David Blanchflower

David Blanchflower was a Member of the Bank of England Monetary Policy Committee from 2006 to 2009. He is currently Bruce V. Rauner Professor of Economics at Dartmouth College in the United States, a position he has held since 2001.

David was named 'Business Person of the Year' by the Daily Telegraph, in their Great Britons of 2008 Awards. His citation said "not only did David Blanchflower foresee the scale of the recession months before the eventual impact, he attempted to do something about it. He was the one Bank of England executive who consistently argued in favour of dramatically lower interest rates. He was the first policy-maker from the Bank, Treasury or Financial Services Authority to warn that the UK faced recession and the possibility of house prices falling by a third".

David's economic interests lie in jobs and wages and happiness - stuff that actually matters to ordinary people, but which researchers usually ignore. He has the rare ability to translate findings into non-academic language, as befits someone who last year described his research technique as "the economics of walking about: you ask people what's going on in their lives and you take seriously what answers they give you".

David's stint on the Bank of England's monetary policy committee brought him into the public eye. He was the first Member of the MPC to spot the seriousness of the credit crunch. The Bank of England may be operationally independent, but outspokenness is not necessarily prized in its staff. At the time, David was much ridiculed, yet he kept on standing out until everyone else caught up.

David was awarded the CBE for services to economics in the Queen’s Birthday Honours List in 2009.