from the Institute of Economic Affairsthinkiea.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/Think-booklet... · 2018-06-25 · The Institute of Economic Affairs. is the UK’s . original free market

from theInstitute of Economic Affairs

June 30 2018 · Royal Geographical Society · 1 Kensington Gore London

2018

Welcome to THINK, a conference to help equip you for the economic and political challenges facing Britain and the world. We hope that we can also encourage you to ‘think the unthinkable’ and consider radical solutions to the problems facing the UK across a range of policies.

With only 272 days until the UK leaves the European Union, our country faces a once in a lifetime chance to fundamentally reconsider the relationship between the state and the individual. Decisions made in the next five years will have effects for decades, as the UK decides how we choose to trade with the world, how we regulate new and innovative technologies, and even how many fish we pull out of the sea! Getting these decisions wrong could undermine the British economy for years.

So I hope today’s conference will leave you both intellectually stimulated and better informed. Free trade and classically liberal policies have been the foundations of the incredible improvement in living standards over the past two centuries, and our continued prosperity depends on young people like you making the case for free market economics in the future.

Please do stay involved with the IEA, especially through our student events programme. To find out more, visit the student section of our website at: www.iea.org.uk/events-and-conferences/

Best wishes,

Mark Littlewood

Director General, IEA

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ABOUT THINK brings together some of the best speakers in the world to highlight how creativity and innovation fostered under free markets have helped halve world poverty in recent decades.

This year, THINK has assembled prominent thinkers – including Nobel Prize winner Vernon Smith – from around the globe.

They’ll shed light on key contemporary issues such as ideas and innovation, post-Brexit Britain, globalisation, gender pay, nudge theory, inequality, the rise of populism – and much more.

This fourth annual THINK conference will introduce you to thought-provoking ideas that will equip you to examine how best to approach some of the major social and economic issues present in the world today.

And, along the way, you’ll hear exciting and surprising views on the way the world may change in your lifetime!

ABOUT THE IEAThe Institute of Economic Affairs is the UK’s original free market think tank, and it’s been at the forefront of the battle of ideas for over 60 years. We believe free markets play a major role in solving economic and social problems – and we spread that message through our books, papers, films, events and more.

As an educational charity, we have strong connections with the UK’s leading universities and schools. From helping university economics societies to flourish, to our sixth form conference programme, we travel the length and breadth of the UK spreading the importance of economics.

In our travels, it became clear there wasn’t an event where the best and brightest students could come together to look at ways to solve the world’s economic problems. This was the spark that led to the creation of THINK – and we very much hope you enjoy it in its fourth year.

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MEET THE ORGANISERM

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Christiana Stewart-Lockhart Director of Programmes, IEA

020 7799 8923 [email protected] @cehambro

Christiana is Director of Programmes at the Institute of Economic Affairs, where she oversees all educational and international outreach.

She founded the THINK conference in 2015, emphasising the importance of discussing different economic ideas.

She is also Founder and Chief Executive of EPICENTER, a Brussels-based network of nine free market think tanks (including the IEA) from across Europe.

Prior to joining the IEA in 2012, Christiana worked at a foreign policy think tank and a campaign organisation.

In addition, she has worked to establish an extensive student network across the UK. Christiana has nearly a decade of experience working in think tanks and education, and she holds a BA in Politics from the University of York.

High Street Kensington

Knightsbridge

South Kensington

TUBE South Kensington (Circle, District and Piccadilly Lines) – a 10 minute walk up Exhibition Road (beyond the Science Museum and Imperial College) to the Society.

Knightsbridge (Piccadilly Line) – a 10 minute walk along Kensington Road to the Society.

Lancaster Gate (Central Line) – a 15 to 20 minute walk across Hyde Park to the Society.

BUS There are several bus routes which stop outside or within the vicinity of the Society building.

9: Hammersmith/Aldwych 10: Hammersmith/King’s Cross 52: Willesden/Victoria 360: Kensington/Elephant and Castle 452: Wandsworth/Willesden

RAIL The nearest mainline railway stations are London Victoria (you can then take the 52 bus to the Society) and London Paddington (a 25 minute walk to the Society).

BICYCLE Bicycles can be locked against the bike stands, located at the main entrance on Exhibition Road. Space is limited. Bicycles are left at their owner’s risk. Please make sure bicycles are secured as thieves are known to work in the area.

CAR There are no car parking facilities at the Society.

The Society is no longer located within central London’s Congestion Charge area.

There is limited public parking in Hyde Park, although car parking restrictions operate in the area, often until late at night.

