THE MONT PELERIN SOCIETY

Alberto Mingardi

Alberto Mingardi is Director General of the Italian free-market think tank, Istituto Bruno Leoni, which he contributed to establish in 2004. He is Assistant Professor in History of Political Thought at IULM University in Milan and a Presidential Scholar in Political Theory at Chapman University (Orange CA). He is also an adjunct fellow at the Cato Institute (Washington DC). He holds a PhD in Political Science from the University of Pavia. He translated and edited critical editions of Thomas Hodgskin (Crimine e potere, 2014), Vilfredo Pareto (L’ignoranza e il malgoverno. Lettere a Liberty, 2018) and Herbert Spencer (L’uomo contro lo Stato, 2016). He wrote a monograph on Herbert Spencer (2011) and one on Thomas Hodgskin (2016). He also translated into English Antonio Rosmini’s La Costituzione secondo la giustizia sociale (The Constitution under Social Justice, 2007). He is currently working on a book in English on Thomas Hodgskin. His latest book for the general public is "La verità, vi prego, sul neoliberismo" (O Tell Me the Truth About Neoliberalism), published in 2019 and shortlisted for Premio Estense, probably Italy’s premier non fiction literary award. He is a columnist for the Italian newspaper “La Stampa,” contributes frequently to publications such as “The Wall Street Journal” and “Politico,” and blogs at EconLog.

Amity Shlaes

Amity Shlaes chairs the board of the Calvin Coolidge Presidential Foundation, based in Plymouth Notch, Vermont, the birthplace of the thirtieth US president, with an office in the Georgetown area of Washington, DC. The Coolidge Foundation is the sponsor of the popular Coolidge Scholarship, a full college scholarship for academic merit, and the Coolidge Senators program, which exposes gifted students the values of President Coolidge.

Her newest book is The Great Society: A New History (November 2019, Harper Collins). Shlaes is the author of five previous books, four of which are New York Times bestsellers: Germany: The Empire Within; The Greedy Hand: Why Taxes Drive Americans Crazy; The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression; Coolidge; and The Forgotten Man Graphic Edition. She was a syndicated columnist for ten years, first at the Financial Times, then Bloomberg.

Before that, she served as editorial board member of the Wall Street Journal. Over the decades she has published in periodicals, including the New Republic, the New Yorker, the Spectator (London), the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the National Review. For the past five years she has chaired the jury of the Hayek Prize, the Manhattan Institute’s book prize. She also serves as presidential scholar at the King’s College in New York.

Annelise Anderson

Annelise Anderson is a research fellow emerita at the Hoover Institution. She is the coauthor or coeditor of several books on Ronald Reagan and his presidency (including Reagan: In His Own Hand and Reagan: A Life in Letters) and a variety of books and articles on public policy. Anderson served as a policy adviser in Reagan’s 1976 presidential campaign and the 1980 campaign and transition, and as associate director from 1981 to 1983 of the Office and Management and Budget, where she was responsible for the budgets of five cabinet departments (Treasury, Justice, Commerce, Transportation, and HUD) and forty agencies. She has also advised the governments of Russia, Romania, and the Republic of Georgia on economic reform. A graduate of Wellesley College, she holds an MA and PhD from Columbia University and taught economics and finance at California State University–Hayward for six years. She was appointed a Hoover fellow in 1983.

Anthony B. Kim

Anthony B. Kim is research manager and editor of the Index of Economic Freedom, published annually by the Heritage Foundation. Previously, Kim served as deputy chief of staff to Heritage founder Edwin J. Feulner. Focusing on policies related to economic freedom, entrepreneurship, and investment in various countries around the world, Kim researches international economic issues. The Index of Economic Freedom is a widely respected policy guidebook that tracks the march of economic freedom around the world by measuring twelve freedoms—from property rights to entrepreneurship—in 186 countries. In 2007, after publishing the Index for a decade, Heritage executives decided that changes were needed to make it more accessible to more readers, from policy makers to investors around the globe. Kim helped oversee and implement those changes.

Kim’s commentary and opinion pieces have been published by the Wall Street Journal’s Asia edition, the New York Post, the Washington Times, the National Review Online and the Korea Herald, among other outlets. He has been quoted by major US and international media, among them the Financial Times, Associated Press, Agence France-Presse, Fox Business News, and Voice of America. Kim won Heritage’s prestigious Drs. W. Glenn and Rita Ricardo Campbell Award, which goes to the employee who makes “an outstanding contribution to the analysis and promotion of a free society.” Before joining Heritage in 2001, Kim studied economics at Rutgers University. He holds a master's degree in international trade and investment policy from the Elliott School of International Affairs at George Washington University.

Axel Kaiser

Axel Kaiser is a Chilean -German lawyer with a Master in Investment, Commerce and Arbitration a Master in American Studies and a Doctor of Philosophie magna cum laude from the University of Heidelberg, Germany. He is the executive director and co-founder of the Foundation for Progress, one of the most influential classical liberal think tanks in Latin America. Since 2016 he also holds the Friedrich von Hayek Chair at the Adolfo Ibáñez University in Santiago de Chile. He is the author of several books, including The misery of interventionism: 1929-2008, The fatal ignorance, The Pope and capitalism and the best sellers, The tyranny of equality and The populist deception. His writings have won several international prizes from organizations such as The Cato Institute, the Mont Pelerin Society and the University of Heidelberg. He was distinguished as one of the most successful young people in Chile by Diario Financiero (2008) and one of the 100 young leaders of the country (2011) by El Mercurio and Adolfo Ibañez University. Mister Kaiser is an international lecturer as well as an opinion columnist for the newspapers El Mercurio and Diario Financiero de Chile. His opinions have also been published by Forbes.com, The Wall Street Journal, El Mundo, La Nación de Argentina, El País de Uruguay among other media outlets.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Ayaan Hirsi Ali is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and founder of the AHA Foundation. She served as a member of the Dutch Parliament from 2003 to 2006.

While in parliament, she focused on furthering the integration of non-Western immigrants into Dutch society and defending the rights of Muslim women. She has written several books, including Infidel (2007), Nomad: From Islam to America, a Personal Journey through the Clash of Civilizations (2010), Heretic: Why Islam Needs a Reformation Now (2015), and The Challenge of Dawa (2017).

