top of page
Speakers
Chris Berg
Associate Professor at RMIT
Chris Berg is one of Australia’s most prominent voices for free markets and individual liberty, and a leading authority on over-regulation, economic freedom and civil liberties.
He is a Principal Research Fellow at RMIT University, Melbourne, and Co-Director of the RMIT Blockchain Innovation Hub.
He is also Board Member of the Worldwide Blockchain Innovation Association, an Academic Fellow with the Australian Taxpayers’ Alliance, and is on the Academic Board of the Samuel Griffiths Society.
Tyler Goodspeed
Kleinheinz Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University
Tyler Goodspeed is a Kleinheinz Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. From 2020 to 2021 he served as acting chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, having been appointed by the president as a member of the council in 2019. In that role he advised the administration’s economic response to the coronavirus pandemic, as well as subsequent economic recovery packages. He previously served as chief economist for macroeconomic policy and senior economist for tax, public finance, and macroeconomics, playing an instrumental role in designing the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act.
Before joining the council, Dr. Goodspeed was on the faculty of Economics at the University of Oxford and was a lecturer in economics at King’s College London. He has published extensively on financial regulation, banking, and monetary economics, with particular attention to the role of access to credit in mitigating the effects of adverse environmental shocks in historical contexts. His research has appeared in three full-length monographs from academic presses, as well as numerous articles in peer-reviewed and edited journals. Goodspeed has a PhD in history from Harvard University and a PhD in economics from the University of Cambridge. He also received a BA in economics and history from Harvard, an MA in history from Harvard, and an MPhil in economic history from Cambridge, where he was a Gates Scholar. He is currently a member of the American Economic Association and the Economic History Association and an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute, and was previously a member of the Economic History Society and the Royal Economic Society.
Senator Phil Gramm
Vice Chairman Lone Star Global Acquisitions
Senator Gramm joined Lone Star Global Acquisitions as Vice Chairman in December of 2012. He served as Vice
Chairman of UBS Investment Bank from December 2002 to December 2011. At UBS he provided senior leadership
in such landmark IPOs as Visa, the Bank of China, the China Merchants Bank and LGPhillips in Korea. He was
instrumental in the follow-on equity offering for the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, the privatization of
Telstra in Australia and the sale of 20% of Akbank in Turkey to Citibank.
Senator Gramm served six years in the US House and eighteen years in the US Senate. His legislative record
includes landmark bills like the Gramm-Latta Budget, which reduced federal spending, rebuilt national defense and
mandated the Reagan tax cut, and the Gramm-Rudman Act, which placed the first binding constraints on federal
spending. As Chairman of the Banking Committee, Senator Gramm steered through legislation modernizing banking,
insurance and securities law, which had been languishing in Congress for 60 years. The Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act
allowed banks, securities firms and insurance companies to affiliate as part of a Financial Services Holding Company.
Dodd-Frank did not repeal Gramm-Leach-Bliley but, instead, expanded it by requiring systemically significant nonbanks to become Financial Services Holding Companies.
Gramm is a Nonresident Senior Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
Phil Gramm holds a Ph.D. from the University of Georgia in economics, the subject he taught at Texas A&M
University for 12 years. He has published numerous articles and books on subjects ranging from monetary theory and
policy to private property and the economics of mineral extraction.
He is married to Dr. Wendy Lee Gramm, former Chairman of the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission under
Presidents Reagan and Bush. They have two sons, Marshall and Jeff, and five grandchildren, Caroline, Will, Joshua,
Gilbert and Benjamin.
Dan Hannan
Vice-Chairman and International Secretary of the Conservative Party
Lord Hannan of Kingsclere is an author and columnist. He serves on the UK Board of Trade and is a Vice-Chairman of the Conservative Party responsible for its international relations. He teaches at the University of Buckingham and the University of Francisco Marroquín. He has written nine books, including the New York Times bestseller Inventing Freedom: How the English-Speaking Peoples Made the Modern World. He sat as a Conservative MEP for 21 years, and was a founder of Vote Leave. He writes regular columns for, among others, The Sunday Telegraph, The Washington Examiner and Conservative Home.
Douglas Irwin
John French Professor of Economics at Dartmouth College
Douglas Irwin is John French Professor of Economics at Dartmouth College. He is the author of Clashing over Commerce: A History of U.S. Trade Policy (University of Chicago Press, 2017), which The Economist and Foreign Affairs selected as one of their Best Books of the Year. He is president-elect of the Economic History Association (2022-23).