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9.45 – 10.15 REGISTRATION

10.15 – 10.30 Welcome and Introduction – Christiana Stewart-Lockhart and Mark Littlewood

10.30 – 11.00 Tim Harford – What Made the Modern Economy: Why History Should Emphasise Ideas and Innovations

Tim Harford is one of the best known and most effective popularisers of economic ideas and insights. He will talk about the arguments made in his most recent book, Fifty Things That Made the Modern Economy and look at some of the amazing ways in which ideas and innovations have transformed our lives in profound ways for the better.

11.00 – 11.20 BREAK

Book signing with Tim Harford

11.20 – 11.50 Roger Bootle – A Positive View of Post-Brexit Britain

Roger Bootle is one of Britain’s most high profile economic analysts and commentators. He will talk about his book Making a Success of Brexit And Reforming the EU, explaining why we should be much more relaxed about the prospects for Brexit. He argues that clearer economic analysis will show claims that Brexit has doomed Britain economically are misguided.

11.50 – 12.20 Dr Linda Yueh – Globalisation and The Rise of China

Leading economist and broadcaster, Linda Yueh, will be speaking on her new book, The Great Economists: How Their Ideas Can Help Us Today. Dr Yueh will focus on two chapters: Can China Grow Rich? And The Future of Globalisation. She will draw on the insights of the Great Economists to help address these two current economic challenges.

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12.20 – 13.00 LUNCH

Book signing with Linda Yueh and Roger Bootle

13.00 – 13.30 Kate Andrews – How Pay Gaps Gripped the Developed World and How to Solve It

2018 marks the 100-year anniversary since most women gained the right to vote. Yet the occasion seems to have drawn more attention to issues like the gender pay gap than it has to the historical and contemporary successes of women. Do men and women have access to the same opportunities in 2018? How concerned should we be about workplace discrimination and the gender pay gap? Will the government’s newly-implemented pay gap reporting measures take us a step closer to gender equality, or lead us further astray?

13.30 – 14.10 Raj Chande of The Behavioural Insights Team in Conversation with Christopher Snowdon

Nudge theory and the applications of insights from behavioural economics have become a major feature of public policy in recent years. Some see this as a case of overbearing paternalism, others as a way to encourage people to make better decisions. Raj Chande of the government’s Behavioural Insights Team will discuss these issues with the IEA’s Christopher Snowdon.

14.10 – 14.30 BREAK

14.30 – 15.00 Dambisa Moyo – The Edge of Chaos

Dambisa Moyo became one of the world’s best-known development economists and critics of the aid system with the publication of her book Dead Aid in 2011. She will speak about the arguments of her new book Edge of Chaos, looking at the rise of populism and the growing challenges to democracy and how we need to reform it to meet them.

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15.00 – 15.30 Tom Standage – The Economics of Self-Driving Cars

Tom Standage is Deputy Editor of The Economist. He will speak about the far-reaching implications and likely effects of autonomous vehicles – they will enable us to correctly price vehicle externalities for the first time for example, but they may also greatly increase the state’s capacity for control and surveillance.

15.30 – 15.50 BREAK

Book signing with Tom Standage

15.50 – 16.30 Dr Vernon Smith, Nobel Prize-Winning Economist, in Conversation with Professor Philip Booth

Vernon Smith is one of the world’s most widely decorated economists. A long-time friend of the IEA, he won the Nobel Prize in economics in 2002. Professor Smith will be interviewed by IEA Senior Academic Fellow Professor Philip Booth, on important and topical aspects of economics. His work includes experimental economics, which tests economic theory against the actual decisions that real people take, and behavioural economics. Vernon Smith has recently become a severe critic of Donald Trump’s protectionist policies, just as he was a critic of George Bush’s steel tariffs 16 years ago.

16.30 – 17.00 Dr Jamie Whyte – The Economics of Oxfam and Inequality

Inequality is widening. That’s what we are always told. But is it really? This talk examines the way inequality is measured and how those measures can be misleading. It argues that inequality, properly understood, has actually declined dramatically over the past 40 years.

17.00 – 17.20 BREAK

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17.20 - 18.00 Closing Keynote with Dr Steve Davies – Dissecting Corbynomics and Theresa May’s Economy

If you are a historian you soon become convinced that there is nothing new under the sun. Today all sorts of bad arguments and policies are being revived and presented as novel and exciting – from all parts of the political debate. Why were these bad ideas before and why is it that they are still so today?

18.00 – 20.00 DRINKS RECEPTION

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-Z Kate Andrews is News Editor at the IEA. She joined in February 2016 having previously worked as Head of Communications at the Adam Smith Institute, where she handled media and donor relations. As News Editor, Kate oversees the IEA’s digital platforms, creating and commissioning content for the website, social media, podcasts and ieaTV. Kate regularly features across the national media, including appearances on BBC Question Time. She writes a weekly column on Fridays for CityAM, and her briefing on the gender pay gap was published by the IEA in November 2017.