Her next book, Prey: Immigration, Islam, and the Erosion of Women’s Rights, will be published by HarperCollins in 2020. Prior to joining the Hoover Institution, she was a fellow at the Belfer Center’s Future of Diplomacy Project at Harvard University and a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, DC. She received her master’s degree in political science from Leiden University in the Netherlands.

Benjamin Powell

Benjamin Powell is the executive director of the Free Market Institute at Texas Tech University, a professor of economics in the Rawls College of Business, and a senior fellow with the Independent Institute. He is the secretary-treasurer of the Southern Economic Association and the Association of Private Enterprise Education. He earned his BS in economics and finance from the University of Massachusetts at Lowell, and his MA and PhD in economics from George Mason University.

Powell is the author of Out of Poverty: Sweatshops in the Global Economy, co-author of Socialism Sucks: Two Economists Drink Their Way Through the Unfree World, and editor or coeditor of four other books, including The Economics of Immigration: Market-Based Approaches, Social Science, and Public Policy. He is author of more than seventy-five scholarly articles and policy studies. Powell's research findings have been reported in hundreds of popular press outlets including the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times. He also writes frequently for the popular press. His popular writing has appeared in the Chicago Tribune, the New York Post, the Dallas Morning News, and many other outlets. He has appeared on numerous radio and television shows broadcast on Fox News, CNN, MSNBC, Showtime, and CNBC, and he was a regular guest commentator on Fox Business’s Freedom Watch and Stossel.

Bob Chitester

Bob Chitester is the founder and executive chairman of Free to Choose Network. After completing his BA and MA degrees at the University of Michigan, he created closed-circuit educational television systems and launched a public television and radio station, which he headed for sixteen years. He created numerous public television programs, including Milton Friedman’s world-changing 1980 series, Free to Choose.

Chitester also created Stossel in the Classroom, which morphed into Izzit.org, a source of educational videos serving more than 300,000 middle school and high school teachers. He started the Idea Channel, a library of more than two hundred recordings of intellectual discussions between the world's leading scholars, which includes sixteen Nobel Prize laureates.

Currently he is leading the effort to develop several community engagement activities associated with the upcoming series on the US Constitution, A More or Less Perfect Union, hosted by Judge Douglas Ginsburg. And he’s guiding the development of Capitaf, Milton and Rose Friedman’s summer home in Fairlee, Vermont, as a venue for residential student colloquiums to discuss Friedman’s public-policy ideas.

Bridgett Wagner

Bridgett Wagner, as vice president for policy promotion at the Washington, DC–based think tank the Heritage Foundation, oversees its coalition relations, Truluck Center for Leadership Development, and Young Leaders Program, among other duties. All of these areas are focused on spreading conservative principles, policies, and ideas among allies, public audiences, interns, young professionals, and new audiences.

Her responsibilities also include advising and consulting with fellow leaders in the think-tank and nonprofit communities. She first joined Heritage in 1981 as a research assistant to the president of the foundation, and she has served in various leadership roles in external relations, events, and fundraising.

Outside of Heritage, Wagner serves as a trustee at the University of Dallas and at the Intercollegiate Studies Institute. She is a director of the State Policy Network, the Foundation for Government Accountability, and the Fund for American Studies. She also serves on the Clare Boothe Luce Selection Committee of the Henry Luce Foundation.

Bruce Caldwell

Bruce Caldwell is a research professor of economics and the director of the Center for the History of Political Economy at Duke University. He is the author of Beyond Positivism: Economic Methodology in the Twentieth Century (1982) and Hayek's Challenge: An Intellectual Biography of F. A. Hayek (2004).

Since 2002 he has served as the general editor of The Collected Works of F. A. Hayek, a multivolume collection of Hayek’s writings. A past president of the History of Economics Society and of the Southern Economic Association, Caldwell has held research fellowships at New York University, Cambridge University, and the London School of Economics, and is a life member of Clare Hall, Cambridge.

He is currently working together with Hansjoerg Klausinger on a full biography of Hayek. In 2019–2020 he will pursue this project as a distinguished visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution.

Condoleezza Rice

Condoleezza Rice is currently the Denning Professor in Global Business and the Economy at the Stanford Graduate School of Business; the Thomas and Barbara Stephenson Senior Fellow on Public Policy at the Hoover Institution; and a professor of political science at Stanford University. She is also a founding partner of RiceHadleyGates, LLC.

From January 2005 to 2009, Rice served as the sixty-sixth secretary of state of the United States and from January 2001 to 2005 she served as President George W. Bush’s assistant to the president for national security affairs.

She served as Stanford University’s provost from 1993 to 1999. In 1997, she also served on the Federal Advisory Committee on Gender--Integrated Training in the Military.

From 1989 through March 1991, Rice served on President George H.W. Bush’s National Security Council staff, serving as director; senior director of Soviet and East European Affairs. In 1986, while an international affairs fellow of the Council on Foreign Relations, Rice also served as special assistant to the director of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

As a professor of political science, Rice has been on the Stanford faculty since 1981 and has won two of the highest teaching honors. She has authored and coauthored numerous books, including two best sellers, No Higher Honor: A Memoir of My Years in Washington (2011) and Extraordinary, Ordinary People: A Memoir of Family (2010).

Born in Birmingham, Alabama, Rice earned her bachelor's degree in political science, cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa, from the University of Denver; her master's from the University of Notre Dame; and her PhD from the Graduate School of International Studies at the University of Denver.

David R. Henderson

David R. Henderson is an emeritus professor of economics at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, a research fellow with the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, and a senior fellow with Canada’s Fraser Institute. He was previously a senior economist for health policy and energy policy with President Reagan's Council of Economic Advisers.

Henderson is the editor of The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics, the only reader-friendly encyclopedia of economics and has written two other books, The Joy of Freedom: An Economist’s Odyssey and Making Great Decisions in Business and Life (coauthored with Charles L. Hooper.) He has written more than three hundred articles for such popular publications as the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, Barron’s, Fortune, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, USA Today, the Chicago Tribune, the National Review, Defining Ideas, and Reason. He has testified before the House Ways and Means Committee, the Senate Armed Services Committee, and the Senate Committee on Labor and Human Resources.

He has also appeared on The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, The John Stossel Show, The O’Reilly Factor, and networks including C-SPAN, CNN, MSNBC, RT, NPR, CBC, and BBC. Born and raised in Canada, he moved to the United States in 1972 to earn his PhD in economics at UCLA. He became a US citizen in April 1986.

