James Forder: The Economic Legacy of Thatcherism

Professor James Forder is Academic and Research Director at the Institute of Economic Affairs. He has taught economics and sometimes politics at Oxford University since 1993 and is Andrew Graham Fellow and Tutor in Political Economy at Balliol College.

His principal research interests have been in central bank independence, and the history of macroeconomic ideas, including especially those following from the work of A. W. H. Phillips; and the work of Milton Friedman. He has also written on the merits of the first past the post electoral system. He believes that public policy could be enormously improved by greater recognition of the power and utility of price mechanisms, as compared to regulatory controls such as prohibitions, licensing rules, and obligations on public bodies to pursue specific quantitative outcomes.