He is the author of Free Trade Under Fire (Princeton University Press, fifth edition 2020), Trade Policy Disaster: Lessons from the 1930s (MIT Press, 2012), Peddling Protectionism: Smoot-Hawley and the Great Depression (Princeton University Press, 2011), The Genesis of the GATT (Cambridge University Press, 2008, co-authored with Petros Mavroidis and Alan Sykes), Against the Tide: An Intellectual History of Free Trade (Princeton University Press, 1996), and many articles on trade policy and economic history in books and professional journals.
He is a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research and a non-resident Senior Fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. He worked on trade policy issues while on the staff of President Ronald Reagan’s Council of Economic Advisers and later worked in the International Finance Division at the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System in Washington, D.C. Before joining Dartmouth, Irwin taught at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business.
Stefan Kolev
Academic Director, Ludwig Erhard Forum for Economy and Society, Berlin
Born 1981 in Sofia, Bulgaria, Stefan Kolev studied economics and business administration at the University of Hamburg. In 2011 he defended his PhD thesis in economics at the University of Hamburg on the history and political economy of neoliberalism. During his studies and PhD studies he was fellow of the Friedrich Naumann Foundation for Freedom.
Since March 2012 Stefan Kolev has been professor of political economy at the University of Applied Sciences Zwickau. In 2015 he co-founded the Network for Constitutional Economics and Social Philosophy NOUS, Freiburg, and is a member of international associations dedicated to the history of economic thought and to liberal political economy. He spent sabbatical semesters at the Center for the History of Political Economy at Duke University, the Ostrom Workshop at Indiana University Bloomington, and the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton Univeristy.
Stefan Kolev’s research focuses on the history of economic thought, especially ordoliberalism, Austrian economics, and the German Historical School, on constitutional and institutional economics, and on economic sociology, especially Max Weber. He is co-editor of the ORDO Jahrbuch für die Ordnung von Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft and of the Journal of Contextual Economics – Schmollers Jahrbuch.
Since March 2023 Stefan Kolev has been the academic director of the Ludwig Erhard Forum for Economy and Society in Berlin.
Pierre Lemieux
Economist affiliated with the Department of Management Sciences at the University of Québec in Outaouais
Pierre Lemieux is an economist affiliated with the Department of Management Sciences at the University of Québec in Outaouais. He is also a Senior
Affiliated Scholar at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, and a Research Fellow at the Independent Institute. He has been a frequent commentator on economics and politics, notably in Regulation, where he is a Contributing Writer. He also blogs at EconLog. His books have been published in France, Québec, and the United States. His latest book was What’s Wrong With Protectionism? (Rowman & Littlefield, 2018). He
lives in Maine.
Eduardo Fernandez Luina
Associate Professor of Political Studies and International Relations, Universidad Francisco Marroquin
Dr. Eduardo Fernández Luiña is an associate professor at the Institute of Political Studies and International Relations at the Universidad Francisco Marroquín (Madrid Campus). He has actively collaborated with the Centre for the Analysis of Public Decisions (CADEP) and he has been Director at the Juan de Mariana Institute. For years, he has specialized in Ibero-American politics, studying everything related to the quality of democracy and public policies from a Public Choice perspective.
David R. Malpass
Former President of the World Bank
David R. Malpass until recently served as President of the World Bank Group (2019-2023), where he led responses to COVID-19, the Ukraine crisis, and energy shortages. Maplass was previously Under Secretary for International Affairs of the US Treasury from 2017-2019, where he received the Alexander Hamilton Award in recognition of Distinguished Leadership. Prior to this, he had a 23-year Wall Street career, working with New Mountain Finance Corporation and UBS funds. He was active in public policy from 1984-1993, serving on the staff of the Senate Budget Committee and the Joint Economic Committee and as a Deputy Assistant Secretary at the Treasury and State Departments for economic, tax, legislative, and international affairs during the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations.
Malpass earned his bachelor’s degree in physics from Colorado College and an MBA from the University of Denver as a Boettcher Scholar. He also received an honorary Doctor of Laws (LLD) from Colorado College. He undertook advanced graduate work in international economics at the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University.