Dominique Lazanski

Dominique Lazanski is a London-based digital policy and strategy consultant and is the director of Last Press Label. She is currently a consultant for the UK Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport and for mobile-related companies. She was formerly the director for public policy and institutional relations for the GSM Association and has worked on cybersecurity policy and internet governance coordination with organizations including the United Nations (UN), the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, and the World Trade Organization. She was on the executive multistakeholder committee for NetMundial in April 2014 and just finished her three-year appointment to the multistakeholder advisory group of the Internet Governance Forum.

Lazanski was a member of the UK Open Data User Group in the Cabinet Office from 2012 to 2014 and the Tax Transparency Board in Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs in 2013. She participates on the Multistakeholder Advisory Group on Internet Governance in the United Kingdom. She worked on the first Cyberspace Conference with the UK Foreign Office and the ICC in London. In 2015 she was a UN expert on access and connectivity. Lazanski began her career with positions at Yahoo, eBay, and Apple, where she helped launch the first iTunes stores in the United States. In 2005 she moved to London to complete a master’s degree in information systems management at the London School of Economics. Lazanski also holds a BA from Cornell University and a second master’s degree from the University of Bath, and is currently working on her PhD.

Douglas H. Ginsburg

Douglas H. Ginsburg is a judge of the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, to which he was appointed by President Reagan in 1986. He is also a professor at the Antonin Scalia Law School, George Mason University, where he teaches courses in antitrust and jurisprudence, and a visiting professor at University College London, Faculty of Laws. Before joining the bench, he was a professor at Harvard Law School and then assistant attorney general of the United States for antitrust. Judge Ginsburg is a graduate of Cornell University (1970) and of the University of Chicago Law School (1973).

He serves on the advisory boards of many journals and academic centers, including the Supreme Court Economic Review, the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy, the University of Chicago Law Review, and, at University College London, both the Centre for Law, Economics and Society and the Jevons Institute for Competition Law and Economics.

He is the author or coauthor of many books and articles, including “Originalism and Economic Analysis: Two Case Studies of Consistency and Coherence in Supreme Court Decision Making,” (Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy, 2010); and “On Constitutionalism,” (2003 Simon Lecture, CATO Supreme Court Review, 2002–03). Judge Ginsburg recently completed a three-part series on the Constitution, A More or Less Perfect Union, to be broadcast on PBS stations early in 2020.

Eamonn Butler

Dr. Eamonn Butler is director and cofounder of Britain’s leading free-market policy think tank, the Adam Smith Institute, and a leading author and broadcaster on economics and social issues. Westminster insiders look forward each week to his wry online commentary on politics and politicians. Eamonn has received many awards in recognition of his long-term commitment to furthering the market economy, such as the UK National Free Enterprise Award and the Freedom Medal of the Freedoms Foundation at Valley Forge. He is honorary secretary of the Mont Pelerin Society.

Butler commissioned and raised the funding for the statue of the economist and philosopher Adam Smith (1723–1790), that stands in Edinburgh’s High Street. He has appeared in many TV and film documentaries on policy issues, such as Brexit: The Movie, and produced the two-part historical documentary Secrets of the Magna Carta.

Butler is a prolific author of books on a wide range of subjects, from economics to psychology and politics. These include easy-to-read introductions to the economists Milton Friedman, F. A. Hayek, and Adam Smith, and a short explanation of how markets work, called (modestly) The Best Book on the Market, which he wrote to be “so simple that even politicians can understand it.”

Edwin J. Feulner

Dr. Edwin J. Feulner is founder and former president of the Heritage Foundation. Feulner’s vision and leadership transformed the think tank from a small policy shop into America’s powerhouse of conservative ideas and what the New York Times calls “the Parthenon of the conservative metropolis.” After serving as its president from 1977 to 2013, Feulner served as president again for a brief period in 2017. Heritage’s influence grew immensely that year. After President Donald J. Trump’s inauguration, there were a number of conservative policy victories, most notably tax reform, and the Heritage Foundation played a role in all of them. Feulner graduated from Regis University with a double major in English and business and received an MBA from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business in 1964. He later attended Georgetown University and the London School of Economics, and earned a doctorate degree at the University of Edinburgh in 1981.

Ernesto Silva

Ernesto Silva is a Chilean politician, scholar, and formerly a distinguished visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution. He was the president of the Unión Demócrata Independiente (UDI) Political Party (2014–5), the largest party in the Congress. Silva was elected to office, serving years in the Cámara de Diputados of the Chilean Congress. He was the chairman of the Finance Committee in 2012 and has participated in several other committees, including Budget, Labor, Internal Security, and Poverty and Social Development.

In addition to his political career, Silva has been a faculty member at the School of Government of Universidad del Desarrollo (UDD), Chile, for the past ten years. At that institution, he has also been director of the Center for Public Policy Analysis, vice president for Undergraduate Studies, and member of the Board of Trustees.

Fred McMahon

Fred McMahon is Dr. Michael A. Walker Research Chair in Economic Freedom at Fraser Institute in Vancouver, Canada. He manages the Economic Freedom of the World Network, an alliance of think tanks in nearly one hundred nations and territories. The network produces the Economic Freedom of the World Report, an annual study that ranks nations on economic liberty. He is coauthor of Economic Freedom of the Arab World and Economic Freedom of North America. He has worked on economic reform programs in more than a dozen nations and has authored several books and many articles on economic reform, both academic and in the popular media. His book Looking the Gift Horse in the Mouth, about damaging government intervention and spending, won the Sir Antony Fisher Memorial Award.

Gabriel Calzada

Gabriel Calzada is president of Universidad Francisco Marroquin, the pioneering free-market university founded in 1971 in Guatemala. He is past president of the Association of Private Enterprise Education and a board member of the Mont Pelerin Society and the Rising Tide Foundation. He has also served on the advisory board of the John Templeton Foundation and is currently a member of the advisory board of Students for Liberty. In his native Spain, he was the founding president of the Juan de Mariana Institute, a think tank known for the impact of its innovative research. Calzada’s 2009 study on the negative impact of the Spanish government’s promotion of “green jobs” along with his testimony before the US Congress helped bury that initiative in the United States. He has served as a professor of economics at Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, where he earned his PhD in economics, and IE University, both in Spain. Gabriel specializes in environmental and energy economics, the Austrian business cycle, and defense economics.

