John Komlos (born 28 December 1944) is an American economic historian of Hungarian descent and former holder of the chair of economic history at the University of Munich.^[1][2]

Komlos was born in 1944 in Budapest in Hungary during the Holocaust.^[3] After becoming refugees during the 1956 revolution, his family fled to the United States where Komlos finally grew up in Chicago.^[3][4]

Komlos received a PhD in history in 1978 and a second PhD in economics in 1990 from the University of Chicago.^[1][5] He was inspired by Robert Fogel to work on the history of human height,^[2] Komlos devoted most of his academic career developing and expanding the research agenda that became known as Anthropometric history,^[2][6][7] the study of the effect of economic development on human biology as indicated by the physical stature or the obesity rate prevalence of a population.^{[8][4][9][10]}

Komlos was a fellow at the Carolina Population Center of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill from 1984 to 1986. He worked as a professor of economics and of economic history at the University of Munich for eighteen years before his retirement.^[5][1]He also taught as a visitor at Harvard, Duke University, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, as well as in Vienna and St. Gallen.^[11][12]

In 2003, Komlos founded Economics and Human Biology, a quarterly peer-reviewed academic journal covering research on biological economics, economics in the context of human biology and health.^[2][5][1]

Through his research, he became a humanistic economist, recognizing that conventional economic models often inadequately represent the complexities of real-world economic behavior.^[13] Following the 2008 financial crisis, his focus shifted towards analyzing contemporary economic issues through a humanistic perspective.^[14]

In 2013, he was elected a Fellow of the Cliometric Society.^[15][16]

• Nutrition and Economic Development in the Eighteenth- Century Habsburg Monarchy: An Anthropometric history. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press. 1989.
• Komlos, John, ed. (1990). Economic development in the Habsburg Monarchy and in the Successor States: Essays. Boulder, Colorado: East European Monographs; Distributed by Columbia University Press. ISBN 9780880331777.
• Komlos, John, ed. (1995). The Biological Standard of Living on Three Continents: Further Explorations in Anthropometric History. Boulder, San Francisco, Oxford: Westview Press. ISBN 9780813320557.
• Komlos, John (2019). Foundations of real-world economics: What every economics student needs to know. Abington, Oxon & New York, NY: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group. ISBN 978-1351584715.^[17]