Deirdre McCloskey
Distinguished Professor of Economics, History, English, and Communication at University of Illinois at Chicago
Deirdre N. McCloskey has been since 2000 UIC Distinguished Professor of Economics, History, English, and Communication at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Trained at Harvard as an economist, she has written twenty books and edited seven more, and has published some four hundred articles on economic theory, economic history, philosophy, rhetoric, feminism, ethics, and law. She taught for twelve years in Economics at the University of Chicago, and describes herself now as a “postmodern free-market quantitative Episcopalian feminist Aristotelian.” Her latest books are How to be Human* *Though an Economist (University of Michigan Press 2001), Measurement and Meaning in Economics (S. Ziliak, ed.; Edward Elgar 2001), The Secret Sins of Economics (Prickly Paradigm Pamphlets, U. of Chicago Press, 2002), The Cult of Statistical Significance: How the Standard Error Costs Us Jobs, Justice, and Lives [with Stephen Ziliak; University of Michigan Press, 2008], The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Capitalism (U. of Chicago Press, 2006), Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can't Explain the Modern World (U. of Chicago Press, 2010), Bourgeois Equality: How Ideas, Not Capital or Institutions, Enriched the World (U. of Chicago Press, 2016), and Why Liberalism Works: How True Liberal Values Produce a Freer, More Equal, Prosperous World for All (Yale U. Press, 2019). Before The Bourgeois Virtues her best-known books were The Rhetoric of Economics (University of Wisconsin Press, 1st ed. 1985, 2nd ed. 1998) and Crossing: A Memoir (U. of Chicago Press, 1999), which was a New York Times Notable Book.
Her scientific work has been on economic history, especially British. Her recent book Bourgeois Equality is a study of Dutch and British economic and social history. She has written on British economic "failure" in the 19th century, trade and growth in the 19th century, open field agriculture in the middle ages, the Gold Standard, and the Industrial Revolution.
Her philosophical books include The Rhetoric of Economics (University of Wisconsin Press 1st ed. 1985; 2nd ed. 1998), If You're So Smart: The Narrative of Economic Expertise (University of Chicago Press 1990), and Knowledge and Persuasion in Economics (Cambridge 1994). They concern the maladies of social scientific positivism, the epistemological limits of a future social science, and the promise of a rhetorically sophisticated philosophy of science. In her later work she has turned to ethics and to a philosophical-historical apology for modern economies.
Max Rangeley
Manager of The Cobden Centre
Max Rangeley is the Editor of The Cobden Centre. He is also the CEO of ReboundTAG Ltd, which produces microchip luggage tags and has been showcased by Lufthansa and featured on BBC World, among other media outlets.
Rangely founded The Concept Place, Paywhatyouwant.io, and is a fellow of the RSA (Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures, and Commerce).
He is a board member of the Ludwig von Mises Institute-Europe, the Initiative for Free Trade, and a member of the Mont Pelerin Society.
Rangely holds an MSc in Economic History from the London School of Economics and Political Science.
David C. Rose
Professor of Economics, University of Missouri-St. Louis
Dave Rose is a Professor of Economics at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. He has served as the Department Director of Graduate Studies and as the Department Chair. He received his Ph.D. in Economics in 1987 from the University of Virginia. His primary areas of research interest are behavioral economics, political economy, and organization theory. He has published scholarly articles in a wide range of areas. His work has been funded by the National Institute of Mental Health, the HFL Foundation, the Earhart Foundation, and the John R. Templeton Foundation. He is currently in his second term on the U.S. Civil Rights Commission. In 2008 he received the St. Louis Business Journal’s Economic Educator of the year award. His latest paper is “On the Evolution of Rationality and Economic Behavior” for The Oxford Handbook on Ethics and Economics (forthcoming summer, 2019). His book, The Moral Foundation of Economic Behavior (Oxford University Press, 2011), was selected one of CHOICE’s outstanding titles of 2012 and was nominated for the Hayek Book Prize. His latest book has just been released and is titled Why Culture Matters Most (Oxford University Press, 2019). He frequently contributes to policy debates through radio and television interviews as well as in Op-Eds in outlets like the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, The Word on Business, The School Choice Advocate, Forbes, The Washington Times, and The Christian Science Monitor on topics ranging from social security, monetary policy, fiscal policy, judicial philosophy, education reform, and healthcare reform.
Judy L. Shelton
Senior Fellow at the Independent Institute
Judy L. Shelton is a Senior Fellow at the Independent Institute. Former Chairman of the National Endowment for Democracy and former U.S. Director of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, she has testified before the U.S. Senate Banking, Senate Foreign Relations, House Banking, House Foreign Affairs, and Joint Economic Committee.