George P. Shultz

George P. Shultz is a native of New York City and graduated from Princeton University in 1942. After serving in the Marine Corps (1942–45), he earned a PhD in industrial economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Shultz taught at MIT and, in 1955, served as a senior staff economist on President Eisenhower’s Council of Economic Advisers. In 1957, he joined the faculty of the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business, where he became dean in 1962.

From 1968 to 1969, he was a fellow at Stanford’s Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. He was appointed US secretary of labor in 1969, director of the Office of Management and Budget in 1970, and secretary of the Treasury in 1972. From 1974 to 1982, he was president of Bechtel Group. Shultz served as chairman of President Reagan’s Economic Policy Advisory Board (1981–82) and as secretary of state (1982–89). In 1989, he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor.

After leaving office, Shultz rejoined the Bechtel Group as director and senior counselor. He also returned to Stanford as a professor of international economics at the Graduate School of Business and as a distinguished fellow at the Hoover Institution. Shultz is the author of numerous books and articles, including Turmoil and Triumph: My Years as Secretary of State (1993), Issues on My Mind (2013), and Learning from Experience (2016). He is one of the editors of Beyond Disruption: Technology’s Challenge to Governance (2018), and his most recent book is Thinking about the Future (2019).

Greg Lindsay

While studying Philosophy at Macquarie University in the early 1970s, Greg became interested in the ideas underpinning a free and open society. A math teacher by training, Greg taught for some years at Richmond High School in Western Sydney, and he founded the Center in 1976. Since then, he has overseen the development of the Center for Independent Studies into one of Australia’s most influential organizations covering three major policy areas – economic, social and international.

Greg has been active in the international liberal movement and is a former President of the Mont Pelerin Society. He organized six meeting of the Mont Pelerin Society: one General Meeting, two Regional Meetings and three Special Meetings.

Henry N. Butler

Henry N. Butler is the Allison and Dorothy Rouse Dean, a George Mason University Foundation Professor of Law, and the executive director of the Law & Economics Center at George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia Law School. For over thirty years, he has developed and led educational programs that teach the basics of economics, finance, accounting, statistics, and the scientific method to federal and state judges, as well as other legal professionals and scholars.

From 2007 to 2010, Butler served as the first executive director of the Searle Center on Law, Regulation, and Economic Growth at Northwestern University School of Law. He has held prior appointments at the Brookings Institution, Chapman University, the University of Kansas, the University of Chicago, and Texas A&M University. From 1986 to 1993, he was a law professor at George Mason and, during that period, also served as an associate dean and director of the Law & Economics Center. He returned to George Mason in 2010 and became dean in 2015.

Butler received an MA and PhD in economics from Virginia Tech (where James M. Buchanan was a member of his dissertation committee) and a JD from the University of Miami School of Law, where he was a John M. Olin Fellow in Law & Economics at the Law & Economics Center (directed by Henry G. Manne). He received his bachelor’s degree in economics from the University of Richmond.

Inchul Kim

Mr. Inchul Kim is a professor emeritus in the Economics department at Sung Kyun Kwan University, Seoul, South Korea. He earned a PhD in economics at the University of Chicago and has taught at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and American University, Washington, DC. In South Korea, he worked at the Korea Development Institute as a senior fellow for three years and served as the adviser to the Minister of Finance for three years before returning to the academic world. His main fields are international economics and economic development.

Kim has been doing research work on foreign debt management and exchange rate policy. Taking some years off from the university, he served as president of Incheon Development Institute. Kim also served as foreign investment ombudsman of South Korea for full three years. His job was to resolve numerous problems for foreign investors. Currently more than 17,000 foreign investors are operating their businesses in South Korea.

Kim received the Cheong Ram Prize from the Korean Economic Association in 1988. This prize is given to the best economist of the year below 40 years of age. He has been a columnist since 2015 writing economic articles for the Korea Times, Korea’s daily English-language newspaper.

Jeff Bennett

Jeff Bennett is emeritus professor at the Crawford School of Public Policy, Australian National University. He is a fellow of the Academy of Social Science of Australia and a distinguished fellow and past president of the Australasian Agricultural and Resource Economics Society. Bennett has published widely in the fields of environmental, resource, and agricultural economics. He has a particular interest in private-sector initiatives to supply environmental goods and services, as reflected in his book Protecting the Environment: Privately (World Scientific Press). Most recently he published (with G. Scheufele) a book on the use of markets to protect biodiversity: Buying and Selling the Environment: How to Design and Implement a PES Scheme (Academic Press). Bennett is a member of the Biodiversity Conservation Advisory Panel of the NSW Government and the Social and Economic Advisory Board of Food Standards Australia and New Zealand. He consults for business and government clients and with his wife, Ngaire, operates a farm producing super-fine merino wool.

Jeff Sandefer

Jeff Sandefer lives a dual life as an entrepreneur and a teacher. As an entrepreneur, he founded several successful companies—his first at age 16; his latest, Sandefer Capital Partners, an investment firm with several billion dollars in assets. Business may be his day job, but Sandefer’s passion is teaching. While he was at the University of Texas, his students five times voted him the school’s Outstanding Teacher, and Businessweek named him one of the top entrepreneurship professors in America.

Fifteen years ago, Sandefer and a group of successful businessmen started the Acton School of Business, whose one-hundred-hour-a-week program led the Princeton Review to repeatedly name Acton’s students as the “most competitive” MBAs in the nation. In 2012 the Economist honored Sandefer as one of the top fifteen business school professors in the world. In 2010 Sandefer and his wife, Laura, started Acton Academy, a cutting-edge K–12 school that blends a one-room schoolhouse, the Socratic method, and twenty-first-century technology. Acton Academy has expanded to more than two hundred schools worldwide, with 18,000 applications from parent-entrepreneurs who want to launch a new school.

Sandefer is a graduate of the Harvard Business School, where he served for over twenty years on the school’s governing committees. He was a longtime director of National Review magazine and the Philanthropy Roundtable, and is one of the youngest members ever elected to the Texas Business Hall of Fame.

Jennifer Burns

Jennifer Burns is an associate professor of history at Stanford University and a research fellow at the Hoover Institution. The leading independent expert on Ayn Rand, she is author of the acclaimed biography Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right. Currently, she is writing an intellectual biography of Milton Friedman. At the Hoover Institution, she directs the annual Summer Workshop on Political Economy.

Burns received her AB in history magna cum laude from Harvard University, and her MA and PhD in history from the University of California–Berkeley. Burns has published articles on conservatism, libertarianism, and liberalism in the New York Times, the Washington Post, Die Zeit, Quartz, and numerous academic journals. She has also been a guest on both The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and The Colbert Report. Podcasts of her courses on American history are available through iTunes and on her website, jenniferburns.org.

