Speakers

Philip Booth 
Prof Philip Booth is Editorial and Programme Director at the IEA and professor of insurance and risk management at Cass Business School, City University. Philip has written widely on pensions, social insurance and financial regulation and was formerly an advisor on financial stability issues at the Bank of England. He is author, co-author and editor of several books and think tank publications as well as editor of the journal Economic Affairs. He was Vice-Chairman of the Public Sector Pensions Commission (established in 2009).

Steve Davies 
Dr Steve Davies is Education Director at the IEA. Previously he was program officer at the Institute for Humane Studies (IHS) at George Mason University in Virginia. He joined IHS from the UK where he was Senior Lecturer in the Department of History and Economic History at Manchester Metropolitan University. He has also been a Visiting Scholar at the Social Philosophy and Policy Center at Bowling Green State University, Ohio. A historian, he graduated from St Andrews University in Scotland in 1976 and gained his PhD from the same institution in 1984. He has authored several books, including Empiricism and History (Palgrave Macmillan, 2003) and was co-editor with Nigel Ashford of The Dictionary of Conservative and Libertarian Thought (Routledge, 1991).  

Kevin Dowd 
Kevin Dowd is a former academic and policy economist who has written extensively on the areas of monetary, financial and macro-economics, political economy and financial risk management. Professor Dowd’s books include Competition and Finance: a New Interpretation of Financial and Monetary Economics (Macmillan, 1996), Money and the Market: Essays on Free Banking (Routledge, 2000) and Measuring Market Risk (Wiley, 2005). He has affiliations with the Cato Institute (Washington), the Cobden Centre (London), the Institute of Economic Affairs (London), the Independent Institute (Oakland), the Istituto Bruno Leoni (Milan), the Pensions Institute (London) and the Taxpayers’ Alliance (London). He lives in Sheffield, England with his wife and their two daughters.

Anthony Evans 
Anthony J. Evans (B.A., Liverpool; M.A., George Mason; PhD., George Mason) is Assistant Professor of Economics at ESCP Europe. He is the co-author of The Neoliberal Revolution in Eastern Europe: Economic Ideas in the Transition from Communism. He has been published in journals such as The Review of Austrian Economics, Eastern European Economics, Constitutional Political Economy, Innovation: The European Journal of Social Science Research, Economic Affairs and The Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics, and has featured in The Times, The Sunday Times and The Daily Telegraph. He has written numerous trade journal articles and pens opinion editorials for Guardian Unlimited. He has also authored policy papers for the Conservative Party, European Investment Fund, Financial Reporting Council and the Competition Commission on a range of market-process issues. Evans lives in Hertfordshire with his wife.

JP Floru
JP Floru founded Freedom Week in 2005. As well as working as the Adam Smith Institute’s Parliamentary Liaison, he is a City of Westminster Councillor, a role in which he tries to limit the size of local government and is a tireless campaigner for low taxes. He stood as a Conservative Party European Parliamentary Candidate for London in 2009 and topped the poll of London party members with an unadulterated free market message. A staunch classical liberal and individualist, he has written numerous polemic articles and lists fighting the nanny state as his hobby.

Mark Pennington 
Mark is a Reader in Public Policy and Political Economy at Queen Mary, University of London. His research interests lie at the intersection of politics, philosophy and economics with an emphasis on the implications of theories of bounded rationality and imperfect knowledge for institutional design and the evaluation of socio-economic systems. He has a particular interest in the works of Hayek, public choice theory and related elements of the classical liberal tradition. Mark’s new book is called Robust Political Economy: Classical Liberalism and the Future of Public Policy. It examines challenges to market liberal theory derived from neo-classical economics, communitarian political theory and egalitarian ethical theory and applies the lessons learned in the context of the welfare state, international development and environmental protection.

Madsen Pirie

Dr Madsen Pirie is President of the Adam Smith Institute, and was one of three Scots graduates working in the US who founded the Institute in 1977. Before that, Madsen worked for the House of Representatives in Washington DC, and was Distinguished Visiting Professor Philosophy at Hillsdale College in Michigan. At the Institute, Madsen was part of the influential team which pioneered privatization and the extension of market choices and incentives. His work in helping to develop the Citizen’s Charter led to his appointment to the Prime Minister’s Advisory Panel from 1991-95. 

Craig Smith
Dr Craig Smith is a Lecturer in the Moral Philosophy Department at St Andrews. Prior to this he was a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Politics at the University of Glasgow. A graduate of Glasgow and Edinburgh Universities, he completed a PhD in Political Theory in 2003 before serving as a Lecturer at Stirling University. He has written a number of articles on liberal political theory and is the author of Adam Smith’s Political Philosophy: The Invisible Hand and Spontaneous Order (Routledge, 2006). He is currently engaged on research in the history of political thought with particular reference to ideas of civilization and civil society in the thought of Adam Ferguson.

Chris Snowdon 
Christopher Snowdon was born in North Yorkshire in 1976 and currently lives with his wife and cat in Sussex. He studied history at Lancaster University and is now a freelance journalist and author. He writes for the online magazine Spiked and on his own blog. His articles have appeared in the Wall Street Journal and The Guardian and he has appeared on several BBC Radio programmes, including The Moral Maze. Velvet Glove, Iron Fist was his first book. His latest book is The Spirit Level Delusion: Fact-checking the Left’s New Theory of Everything.