Festival of Economics: Diane Coyle
Recent research predicts that about a third of UK jobs are at high risk of automation in coming decades. Is this to be welcomed, given our poor productivity performance and the growing needs of an ageing population? Or does it spell a future of high unemployment and great inequality? Should we welcome the robots or fear them? Diane Coyle will discuss these issues with Richard Davies, Gavin Kelly and Debra Howcroft on 22 November 2014. Event details can be found HERE.
Diane runs the consultancy Enlightenment Economics. Read her Enlightenment Economics blog posts HERE. She is Vice-Chair of the BBC Trust and was a member of the Migration Advisory Committee from 2007-2012, and a member of the Competition Commission from 2001-2009. She is also a visiting research associate at the University of Oxford's Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment, and Professor of Economics at the University of Manchester.
Diane specialises in competition analysis and the economics of new technologies and globalisation, including extensive work on the impacts of mobile telephony in developing countries.
She is the author of a number of books. The Economics of Enough: How to Run the Economy as If the Future Matters, was published in 2011.
Nancy F. Koehn, New York Times, said: “In The Economics of Enough, Ms. Coyle adds a knowledgeable and earnest voice to the discussion about how to face these global challenges ... [She] has made an important contribution to the debate on the nature of global capitalism.” Read the full review HERE.
Christopher Cook, Financial Times, wrote: “Coyle's work manages to tie up fiscal policy, inequality and the environment with reflection on civil society ... Coyle makes a particularly effective assault on the view, often espoused by environmentalists, that economic growth ought not to be a policy goal. While she calls for other objectives - and the use of a greater range of economic indicators - she backs output growth as an objective.” Read the full review HERE.
Diane’s most recent book is GDP: A Brief But Affectionate History, published this year. She tells the story of GDP, tracing it from its eighteenth- and nineteenth-century precursors through its invention in the 1940s and its postwar golden age, and then through the Great Crash up to today, making sense of a statistic “that appears constantly in the news, business, and politics, and that seems to rule our lives - but that hardly anyone actually understands.” Read more about the book HERE, and read a Q&A with Diane HERE.
Our 2014 Festival of Economics, programmed by Diane Coyle, Enlightenment Economics, looks at money, the benefits of a more local economy, the economics of obesity and diet, what happens when quantitative easing ends, whether robots will take all the jobs in the future, the economics of crime and punishment and what will make the housing market work for all. We’ve also got John Lanchester (author of Whoops) talking about understanding money with Izabella Kaminska from the Financial Times and a discussion between Adair Turner and BBC Economics Editor Robert Peston. Full programme HERE.