Jesús Fernández-Villaverde

Jesús Fernández-Villaverde is currently professor of economics at the University of Pennsylvania, where he serves as director of graduate studies in the Economics department; visiting professor at University of Oxford; visiting scholar at the Federal Reserve Banks of Chicago, New York, and Philadelphia and at the Bank of Spain; advisor to the Regulation and Rule of Law Initiative of the Hoover Institution, Stanford University; and a member of the National Bureau of Economic Research, the Center for Economic Policy Research, and ADEMU (A Dynamic Economic and Monetary Union).

He has held academic appointments at Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Duke, and New York Universities, among others, and was the director of the Penn Institute for Economic Research. He has been visiting scholar at the Federal Reserve Banks of St. Louis, Minneapolis, Cleveland, and Atlanta; research professor at FEDEA (Fundación de Estudios de Economía Aplicada, Spain); national fellow at the Hoover Institution; visiting scholar at the Becker-Friedman Institute of the University of Chicago; visiting scholar at the Institute for New Economic Thinking at the University of Cambridge; and distinguished visiting professor at the University of Melbourne (Australia).

He is editor of the International Economic Review and has previously served on the editorial boards of several other learned journals. He has published several dozen peer-reviewed papers in such journals as the American Economic Review, Econometrica, and the Review of Economic Studies, and has edited and coauthored several books. His research focuses on macroeconomics, econometrics, and economic history. Among other topics, he is interested in the role of monetary and fiscal policy, the sources of economic growth, the importance of the rule of law, and the foundations of market economies.

Joe Lonsdale

Joe Lonsdale is a partner at 8VC, a San Francisco–based venture-capital fund. He was an early institutional investor in many notable companies, including Wish, Oculus, Oscar, Illumio, Blend, RelateIQ, Joby Aviation, Guardant Health, and Synthego, and in 2016 and 2017 he was the youngest member of the Forbes 100 Midas List. Lonsdale is a cofounder of Palantir, a multibillion-dollar global software company best known for its work in defense and finance.

More recently, he was a founding partner at Formation 8, one of the top-performing private funds and the precursor to 8VC. Together, these funds manage a total committed capital of over $2.7 billion. He previously founded Addepar, which has over $1 trillion US managed on its wealth-management technology platform, and OpenGov, which modernizes various processes for more than two thousand municipalities and state agencies. He is also a founder of Affinity, Anduin, and Esper. Lonsdale was an early executive at Clarium Capital, which he helped grow into a large global macro hedge fund. He also worked with PayPal while he was at Stanford.

Lonsdale and his wife, Tayler, are active in a variety of philanthropic and mission-driven pursuits involving public policy and liberty, classical arts, and health-care innovation. In addition to supporting various nonprofit organizations such as Thorn, an NGO which leverages technology to fight child trafficking, the Lonsdales are focused on harnessing the power of markets to create more opportunity for all parts of society. Lonsdale received a BS in computer science from Stanford in 2003. He often lectures and writes on entrepreneurship, technology, and public policy.

John B. Taylor

John B. Taylor is the Mary and Robert Raymond Professor of Economics at Stanford University and the George P. Shultz Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution. He is widely recognized for path-breaking research in macroeconomics, monetary economics, and international economics. He served as senior economist on the President’s Council of Economic Advisers from 1976 to 1977, as a member of the council from 1989 to 1991, and as under secretary of the Treasury for international affairs from 2001 to 2005. He is currently president of the Mont Pelerin Society and recently served on the Eminent Persons Group on Global Financial Governance created by the G20. He received the Alexander Hamilton Award and the Treasury Distinguished Service Award at the US Treasury, and the Medal of the Republic of Uruguay for his work in resolving that nation’s 2002 financial crisis. His book Global Financial Warriors chronicles his policy innovations at the US Treasury. He received the Truman Medal for Economic Policy for extraordinary policy contributions, the Bradley Prize for economic research and policy achievements, the Hayek Prize for his book First Principles, and Adam Smith Awards from the National Association for Business Economics and the Association of Private Enterprise Education. His most recent book is Reform of the International Monetary System. Taylor received Stanford’s Hoagland Prize and Rhodes Prize for excellence in undergraduate teaching and the Economics Department Distinguished Faculty Teaching Award. Taylor received a BA summa cum laude in economics from Princeton and a PhD in economics from Stanford.

John F. Cogan

John F. Cogan is the Leonard and Shirley Ely Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and a faculty member in the Public Policy program at Stanford University. Cogan’s research is focused on US budget and fiscal policy, federal entitlement programs, and health care. He has published widely in professional journals in both economics and political science. His latest book, The High Cost of Good Intentions (2017) is the recipient of the 2018 Hayek Prize.

The book traces the history of US federal entitlement programs from the Revolutionary War to modern times. His previous books include Healthy, Wealthy, and Wise: Five Steps to a Better Health Care System (coauthored with Glenn Hubbard and Daniel Kessler) and The Budget Puzzle (with Timothy Muris and Allen Schick). Cogan has devoted a considerable part of his career to public service.

He served under President Ronald Reagan as assistant secretary for policy in the US Department of Labor from 1981 to 1983, as associate director in the US Office of Management and Budget (OMB) from 1983 to 1985, and as deputy OMB director from 1988 to 1989. Cogan is currently a member of the board of directors of Gilead Sciences, where he is the lead independent director, and a member of the board of trustees of the Charles Schwab Family of Funds, where he is chairman of the Governance Committee. Cogan received his AB in 1969 and his PhD in 1976 from the University of California—Los Angeles.

John H. Cochrane

John H. Cochrane is the Rose-Marie and Jack Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution. He is also a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research and an adjunct scholar of the Cato Institute. Before joining Hoover, Cochrane was a professor of finance at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business, and previously in its Economics department.

He was a junior staff economist on the Council of Economic Advisers (1982–83). Cochrane’s recent publications include the book Asset Pricing and articles on such topics as dynamics in stock and bond markets, the volatility of exchange rates, the term structure of interest rates, the returns to venture capital, liquidity premiums in stock prices, the relation between stock prices and business cycles, and option pricing when investors can’t perfectly hedge. His monetary economics publications include articles on the relationship between deficits and inflation, the effects of monetary policy, and the fiscal theory of the price level. He has also written articles on macroeconomics, health insurance, time-series econometrics, financial regulation, and other topics.

