Diane Coyle

Diane Coyle, OBE (born 12 February 1961), is a freelance economist, and a former advisor to the UK Treasury. She is a member of the UK Competition Commission and a member of the BBC Trust, the governing body of the British Broadcasting Corporation.

Biography

Coyle was born in Lancashire and attended a grammar school, where a teacher engaged her "very sceptical and mathematical" mind with the logical way of thinking required in economics. She did her undergraduate studies at Brasenose College, Oxford reading philosophy, politics, and economics, before gaining an MA and a PhD in Economics from Harvard University, graduating in 1985.

She was an advisor to the UK Treasury from 1985 to 1986, and then became economics editor of The Independent and the European Editor of Investors Chronicle between 1993 and 2001.

She has since written a series of books focused on both educating people about, as well as different aspects of economics. Coyle is Managing Director of Enlightenment Economics, an economic consultancy to large corporate clients and international organisations, specialising in new technologies and globalisation. Coyle is also visiting Professor at the University of Manchester's Institute for Political and Economic Governance .

Coyle is: a board member of the UK's Competition Commission; on the Executive Committee of the Centre for Economic Policy Research; the Royal Economic Society; the Council of the Royal Society of Arts; and is a member of the BBC Trust .

Coyle was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the 2009 New Year Honours for services to economics. She is married to BBC News' Technology Correspondent Rory Cellan-Jones.

Published works

• 1997 - The Weightless World - summarised by Mervyn King, executive director of the Bank Of England, as: "In sophisticated economies, output weighs less and is worth more than in the past – just like the people who make it."’
• 2000 - Governing the World Economy
• 2001 - Paradoxes of Prosperity
• 2002 - Sex, Drugs and Economics - One chapter, "Sex: can you have too much of a good thing?", reaches the miserable conclusion, "apparently, people think sex is fun"
• 2007 - The Soulful Science: what economists really do and why it matters

Quotations

• Coyle on America: I think for any European spending some time in America is incredibly interesting and useful. It’s a hugely flawed country filled with a tacky pop culture but it’s also a profoundly vibrant and democratic country. I mean, it does look tacky to us – if you look at the present situation and all the flag waving stuff you kind of want to cringe – but I still think that it’s a pretty valuable process – all those people feeling strongly and patriotically looks naff to cynical Europeans – but all those voices get fed into the political process. Now that’s something that we need to value and celebrate. It is democratic. After all, they’re citizens and so why shouldn’t their voices count? Europeans might like to feel superior – it doesn’t look particularly stylish - but I think we’ve a lot to learn about including people in the political process. Let everyone’s voice count. Americans seem to do that better than Europeans.

External links

• EnlightenmentEconomics.com, Diane Coyle's own website includes list of books and major articles/publications
• BBC Trust biography
• Competition Commission biography
• Biography at LSE's economics department
• Interview at 3am magazine
• Diane Coyle articles at Prospect magazine
• Diane Coyle lecture to the Friends of the Earth
• September 2006 podcast interview re mobile phones in Africa