds a PhD in economics from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, a master’s degree in economics from the University of Toronto, and a bachelor’s degree in economics from Trent University. In their free time, this economist likes to play RPG video games and listen to Dungeons and Dragons podcasts. “The sci fi, fantasy, fiction world is my escape,” they said.