He was a coauthor of The Squam Lake Report. His PhD class on asset pricing is available online via Coursera. Cochrane frequently contributes editorial opinion essays to the Wall Street Journal, The Hill, and other publications. He maintains the Grumpy Economist blog. Cochrane earned a bachelor’s degree in physics at MIT and his PhD in economics at the University of California–Berkeley.

Lars P. Feld

Lars P. Feld has been chair of Economic Policy at the Albert Ludwig University of Freiburg since 2010 and is the current director of the Walter Eucken Institute. After his studies in economics at the University of Saarland (Germany), Feld graduated from University of St. Gallen in 1999 and qualified for a professorship in 2002. From 2002 to 2006, he worked as a professor of economics, with a focus on public economics, at the Philipps University of Marburg, and from 2006 to 2010 at Heidelberg University.

He is a member of Leopoldina (the German National Academy of Sciences), the Kronberger Kreis (the scientific council of the think tank Stiftung Marktwirtschaft), and the Mont Pelerin Society. From 2007 to 2009, he was president of the European Public Choice Society.

Feld has been, since 2003, a member of the Scientific Advisory Council to the Federal Ministry of Finance, Germany, and, since 2011, a member of the German Council of Economic Experts (GCEE). He currently represents the GCEE in the Independent Advisory Council of the Stability Council. In 2017, he received an honorary doctorate from the University of Lucerne in Switzerland.

Lars Peder Nordbakken

Lars Peder Nordbakken is an economist with the liberal think tank Civita in Oslo, Norway, and a frequent writer and commentator on a range of political and economic policy issues. Nordbakken is also actively engaged with the history of economic and political ideas and with the continuing task of interpreting and renewing liberalism in response to a changing world.

His most recent book, Liberale tenker for vår tid (Liberal Thinkers for Our Time, 2017), presents, for the first time in Norway, a series of intellectual portraits of the main thinkers behind the revival of liberalism in Europe after the Second World War, including many prominent former members of the Mont Pelerin Society. His other major work is a book on the preconditions for the productive dynamism of a liberal market economy, Muligheter for alle (Opportunities for Everyone, 2006).

Nordbakken is currently working on a new book on the principles of liberal economic policy, combining insights from Austrian, institutional and ordoliberal thinking. Nordbakken is also a board member of the foundation Liberalt forskningsinstitutt (Liberal Research Institute) and a business strategy consultant, and has for many years served on a senior executive level in the financial- and payment-services industry. He graduated from the Norwegian School of Economics in Bergen in 1980. Lars Peder has been a member of the Mont Pelerin Society since 2010 and a frequent participant since 2008, and is chairing the Organizing Committee of the next General Meeting in Oslo, Norway, September 1–5, 2020.

Lee E. Ohanian

Lee E. Ohanian is professor of economics and director of the Ettinger Family Program in Macroeconomic Research at UCLA, where he has taught since 1999. He is also a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and the associate director of the Center for Advanced Study in Economic Efficiency at Arizona State University.

He is an adviser to the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis and previously has advised other Federal Reserve Banks, Foreign Central Banks, and the National Science Foundation. He has been an economic adviser to state and national political campaigns and has testified to the US Senate and the California State Legislative Assembly.

His research, focusing on economic crises, has been discussed recently in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, and other media sources and published widely in a number of peer-reviewed journals. He is a frequent columnist for the Wall Street Journal, the San Francisco Chronicle, and other media. He received his PhD in economics from the University of Rochester.

Niall Ferguson

Niall Ferguson, MA, DPhil, is the Milbank Family Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and a senior fellow of the Center for European Studies, Harvard University, where he served for twelve years as the Laurence A. Tisch Professor of History.

He is also a visiting professor at Tsinghua University, Beijing, and the Diller-von Furstenberg Family Foundation Distinguished Scholar at the Nitze School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, DC. He is the author of fifteen books. His most recent book, The Square and the Tower, was published in the U.S. in January, and was a New York Times best seller. His previous book Kissinger, 1923–1968: The Idealist won the Council on Foreign Relations Arthur Ross Prize. He is also an award-making filmmaker, having won an International Emmy for his Channel 4 series The Ascent of Money (adapted for PBS).

His many other prizes include the Benjamin Franklin Prize for Public Service (2010), the Hayek Prize for Lifetime Achievement (2012), and the Ludwig Erhard Prize for Economic Journalism (2013). In addition to writing a weekly column for the Sunday Times (London) and the Boston Globe, he is the founder and managing director of Greenmantle LLC, an advisory firm. He also serves on the board of Affiliated Managers Group.

Nicolas Cachanosky

Nicolas Cachanosky is associate professor of economics at Metropolitan State University of Denver and fellow of the Sound Money Project at the American Institute of Economic Research. His research has been published in such journals as the Journal of Institutional Economics, Public Choice, the Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, the Review of Financial Economics, and the Journal of the History of Economic Thought. His academic research focuses on business cycles, monetary institutions, and financial applications to capital theory.

He is author of Monetary Equilibrium and Nominal Income Targeting (Routledge, 2018) and co-author of Austrian Capital Theory: A Modern Survey of the Essentials (Cambridge University Press, 2019), with Peter Lewin. He also serves as co-editor of Libertas: Segunda Época and on the editorial board of the Review of Austrian Economics.

Peter Boettke

Peter Boettke is a university professor of economics and philosophy at George Mason University, as well as the vice president of advanced study, director of the F. A. Hayek Program for Advanced Study in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics, and BB&T Professor for the Study of Capitalism at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. Boettke has authored and coauthored thirteen books, including his most recent, Public Governance and the Classical Liberal Perspective, which was co-authored with Paul Dragos Aligica and Vlad Tarko.

He is also editor of numerous academic journals and book series, including the Review of Austrian Economics, Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, and the Cambridge Studies in Economics, Choice, and Society book series with Cambridge University Press, among others. Boettke received his PhD in economics from George Mason University.

Peter M. Robinson

Peter M. Robinson is the Murdoch Distinguished Policy Fellow at the Hoover Institution, where he writes about business and politics, edits Hoover's quarterly journal, the Hoover Digest, and hosts Hoover's video series program Uncommon Knowledge. After graduating summa cum laude in English from Dartmouth College, Robinson studied politics, philosophy, and economics at Oxford University. He then spent six years in the White House, serving as chief speechwriter to Vice President George H. W. Bush (1982–83) and as special assistant and speechwriter to President Ronald Reagan (1983–88). He wrote the historic Berlin Wall address in which Reagan called on Mikhail Gorbachev to “tear down this wall!”