Shelton has been consulted on international economic/financial issues by national security officials at the White House, U.S. Congress, and the Pentagon. She received a postdoctoral fellowship from the Hoover Institution at Stanford University as a National Fellow, and she was named as a Hoover Senior Research Fellow (1985–1995). She is the author of The Coming Soviet Crash: Gorbachev’s Desperate Pursuit of Credit in Western Financial Markets (1989) and Money Meltdown: Restoring Order to the Global Currency System (1994). Her popular articles have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, The Hill, and The Weekly Standard.
Shelton was an economic advisor for the National Commission on Economic Growth and Tax Reform chaired by Jack Kemp (1995–96). She was a founding member of the board of directors of Empower America and has also served on the board of directors for Hilton Hotels and Atlantic Coast Airlines. She also taught international finance as a visiting professor at the DUXX Graduate School of Business in Monterrey, Mexico (1995–2001).
Shelton has further served as Senior Fellow and Director of the Sound Money Project at the Atlas Network where she authored the monographs, A Guide to Sound Money (2010) and Fixing the Dollar Now (2011). She holds a Ph.D. in business administration, with an emphasis on finance and international economics, from the University of Utah.
Amity Shlaes
Chairs the board of the Calvin Coolidge Presidential Foundation
Amity Shlaes is the author of four New York Times bestsellers, The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression, The Forgotten Man: Graphic, a full length illustrated version of the same book drawn by Paul Rivoche, and Coolidge, a full-length biography of the thirtieth president, which debuted at number three on the Times list and The Greedy Hand: How Taxes Drive Americas Crazy. National Review called the Forgotten Man “the finest history of the Great Depression ever written.” The Economist wrote of Coolidge that the book “deserves to be widely read” and made it an editor’s choice for 2013.
Miss Shlaes is also the author of Great Society: A New History, a comprehensive account of the Johnson administration’s most notable legacy. Former Chairman of the Federal Reserve Alan Greenspan praised Great Society as an “accurate history that reads like a novel.”
Miss Shlaes chairs the board of the Calvin Coolidge Presidential Foundation, a national foundation based at the birthplace of President Coolidge. The Foundation’s goal is to share Coolidge with Americans, by hosting debate and events at the Coolidge site and through newer media. She is especially interested in education.
Miss Shlaes is winner of the Hayek Prize and currently serves on the jury for the prize, sponsored by the Manhattan Institute. She has twice been a finalist for the Loeb Prize in commentary. In 2002 she was co-winner of the Frederic Bastiat Prize, an international prize for writing on political economy, and later chaired the jury for that prize. In 2003, she was JP Morgan Fellow for finance and economy at the American Academy in Berlin. In 2004, she gave the Bradley lecture at the American Enterprise Institute. Her lecture, titled “The Chicken vs the Eagle” looked at the effect of the National Recovery Administration on the entrepreneur in the New Deal. In 2021, Miss Shlaes was awarded the Bradley Prize. Over the years she has served at the Council on Foreign Relations (as senior fellow in economic history) and the George W. Bush Presidential Center, where she was one of four directors, working on its Four Percent Growth Project.
Many readers know Miss Shlaes from the Wall Street Journal, where she served on the editorial board, writing on foreign policy, taxation and other topics, or from the Financial Times and Bloomberg, each of which carried her syndicated column over the years. Currently Miss Shlaes appears in print Forbes and in National Review. A magna cum laude graduate of Yale College, Miss Shlaes is married to fellow journalist and editor Seth Lipsky. The Lipskys have four children.
Vernon Smith
Professor of Economics and Law at Chapman University
Vernon L. Smith, Nobel Prize winner in Economics, 2002, is currently Professor of Economics and Law at George Mason University, a research scholar in the Interdisciplinary Center for Economic Science, and a Fellow of the Mercatus Center all in Arlington, VA. He received his bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering from Cal Tech, and his Ph.D. in Economics from Harvard. He has authored or co-authored over 200 articles and books on capital theory, finance, natural resource economics and experimental economics. He serves or has served on the board of editors of the American Economic Review, The Cato Journal, Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, the Journal of Risk and Uncertainty, Science, Economic Theory, Economic Design, Games and Economic Behavior, and the Journal of Economic Methodology. He is past president of the Public Choice Society, the Economic Science Association, the Western Economic Association and the Association for Private Enterprise Education. Previous faculty appointments include the University of Arizona, Purdue, Brown University and the University of Massachusetts. He has been a Ford Foundation Fellow, Fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences and a Sherman Fairchild Distinguished Scholar at the California Institute of Technology. The Cambridge University Press published his Papers in Experimental Economics in 1991, and they published a second collection of more recent papers, Bargaining and Market Behavior, in 2000. He received an honorary Doctor of Management degree from Purdue University, and is a Fellow of the Econometric Society, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is a distinguished fellow of the American Economic Association, an Andersen Consulting Professor of the Year, the 1995 Adam Smith award recipient conferred by the Association for Private Enterprise Education. He was elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 1995, and received CalTech's distinguished alumni award in 1996. He has served as a consultant on the privatization of electric power in Australia and New Zealand and participated in numerous private and public discussions of energy deregulation in the United States. In 1997 he served as a Blue Ribbon Panel Member, National Electric Reliability Council.
