| Citation | Adair Turner is a polymath. After gaining a double first in History and Economics at Cambridge he worked for BP, then Chase Manhattan Bank and McKinsey. At the age of 40 he was appointed Director-General of the Confederation of British Industry. Subsequently he was he was Vice-Chairman of Merrill Lynch Europe for six years.
Between 2002 and 2006 Turner chaired the Low Pay Commission and the Pensions Commission. The latter produced perhaps the most comprehensive and influential report on pensions produced in the UK. The year 2007 was the start of an extraordinary period of activity: he took over as Chairman of the Economic and Social Research Council; the following year he became chair of the independent Committee on Climate Change which advises the UK Government and also became chair of the Financial Services Authority (FSA) as the financial crisis gripped most of the world.
In the last three years Adair Turner has been a very frequent commentator on the state of capitalism and on the consequences for society. Examples of his lectures have included those given in many countries under the Institute for New Economic Thinking and the Lionel Robins Lectures at LSE (subsequently published as a book). If these are not characterised as deeply profound by senior economists they are nevertheless often original and have changed the way many think about the capitalist system.
In all of this there are two obvious characteristics of Adair Turner: his total focus on quantitative evidence in coming to conclusions and his unwillingness simply to follow orthodoxy. For example, as Chairman of the FSA he criticized the financial sector as providing inadequate social benefit, paying excessive salaries and having grown too big for society. He has also criticised the economics and government communities for their obsession with narrow versions of output and growth as indicators of performance. Adair is unique in his ability to combine an insider's knowledge of how so much of our economy and society function (public and private), a serious training in economics (and history), a fiercely analytical approach, an ability to go to the guts of a problem, and real talent in communication. |