After the White House, Robinson attended the Stanford University Graduate School of Business and graduated with an MBA in 1990. Robinson then spent a year at Fox Television, New York, reporting to Rupert Murdoch, and another year with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Washington, DC, where he served as the director of the Office of Public Affairs, Policy Evaluation, and Research. Robinson joined Hoover in 1993. In 2005, Robinson was elected to serve as a Trustee of Dartmouth College. Robinson has published numerous essays and interviews in the New York Times, Red Herring, Forbes ASAP, the Wall Street Journal, and National Review Online. He is the author of How Ronald Reagan Changed My Life; It's My Party: A Republican's Messy Love Affair with the GOP; and the best-selling business book Snapshots from Hell: The Making of an MBA. He is the editor of Can Congress Be Fixed?: Five Essays on Congressional Reform.

Peter Thiel

Peter Thiel is an entrepreneur and investor. He cofounded PayPal, led it as CEO, and took it public; he made the first outside investment in Facebook, where he serves as a director; and he cofounded Palantir Technologies, where he serves as chairman. He has provided early funding for LinkedIn, Yelp, and dozens of startups, many run by former colleagues who have been dubbed the “PayPal Mafia.”

He is a partner at Founders Fund, a Silicon Valley venture-capital firm that has funded companies including SpaceX and Airbnb. He started the Thiel Fellowship, which funds young entrepreneurs, and he leads the Thiel Foundation, which works to advance technological progress and long-term thinking. He is also author of the no. 1 New York Times bestselling book Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future.

Robert Chatfield

Robert Chatfield serves as President and CEO of Free to Choose Network (FTCN), a global media organization, taking the helm from founder Bob Chitester in July 2017. Prior to joining FTCN, he was CFO of Fluid Imaging Technologies, a manufacturer of scientific instruments. For the previous ten years, Chatfield ran his own business as a merger and acquisition advisor to private companies. Chatfield also worked in corporate finance roles with Banknorth Group (now TD Bank) and Polaroid Corporation.

Starting his career with the nonprofit Pioneer Institute, a market-oriented research institute based in Boston, Chatfield has maintained a proactive role in academia for twenty years, teaching as an adjunct faculty member for many organizations. Chatfield is currently affiliated with Syracuse University’s online MBA program and Suffolk University’s finance department, where he earned his MS in Finance. Chatfield is a lifelong learner, community servant, and an adventurer. He served a one-year visiting professor assignment at Suffolk’s campus in Dakar, Senegal, and has participated in several humanitarian missions with Rotary International.

Robert Skidelsky

Robert Skidelsky is a British historian and economist best known for his award-winning three-volume biography on John Maynard Keynes. The second volume, The Economist as Saviour, 1920–1937, won the Wolfson History Prize in 1992. The third volume, Fighting for Britain, 1937–1946, won the Duff Cooper Prize in 2000, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for biography in 2001, the Arthur Ross Book Award for international relations in 2002, and the Lionel Gelber Prize for International Relations, and was short-listed for the Samuel Johnson Prize for nonfiction writing in 2001. Other writings include Keynes: The Return of the Master. He has also written many relevant papers and books on the British economy.

Russell Roberts

Russell Roberts is the John and Jean De Nault Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution. He hosts the award-winning weekly podcast EconTalk, which reaches an audience of more than one hundred thousand listeners in more than sixty-five countries. His two rap videos on Keynes and Hayek, created with filmmaker John Papola, have had more than ten million YouTube views and are used in high school and college classrooms around the world.

His poem and animated video “It’s a Wonderful Loaf” (wonderfulloaf.org) is an ode to emergent order. His series on the challenges of using data to measure economic progress, The Numbers Game, can be found at PolicyEd.org. His latest book is Gambling with Other People's Money: How Perverse Incentives Caused the Financial Crisis (Hoover Institution Press, 2019).

Other books include How Adam Smith Can Change Your Life: An Unexpected Guide to Human Nature and Happiness and The Choice: A Fable of Free Trade and Protectionism, which was named one of the top ten books of 1994 by Business Week and one of the best books of the year by the Financial Times. Roberts holds a PhD in economics from the University of Chicago and received his undergraduate degree in economics from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Ruth Richardson

As New Zealand’s Finance Minister from 1990 to 1993, the Honorable Ruth Richardson drove the nation’s reform agenda and laid the foundation for its economic turnaround. Richardson was first elected to Parliament in 1981. In 1987, she was promoted to shadow minister of finance. Once in office as the Minister of Finance in 1990, she set about making radical reform, implementing market-style policies to secure New Zealand’s economic recovery. These involved a major fiscal correction, deregulation of the labor market, recommitment to price stability, and early initiatives in redesigning social policy. On the back of those reforms, the economy grew by 20 percent, and New Zealand recorded the highest rate of job growth within the international Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.

Since leaving Parliament in 1994, Richardson has been in demand as a policy consultant to governments around the world on lifting standards of governance; on privatization; and on comprehensive macro, micro, labor market, public sector, and social policy reforms. Richardson mentors public and private figures extensively and has an extensive governance career, currently as the Chairman of the Kula Fund and New Zealand Merino Ltd., and as a director of Synlait Milk Ltd. and Bank of China (NZ) Ltd. She was previously director of the Reserve Bank of New Zealand. She has received the Lincoln Medal from Lincoln University and honorary doctorates from the University of Canterbury and the Universidad Francisco Marroquin (Guatemala). In 1995 she published an insider account of the politics of reform in Making a Difference (Christchurch, NZ: Shoal Bay Press).

Sally C. Pipes

Sally C. Pipes is president, CEO, and Thomas W. Smith Fellow in Health Care Policy at the Pacific Research Institute. Prior to becoming president of PRI in 1991, she was assistant director of the Fraser Institute, based in Vancouver, Canada. She is the founder and chairman of the Benjamin Rush Institute. She received the State Policy Network’s Roe Award in 2004 and an honorary PhD from Pepperdine University for her work on health-care reform in 2018.

