IEA launches new online magazine ‘Economic Affairs’, with star writers

The Institute of Economic Affairs has today (Monday 29 June) launched Economic Affairs, a new daily Substack publication bringing together Britain’s leading free-market economists, writers and thinkers — the latest step in the IEA’s seventy-year mission to communicate the case for freedom and prosperity to new audiences.

Economic Affairs is published at economicaffairs.co.uk and edited by William Atkinson, one of the UK’s most highly rated young writers, a Spectator leader writer and regular Telegraph contributor. It will cover the defining debates in British policy and economic life: growth, tax and spending, regulation, housing, energy, welfare, and the proper boundaries of the state, from an authoritative free market perspective.

Contributors:

Lord (Matt) Ridley is one of Britain’s most celebrated science writers and public intellectuals. A peer and former chairman of Northern Rock, he is the author of ‘The Rational Optimist’, ‘How Innovation Works’ and several other widely-read books making the case that human ingenuity and free exchange are the principal engines of progress.
The Rt Hon Lord (John) Redwood is one of the most experienced economic commentators in British politics. A former Cabinet minister under Margaret Thatcher and John Major, he has been a consistent and authoritative voice for low taxation, economic growth and free markets across four decades in public life.
Lord (Daniel) Hannan is Director General of the IEA and one of the most widely read classical liberal writers in Britain. A former Member of the European Parliament, he is the author of How We Invented Freedom and numerous other works on political economy and constitutional history.
William Atkinson is a Assistant Content Editor and leader-writer at The Spectator and editor of Economic Affairs.
Some of the most exciting new voices for free markets, including Alys Denby of CityAM; Melisa Tourt of the Centre for Policy Studies; and Kitty Thompson of Create Streets
IEA experts including Dr Kristian Niemietz, the IEA’s Head of Political Economy and one of Britain’s leading analysts of socialist economic policy, Dr Steve Davies, the IEA’s Education Fellow and a historian of economic and political thought with an international reputation, and Dr Christopher Snowdon, the authority on lifestyle economics and author of Killjoys and Inside the Sausage Factory
Economic Affairs will also welcome regular contributions from politicians from all parties, academics from institutions across the world, leading business people, other think tanks and international economics and policy experts

The publication takes its name from two distinguished predecessors. The IEA’s peer-reviewed academic journal Economic Affairs has been published since 1980 and remains one of the leading outlets for free-market scholarship in the UK. Plus a former student-focused print magazine that brought our work to young people around the country. The new Substack carries that tradition into the digital age, built on the old IEA Substack which was already one of the fastest growing in the world, and combining it with the reach of the IEA Podcast — one of the country’s largest economics shows.

The IEA was founded in 1955 and has been at the forefront of communicating free-market ideas to policymakers, journalists and the public ever since. From its early influence on the intellectual climate to its contemporary work on economic growth, tax, regulation, lifestyle economics and the size of the state, the IEA has consistently sought new platforms to make the argument that freedom works. Economic Affairs is the newest expression of that ambition.

The publication does not impose a party line. Its contributors hold a range of views within the classical liberal tradition and are expected to disagree. What unites them is the conviction that prosperity is driven by markets, not the state, and that the argument for freedom must be made again in every generation, in plain language and without apology.

Lord Hannan of Kingsclere, Director General of the Institute of Economic Affairs, said:

“Britain hasn’t grown in over a decade. We are poorer than every American state. The tax burden is at its highest in living memory. These are not abstract statistics — they are the consequence of ideas. Economic Affairs exists to challenge those ideas and make the argument for different choices. The IEA has been doing this since 1955, and we have never needed to do it more urgently than now.”

William Atkinson, Editor of Economic Affairs, said:

“There is no shortage of economic commentary in Britain. What is in short supply is commentary that takes seriously the possibility that the state is the problem, not the solution. Economic Affairs exists to make that argument every day, with some of the sharpest minds in the country. I am delighted to be editing it.”