John B. Taylor
Mary and Robert Raymond Professor of Economics at Stanford University
John B. Taylor is the George P. Shultz Senior Fellow in Economics at the Hoover Institution and the Mary and Robert Raymond Professor of Economics at Stanford University. He chairs the Hoover Working Group on Economic Policy, co-chairs the Hoover Technology, Economics and Governance Working Group, and is director of Stanford’s Introductory Economics Center.
Taylor's fields of expertise are monetary policy, fiscal policy, and international economics. His book Getting Off Track was one of the first on the financial crisis; his latest book, First Principles, for which he received the 2012 Hayek Prize, develops an economic plan to restore America’s prosperity. His most recent book is Choose Economic Freedom: Enduring Policy Lessons from the 1970s and 1980s with George P. Shultz.
Taylor served as senior economist on President Ford's and President Carter’s Council of Economic Advisers, as a member of President George H. W. Bush's Council of Economic Advisers, and as a senior economic adviser to Bob Dole’s presidential campaign, to George W. Bush’s presidential campaign in 2000, and to John McCain’s presidential campaign. He was a member of the Congressional Budget Office's Panel of Economic Advisers from 1995 to 2001. From 2001 to 2005, Taylor served as undersecretary of the Treasury for international affairs where he was responsible for currency markets, international development, for oversight of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, and for coordinating policy with the G-7 and G-20.
Taylor received the Bradley Prize from the Bradley Foundation and the Adam Smith Award as well as the Adolph G. Abramson Award from the National Association for Business Economics. He was awarded the Alexander Hamilton Award for his overall leadership at the US Treasury, the Treasury Distinguished Service Award for designing and implementing the currency reforms in Iraq, and the Medal of the Republic of Uruguay for his work in resolving the 2002 financial crisis. At Stanford he was awarded the George P. Shultz Distinguished Public Service Award, as well as the Hoagland Prize and the Rhodes Prize for excellence in undergraduate teaching. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Econometric Society; he formerly served as vice president of the American Economic Association.
Taylor received the 2016 Adam Smith Award from the Association of Private Enterprise Education and the 2015 Truman Medal for Economic Policy for extraordinary contribution to the formation and conduct of economic policy.
Taylor formerly held positions as professor of economics at Princeton University and Columbia University. Taylor received a BA in economics summa cum laude from Princeton University in 1968 and a PhD in economics from Stanford University in 1973.
Lawrence H. White
Professor of Economics, George Mason University
Lawrence H. White specializes in the theory and history of banking and money. He previously taught at New York University, the University of Georgia, and the University of Missouri - St. Louis. Professor White is the author of The Clash of Economic Ideas (2012), The Theory of Monetary Institutions (1999), Free Banking in Britain (2nd ed., 1995), and Competition and Currency (1989). He is the editor of The History of Gold and Silver (3 vols., 2000), Free Banking (3 vols., 1993), and other volumes. His articles on monetary theory and banking history have appeared in the American Economic Review, the Journal of Economic Literature, the Journal of Money, Credit, and Banking, and other leading professional journals. In 2014 he received the Adam Smith Award of the Association for Private Enterprise Education. He has been a visiting research fellow at the American Institute for Economic Research, a visiting lecturer at the Swiss National Bank, and a visiting scholar at the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta. Professor White is a co-editor of Econ Journal Watch and a member of the board of associate editors of the Review of Austrian Economics. He is a Distinguished Senior Fellow of the F. A. Hayek Program for Advanced Study in Philosophy, Politics and Economics of the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, and a senior scholar of the Cato Institute Center for Monetary and Financial Alternatives.
bottom of page