James Forder

Economist

‘I believe that the humanist outlook is essential to a civilised, liberal society. Its propagation and the promotion of widespread public understanding of it has never been more important than it is today.’

James Forder, born in 1964, grew up in Edinburgh and then Southampton before studying for his undergraduate degree at the University of Oxford.

James has taught economics and occasionally politics at Oxford since 1993. He is a member of the Bar, was Senior Proctor of the University of Oxford, and Vice-Master and Vicegerent of Balliol College, and has been a member of the Council of Business for Sterling and the Investments and General Purposes Committees of the British School at Athens. Besides academic papers on central bank independence, European integration, and the macroeconomics of the 1960s, he is the author of, among other things, half of Both Sides of the Coin (1999), The Case Against Voting Reform (2011), Macroeconomics and the Phillips Curve Myth (2014), and Milton Friedman (2019). Since 2021 he has been Academic and Research Director at the Institute of Economic Affairs, and continues to research in the history of economic analysis.

James is a keen bridge player, once representing Oxford.