Adam Smith Lecture Series

Andrew G Haldane is the Chief Economist at the Bank of England. He is a member of the Bank’s Monetary Policy Committee. Among other positions, he is Honorary Professor at University of Nottingham, a Visiting Fellow at Nuffield College, Oxford, a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences and Governor of the National Institute of Economic and Social Research. He has authored around 200 articles and 4 books. Andrew is the founder and trustee of ‘Pro Bono Economics’, a charity which brokers economists into charitable projects and Vice-Chair of National Numeracy.

Sir Angus Deaton is Senior Scholar and Professor Emeritus at Princeton University and Presidential Professor of Economics at USC. He is the author of The Great Escape: health, wealth, and the origins of inequality and, with Anne Case, Deaths of despair and the future of capitalism. His interests span domestic and international issues and include health, happiness, development, poverty, inequality, and how to best collect and interpret evidence for policy. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Philosophical Society, a Fellow of the British Academy, and an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. He is a past President of the American Economic Association. His BA, MA, and PhD are from Cambridge University, and he holds several honorary doctorates from universities in Europe and the US. In 2015, he received the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel “for his analysis of consumption, poverty, and welfare.” He was born in Edinburgh, Scotland. He was made a Knight Bachelor in the Queen’s Birthday Honors List in 2016.

Nemat (Minouche) Shafik is a leading economist whose career has straddled public policy and academia. She was appointed Director of the London School of Economics and Political Science in September 2017. By the age of 36, had become the youngest ever Vice President of the World Bank. She taught at Georgetown University and the Wharton Business School and has published widely. She served as the Permanent Secretary of the Department for International Development from 2008 to 2011, Deputy Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund from 2011-2014 and as Deputy Governor of the Bank of England from 2014-2017. Her book What We Owe Each Other: A New Social Contract is out now.

Niall Ferguson, MA, DPhil, FRSE, is the Milbank Family Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and a senior faculty fellow of the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard. He is the author of sixteen books, including The Pity of War, The House of Rothschild, Empire, Civilization and Kissinger, 1923-1968: The Idealist, which won the Council on Foreign Relations Arthur Ross Prize. He is an award-winning filmmaker, too, having received an international Emmy for his PBS series The Ascent of Money. 

Branko Milanovic is a Research Professor at the Graduate Center, City University of New York (CUNY), Senior Scholar at the Stone Center on Socio-economic Inequality at CUNY, and Visiting Professor at the Institute for International Inequalities at the London School of Economics. In 2019 he was appointed the honorary Maddison Chair at the University of Groningen. He obtained his Ph.D. in economics (1987) from the University of Belgrade with a dissertation on income inequality in Yugoslavia. He served as lead economist in the World Bank’s Research Department for almost 20 years, leaving to write his book on global income inequality, Worlds Apart (2005). He was senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington (2003-2005) and has held teaching appointments at the University of Maryland (2007-2013) and at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University (1997-2007). He was a visiting scholar at All Souls College in Oxford, and Universidad Carlos III in Madrid (2010-11).

Colin Mayer is Emeritus Professor of Management Studies at the Saïd Business School at the University of Oxford and Visiting Professor at the Blavatnik School of Government at the University of Oxford.  He is a Fellow of the British Academy, the Centre for Economic Policy Research and the European Corporate Governance Institute, an Emeritus Fellow of Wadham College, Oxford, an Honorary Fellow of Oriel College, Oxford and St Anne’s College, Oxford, and he has an Honorary Doctorate from Copenhagen Business School.  He was co-chair of the Scottish Government Business Purpose Commission, a member of the Board of Trustees of the Oxford Playhouse, the UK Government Natural Capital Committee, the UK Competition Appeal Tribunal and the International Advisory Board of the Securities and Exchange Board of India.  He was chairman of Oxera Ltd. between 1986 and 2010 and a director of the energy modelling company, Aurora Energy Research Ltd between 2013 and 2020.  He was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 2017 New Year Honours.  Between 2017 and 2021, he led the British Academy enquiry into “the Future of the Corporation” and his most recent book Capitalism and Crises: How to Fix Them is published by Oxford University Press.

Sir John Kay is one of Britain’s leading economists with wide practical experience in business and finance. A Fellow of the British Academy and Royal Society of Edinburgh, he was the founding dean of Oxford University’s Saïd Business School and held a chair at London Business School. He is a winner of the Senior Wincott Award for Financial Journalism for his Financial Times columns. Other People’s Money won the Saltire Prize for non-fiction and was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize for Political Writing. His other books include Obliquity, The Long and Short of It, Greed is Dead (written with Paul Collier) and Radical Uncertainty (with Mervyn King). His new book, The Corporation in the Twenty-First Century: Why (almost) everything we are told about business is wrong is published by Profile Books.