Tanner Lecture on Human Values at Stanford University

Professor Lord Stern is the IG Patel Professor of Economics and Government at the London School of Economics. He is Chair of the LSE’s Global School of Sustainability and the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment. President of the British Academy, July 2013 – 2017. He was elected Fellow of the Royal Society in 2014.

Professor Stern has held academic appointments in the UK at Oxford, Warwick and the LSE and abroad including at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Ecole Polytechnique and the Collège de France in Paris, the Indian Statistical Institute in Bangalore and Delhi, and the People’s University of China in Beijing.

He was Chief Economist of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, 1994-1999, and Chief Economist and Senior Vice President at the World Bank, 2000-2003.

He was Second Permanent Secretary to Her Majesty’s Treasury from 2003-2005; Director of Policy and Research for the Prime Minister’s Commission for Africa from 2004-2005; Head of the Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change, published in 2006; and Head of the Government Economic Service from 2003-2007.

He was knighted for services to economics in 2004, made a cross-bench life peer as Baron Stern of Brentford in 2007, and appointed Companion of Honour for services to economics, international relations and tackling climate change in 2017. He has published more than 25 books and 200 articles and his most recent book is “The Growth Story of the 21st Century: The Economics and Opportunity of climate Action” (LSE Press, 2025).

(link to the open access version here: The Growth Story of the 21st Century | LSE Press)