Economics Department

Louis Johnston

Assistant Professor of Economics

Louis Johnston’s passion for educating others is not confined by the walls of a classroom. Rather, Johnston, assistant professor of economics at CSB/SJU, uses his skills as a teacher to touch the lives of not only students, but the greater Minnesota community as well.

Over the years, Johnston has appeared on Minnesota Public Radio’s (MPR) Midday program, as well as written for the Minneapolis Star Tribune. “I think of my discussions on MPR as a bigger version of the classroom; there are literally thousands of people listening to MPR during Midday, so I’m privileged to be fielding questions and helping to educate thousands of people.”

In his columns for the Minneapolis Star Tribune, Johnston takes legitimate questions and attempts to address them. A comment from a friend inspired Johnston to explore the issues relating to sales tax. “A friend of mine told me a story last year about how he stopped at a gas station and bought trail mix. The clerk held up the bag and asked, ‘Are there chocolate chips in this?’ My friend asked why this mattered. She replied, ‘If there are chocolate chips in the trail mix, I have to charge you sales tax. If there aren’t any, then I don’t have to charge tax.’”

This simple story inspired Johnston to further explore an idea he had already being thinking about. “I started digging into the sales tax system and found that it was typical of a system that was full of hair-splitting differences. For example, Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups are taxed. Reese’s Stix are not taxed because they have flour as an ingredient, and anything with flour is exempt from tax.”

In response to this example, Johnston wrote a piece titled “The Sales Tax: Reform It Or Scrap It?” In the article, Johnston argues that sales tax could be greatly simplified by getting rid of these distinctions; however, it would be even better to just scrap sales tax altogether and replace it with an adjusted income tax. The article will appear in The Minnesota Journal.

Johnston is very enthusiastic about teaching and facing challenges. “I like to describe it this way: I’m a teacher. That is, everything that I do is connected to the notion that people have questions about how the world works, and I want to use my expertise to help them answer their questions.”

In his writing and teaching, Johnston applies basic insights of economics to real-world issues and tries to make the discussion comprehensible to an educated person, a person who reads and thinks but may never have taken an economics course.

Johnston has been a professor at CSB/SJU since 1997. Prior to that, he was a professor at Bowdoin College in Maine and at Gustavus Adolphus College. Johnston also taught as a graduate student at the University of Minnesota and at the University of California, Berkeley.

Johnston first became interested in economics in the 1970s when his mom went back to school to get an MBA and took a couple of economics classes along the way. She told Johnston that he should, “study economics. It’s a lot more challenging.” In 1980, Johnston read a book by John Kenneth Galbraith called The Affluent Society. When he was finished with the book, he knew that he wanted to be an economist. “By combining the history of economic thought with contemporary evidence he was able to bring economic concepts to life in a manner that was both lively and thoughtful. I thought, ‘That’s what I want to do.’”