Pipes addresses national and international audiences on health care. She writes a weekly column for Fox News and biweekly columns for Forbes and for the Washington Examiner’s “Beltway Confidential” blog. She has published more than 360 health-care opinion pieces in the Wall Street Journal, Fortune, and other major outlets. Her comments are included regularly in national media outlets from Politico to the Washington Post. She appears on nationwide radio shows hosted by Dennis Prager, Larry Elder, and Lars Larson, and has argued against Medicare for All on the Intelligence Squared podcast and on Life, Liberty & Levin (Fox News).

In January 2020, Encounter Books will publish False Premise, False Promise: The Disastrous Reality of Medicare for All. Her first book, Miracle Cure: How to Solve America’s Health Care Crisis and Why Canada Isn’t the Answer, featured a foreword by Milton Friedman. She has since published a number of books about the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare), and health-care reform, including The Pipes Plan: The Top Ten Ways to Dismantle and Replace Obamacare.

Samuel Gregg

Samuel Gregg is research director at the Acton Institute and a fellow at the Center for Law and Religion at Emory University. He has a PhD degree in moral philosophy and political economy from Oxford University, and writes and speaks extensively on political economy, finance, economic history, and natural law theory. He oversees domestic and international academic programming, conferences and seminars at the Acton Institute. He is also the current president of the Philadelphia Society. His articles have been published in journals including the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy; the Notre Dame Journal of Law, Ethics and Public Policy; the Journal of Markets and Morality; Economic Affairs; and the Journal of Scottish Philosophy. He has also written for newspapers and other print and online publications including Foreign Affairs; First Things; the National Review; American Banker; Law and Liberty; Real Clear Politics; Real Clear Markets; Wall Street Journal Europe; Investor’s Business Daily; the Washington Times; the Australian Financial Review; El Mercurio, and the Jerusalem Post. He has written fifteen academic and popular books, most recently Reason, Faith, and the Struggle for Western Civilization.

Susan Dudley

Susan Dudley is director of the George Washington University Regulatory Studies Center and distinguished professor of practice in the Trachtenberg School of Public Policy and Public Administration. She is a past president of the Society for Benefit Cost Analysis; a senior fellow with the Administrative Conference of the United States; a National Academy of Public Administration fellow; on the boards of the National Federation of Independent Businesses Legal Center and Economists Incorporated; on the executive committee of the Federalist Society Administrative Law Group; and chair of the Regulatory Transparency Project regulatory process working group.

She served as the presidentially appointed administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA); directed the Regulatory Studies Program at the Mercatus Center; taught courses on regulation at the George Mason University School of Law; served as a staff economist at OIRA, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission; and was a consultant to government and private clients at Economists Incorporated. She holds an MS degree from the Sloan School of Management at MIT and a BS degree (summa cum laude) in resource economics from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Her book Regulation: A Primer, coauthored with Jerry Brito, is available on Amazon.

Terry L. Anderson

Terry L. Anderson is the John and Jean DeNault Senior Fellow the Hoover Institution, Stanford University; past president of the Property and Environment Research Center, Bozeman, Montana; and a professor emeritus at Montana State University. He received his PhD from the University of Washington in 1972 and then began teaching at Montana State University from then until 1997.

He was recognized with several awards for his outstanding teaching. Anderson has been a visiting professor or scholar at Stanford University, the University of Basel, Oxford University, Clemson University, Cornell University, and Canterbury University. Since 1986, he has been a member of the Mont Pelerin Society. In addition to publishing in professional journals, Anderson has been a frequent columnist in popular publications ranging from the Wall Street Journal to the Dallas Safari Club’s Game Trails. Much of his career has focused on developing the ideas expressed in Free Market Environmentalism, the title of his co-authored book (third edition), which outlines how markets and property rights can solve environmental problems.

More recently he has focused his research and writing on how the ideas defining a free society apply to Native American economies. Of his thirty-nine books, four have laid the foundation for his Renewing Indigenous Economies project (indigenousecon.org). The most recent of these books is Unlocking the Wealth of Indian Nations. He lives in Montana with his wife, Monica, where they enjoy fishing, hunting, horseback riding, and skiing in Big Sky Country.

Tyler Goodspeed

Tyler Goodspeed currently serves a member of the Council of Economic Advisers. He was formerly a junior fellow in Economics at the University of Oxford, and a lecturer in Economics at King’s College London. His primary research and teaching fields are economic and financial history, with secondary interests in political economy.

Prior to earning his PhD from Harvard University in 2014, he received his AB from Harvard summa cum laude in 2008 and from 2008 to 2009 was a Gates Scholar at the University of Cambridge. His second book, Legislating Instability, examines the effects of unlimited liability and regulatory capture on financial stability in “free banking” Scotland. He also has a recent book, Famine and Finance, on the market for small loans during the Great Famine of Ireland, as well as companion articles in the Journal of Development Economics and World Bank Economic Review.

Goodspeed’s current research focuses on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British and North American economic history, with particular attention to informal banking and the political economy of financial regulation, as well as long-run economic development. In his first book, Rethinking the Keynesian Revolution, he analyzed the debates between John Maynard Keynes and Friedrich Hayek, considering the relevance of those debates to contemporary monetary economics.

Valeria Perotti

Valeria Perotti is the Program Manager of the Doing Business unit at the World Bank. She joined the team in December 2019, after holding several positions within the World Bank, including Senior Economist with the Enterprise Surveys team, where she led the implementation of the survey in East Asia, the Pacific, Europe and Central Asia, and she analyzed firm-level productivity in conjunction with skills and training issues. Valeria also worked in the former Human Development Network of the World Bank, where she managed the Russia Trust Fund survey to develop methods for measuring financial capability. Valeria holds a PhD in Econometrics and Empirical Economics from Tor Vergata University in Rome, and her research has focused on firm productivity, skills, labor market regulations, informality, life expectancy and applied microeconometrics.

Victor Davis Hanson

Victor Davis Hanson is the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and chairs the Working Group on the Role of Military History in Contemporary Conflict. He is a scholar of ancient and modern military history, classics, and contemporary politics. He is also a columnist and commentator for numerous media outlets.

Hanson was a professor of classics at California State University, Fresno, and has been a visiting professor at Hillsdale College since 2004. He has been awarded the Eric Breindel Award for Excellence in Opinion Journalism (2002), the National Humanities Medal (2007), and the Bradley Prize (2008). Hanson is also a farmer and a critic of social trends related to farming and agrarianism and is author or editor of more than twenty-four books. His most recent books are The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won (Basic Books, 2017) and The Case for Trump (Basic Books, 2019).