Philip Booth is Senior Academic Fellow at the IEA and Professor of Finance, Public Policy and Ethics at St. Mary’s University, Twickenham. He also holds the position of Director of Research and Public Engagement at St. Mary’s. From 2002-2015 he was Professor of Insurance and Risk Management at Cass Business School. Philip Booth also worked for the Bank of England, was Associate Dean of Cass Business School and held various other academic positions at City University. He has written widely, including a number of books, on investment, finance, social insurance and pensions as well as on the relationship between Catholic social teaching and economics. He is Deputy Editor of Economic Affairs. Philip is a Fellow of the Royal Statistical Society, a Fellow of the Institute of Actuaries and an honorary member of the Society of Actuaries of Poland. Philip has a BA in Economics from the University of Durham and a PhD from City University.

Roger Bootle is the founder and chairman of Capital Economics, one of the largest macro-economics consultancies in the world. He is also an Honorary Fellow of the Institute of Actuaries and a regular columnist for The Daily Telegraph. Roger was a Specialist Adviser to the House of Commons Treasury Committee for twenty years from 1997 to 2017. Under Chancellor Kenneth Clarke, he was appointed to the panel of Independent Economic Advisers, the so-called “Wise Men”. He is a former Group Chief Economist of HSBC and a visiting professor at Manchester Business School. In 2012, he was named Economics Commentator of the Year and, together with a team from Capital Economics, won the Wolfson Prize. He has also written several books, including his widely acclaimed latest book, Making a Success of Brexit, and the prophetic The Death of Inflation, published in 1996.

Raj Chande is a Principal Advisor on the Education and Skills team at The Behavioural Insights Team (BIT). BIT started life inside 10 Downing Street as the world’s first government institution dedicated to the application of behavioural sciences. Raj leads their work on early years and schools. He joined the team in 2012 and has also worked on projects targeting higher education participation and attainment in further education colleges. Prior to joining the team, Raj worked in finance as an equities trader for nine years, resigning in 2010 to take an MSc in Economics and Public Policy at University of Bristol. Raj went on to complete his PhD at Bristol on the Economics of Education, where his thesis comprised a series of RCTs testing parent engagement interventions designed in collaboration with Harvard Kennedy School.

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Steve Davies is Head of Education at the IEA. Previously he was program officer at the Institute for Humane Studies (IHS) at George Mason University in Virginia. He joined IHS from the UK where he was Senior Lecturer in the Department of History and Economic History at Manchester Metropolitan University. He has also been a Visiting Scholar at the Social Philosophy and Policy Center at Bowling Green State University, Ohio. A historian, he graduated from St Andrews University in Scotland in 1976 and gained his PhD from the same institution in 1984. He has authored several books, including Empiricism and History and was co-editor with Nigel Ashford of The Dictionary of Conservative and Libertarian Thought.

Tim Harford is an economist, journalist and broadcaster. He is author of Fifty Things That Made the Modern Economy, Messy, and the million-selling The Undercover Economist. Tim is a senior columnist at the Financial Times, and the presenter of Radio 4’s More or Less and the iTunes-topping series Fifty Things That Made the Modern Economy. Tim has spoken at TED, PopTech and the Sydney Opera House. He is a visiting fellow of Nuffield College, Oxford and an honorary fellow of the Royal Statistical Society. Tim was Economics Commentator of the Year 2014, winner of the Royal Statistical Society journalistic excellence award 2015, won the Society of Business Economists writing prize 2014-15, and the Bastiat Prize for economic journalism in 2006 and 2016.

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Mark Littlewood is the Director General of the Institute of Economic Affairs and the IEA’s Ralph Harris Fellow. Since his appointment in 2009, Mark has been instrumental in expanding the IEA’s reach, both inside and outside Britain. He was recently ranked number 45 on the right-wing power list. Mark is recognised as a powerful spokesman for free markets and features as a regular guest on flagship political programmes such as BBC Question Time, Newsnight and the Today Programme. He writes a regular column for The Times and features in many other print and broadcast media such as The Telegraph, CityAM and Any Questions.

Dambisa Moyo is an international economist who writes on the macroeconomy and global affairs. She is the author of the New York Times bestsellers Dead Aid: Why Aid Is Not Working and How There Is a Better Way for Africa, How The West Was Lost: Fifty Years of Economic Folly – And the Stark Choices Ahead, and Winner Take All: China’s Race for Resources and What It Means for the World. Moyo was named by Time magazine as one of the 100 Most Influential People in the World, and was named to the World Economic Forum’s Young Global Leaders Forum. Her work regularly appears in economic and finance-related publications such as the Financial Times and Wall Street Journal. She completed a doctorate in Economics at Oxford University and holds a master’s degree from Harvard University. She completed an undergraduate degree in Chemistry and an MBA in Finance at the American University in Washington DC.

