Jonathan Portes (born 18 April 1966) is Professor of Economics and Public Policy at the School of Politics & Economics of King's College, London [1] and a senior fellow at UK in a Changing Europe. [2]
Portes is the son of Richard Portes, a Rhodes Scholar from Chicago. [3] He earned a degree in mathematics from Balliol College, Oxford, and a master's degree in Public Affairs (Economics and Public Policy) at Princeton University.
After joining HM Treasury in 1987, he held increasingly senior positions in the civil service, rising to be the chief economist at the Department for Work and Pensions and then the chief economist at the Cabinet Office under Gordon Brown. He left the civil service in 2011, after the Labour Party lost power to the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government.
Portes was appointed as the director of the National Institute of Economic and Social Research in February 2011. [4] In October 2015, it was announced that Portes would step down as Director of NIESR before the end of that year, following a management review at the organisation. [5]
His areas of interest include fiscal policy, labour markets and immigration. [6] He has a particular interest in the economic effects of Brexit, and was a prominent critic of the 'austerity' policies advocated by George Osborne, the former Chancellor of the Exchequer; Portes has described the Coalition's Incapacity Benefit reassessment programme — a major Whitehall project that was supposed to cut welfare spending by up to seven billion pounds a year — as "the biggest single social policy failure of the last fifteen years". [7] He analysed the government's welfare reforms for BBC Radio 4 in 2014. [8]
Portes is a council member of the Royal Economic Society, [9] a trustee of the charity Coram, [10] a senior fellow at the UK in a Changing Europe. [11] He was elected a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in 2018. [12]
Portes has said that British government policy since 2010 has disproportionately harmed the poor. In 2018, he said "There were a lot of choices, and the government chose to balance the budget on the backs of the poorest." [13] In 2023, Portes lost a bet made in 2018 with Christopher Snowdon, in which Portes had incorrectly predicted that relative child poverty would rise to unprecedented levels. [14] [15]
Sir George Iain Duncan Smith, often referred to by his initials IDS, is a British politician who served as Leader of the Conservative Party and Leader of the Opposition from 2001 to 2003. He was Secretary of State for Work and Pensions from 2010 to 2016. He has been Member of Parliament (MP) for Chingford and Woodford Green, formerly Chingford, since 1992.
Mervyn Allister King, Baron King of Lothbury is a British economist and public servant who served as the Governor of the Bank of England from 2003 to 2013. He is a School Professor of Economics at the London School of Economics. He is also the Chairman of the Philharmonia.
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Sir Alan Peter Budd was a British economist, who was a founding member of the Bank of England's Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) in 1997.
Nicholas Herbert Stern, Baron Stern of Brentford, is a British economist, banker, and academic. He is the IG Patel Professor of Economics and Government and Chair of the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics (LSE), and 2010 Professor of Collège de France. He was President of the British Academy from 2013 to 2017, and was elected Fellow of the Royal Society in 2014.
Augustine Thomas O'Donnell, Baron O'Donnell, is a former British senior civil servant and economist, who between 2005 and 2011 served as the Cabinet Secretary, the highest official in the British Civil Service.
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Olivier Jean Blanchard is a French economist and professor who is a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. He was the chief economist at the International Monetary Fund from September 1, 2008, to September 8, 2015. Blanchard was appointed to the position under the tenure of Dominique Strauss-Kahn; he was succeeded by Maurice Obstfeld. He is also a Robert M. Solow Professor of Economics emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). According to IDEAS/RePEc, he is one of the most cited economists in the world.
Henning Meyer is a German social scientist, consultant and policy specialist. He is the first Fellow of the German Federal Ministry of Finance and honorary professor for Public Policy and Business at the Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen. Furthermore, he is research associate at Cambridge University’s Centre for Business Research (CBR), Future World Fellow at the Centre for the Governance of Change at IE University and founder and editor-in-chief of Social Europe. Previously, he was John F. Kennedy Memorial Fellow at the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies at Harvard University, senior visiting fellow and research associate at the London School of Economics and Political Science and visiting fellow at Cornell University.
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Incapacity Benefit was a British social security benefit that was paid to people facing extra barriers to work because of their long-term illness or their disability. It replaced Invalidity Benefit in 1995. The government began to phase out Incapacity Benefit in 2008 by making it unavailable to new claimants, and later moved almost all the remaining long-term recipients onto Employment and Support Allowance.
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The United Kingdom government austerity programme is a fiscal policy that was adopted for a period in the early 21st century following the Great Recession. The term was used by the Coalition and Conservative governments in office from 2010 to 2019, and again during the 2021–present cost of living crisis. The two periods are separated by a stint of interventionist, Keynesian spending during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Professor Paul Gregg is a British academic, and expert on labour markets and welfare reform. He is currently a Commissioner on the Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission.
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Roger Edward Alfred Farmer is a British/American economist. He is currently a professor at the University of Warwick and is a Distinguished Emeritus Professor and former Chair of the Economics department at the University of California, Los Angeles. He has also held positions at the University of Pennsylvania, the European University Institute and the University of Toronto. He is a Fellow of the Econometric Society, Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, and Research Fellow of the Centre for Economic Policy Research, and the former Research Director of the National Institute of Economic and Social Research (NIESR). In 2013, he was the Senior Houblon-Norman Fellow at the Bank of England. He is internationally recognized for his work on self-fulfilling prophecies. Farmer has published several scholarly articles in leading academic journals. He is also a co-founder of the Indeterminacy School in Macroeconomics. His body of work has advanced the view that beliefs are a new fundamental in economics that have the same methodological status as preferences, technology, and endowments. In his 1993 book, Macroeconomics of Self-fulfilling Prophecies, he argues that beliefs should be modeled with the introduction of a Belief Function, which explains how people form ideas about the future based on things they have seen in the past. In his 2010 book, Expectations, Employment and Prices, he suggests an alternative paradigm to New Keynesian economics which reintroduces a central idea from John Maynard Keynes' The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money; that high involuntary unemployment can persist as a permanent equilibrium outcome. He provided an accessible introduction to these ideas in his 2010 book How the Economy Works, and more recently, in his 2016 book Prosperity for All, both of which were written for a general audience. The Farmer Monetary Model has different and high policy implications and relevance. Farmer's policy proposal to achieve full employment by controlling and stabilizing asset prices shows promise as a way to help prevent stock market crashes and deep recessions. His son is the economist Leland Edward Farmer, who joined the faculty at the University of Virginia in July 2017.
The economic effects of Brexit were a major area of debate during and after the referendum on UK membership of the European Union. The majority of economists believe that Brexit is likely to harm the UK's economy and reduce its real per capita income in the long term, and the referendum itself damaged the economy. It is likely to produce a large decline in immigration from countries in the European Economic Area (EEA) to the UK, and poses challenges for British higher education and academic research.
Iain Duncan Smith served as Secretary of State for Work and Pensions from 2010 to 2016. A member and previous leader of the Conservative Party, Duncan Smith was appointed to the cabinet by Prime Minister David Cameron following the 2010 general election and the formation of the coalition government between the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats. He was reappointed after the Conservatives won a majority in the 2015 general election but resigned in March 2016 in opposition to disability benefit cuts.