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Vernon L. Smith is the George L. Argyros Chair in Finance and Economics and President, International Foundation for Research in Experimental economics. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2002, “for having established laboratory experiments as a tool in empirical economic analysis, especially in the study of alternative market mechanisms.” He has held appointments at Purdue University, Stanford Brown, University of Massachusetts, USC, California Institute of Technology, University of Arizona, University of Alaska-Anchorage, George Mason University, and Chapman University.

Professor Smith received his bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering from California Institute of Technology (1949), his masters in Economics from the University of Kansas (1951), and his Ph.D. in Economics from Harvard (1955). He has authored or co-authored over 300 articles and books on capital theory, finance, natural resource economics, experimental economics, the housing origins of economic instability, 1920-2014, and in 2018, Humanomics, with Bart Wilson. Professor Smith is a Fellow of the Econometric Society, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Purdue University awarded him an Honorary Doctor of Management degree in 1989. He was elected member, National Academy of Science in 1995. In 1996 he received Cal Tech’s Distinguished Alumni Award. He became Kansan of the Year (Topeka Gazette) in 2002, received a Distinguished Alumni Award from the University of Kansas in 2011 and in 2014 an Honorary Doctor of Science degree.

He has served on numerous editorial and editorial advisory boards, and as president of several national economic associations. He has served as a consultant on the liberalisation of electric power in Australia and New Zealand, and has participated in numerous private and public discussions of energy privatisation and liberalisation in the United States and around the world. In 1997 he served as a Blue Ribbon Panel Member, North American Electric Reliability Council.

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Christopher Snowdon is Head of Lifestyle Economics at the IEA. Christopher regularly writes for CityAM, Spiked, The Spectator and The Sun. He is the author of The Art of Suppression, The Spirit Level Delusion and Velvet Glove, Iron Fist. His work focuses on pleasure, prohibition and dodgy statistics. He has authored a number of publications including Sock Puppets, Euro Puppets, The Proof of the Pudding, The Crack Cocaine of Gambling and Free Market Solutions in Health.

Tom Standage is Deputy Editor of The Economist. He is also responsible for the newspaper’s digital strategy and the development of new digital products, including Espresso, Economist Films and Economist VR. He joined The Economist as Science Correspondent in 1998 and was subsequently appointed Technology Editor, Business Editor and Digital Editor. He is the author of six history books, including Writing on the Wall, The Victorian Internet and the New York Times bestsellers A History of the World in 6 Glasses and An Edible History of Humanity. He studied engineering and computer science at Oxford University and has written for other publications including the New York Times, Guardian and Wired, taking a particular interest in technology’s social and historical impact.

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Dr Jamie Whyte is Director of Research at the IEA. In 2014 he was leader of the ACT Party of New Zealand, a position he resigned upon failing to be elected to parliament in the September general election. Jamie has previously worked as a management consultant and as a philosophy lecturer at the University of Cambridge. He is the author of Quack Policy (2013), Free Thoughts (2012), A Load of Blair (2005) and Crimes Against Logic (2004). He won the Bastiat Prize for Journalism in 2006 and was runner up in 2010 and 2016.

Dr Linda Yueh is an economist, broadcaster and author. She is a Fellow in Economics at St Edmund Hall, Oxford University, and Adjunct Professor of Economics at London Business School. She is also Visiting Senior Fellow at the London School of Economics and Political Science’s foreign policy think tank, the IDEAS research centre, and was Visiting Professor of Economics at Peking University. She is a TV and radio presenter, including for BBC Radio 4 and the World Service, as well as having fronted BBC TV series, such as The New Middle Class, Next Billionaires, and Working Lives.

She is a widely published author and Editor of the Routledge Economic Growth and Development book series. Her newest book is The Great Economists: How Their Ideas Can Help Us Today. Previously, she was Chief Business Correspondent for BBC News and host of Talking Business with Linda Yueh for BBC World TV and BBC News Channel based in Singapore. She had been the Economics Editor and anchor at Bloomberg TV in London. Linda Yueh has advised the World Bank, European Commission, Asian Development Bank and World Economic Forum in Davos, among others. She was previously Co-Chair of the Global Cities Business Alliance (GCBA) of London First; Board Member of London & Partners; and adviser to the British Chambers of Commerce (BCC).

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The RICHARD KOCH BREAKTHROUGH PRIZE 2018

GOT THE WRITE STUFF?The IEA’s prestigious essay prize returns this summer – with a GRAND PRIZE of £50,000 and STUDENT PRIZES totalling £4,000

FIND OUT MORE from JULY 9 at:

www.breakthroughprize.org.uk

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