Steve Hanke
Steve H. Hanke is an American economist and professor of applied economics at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. He is also a senior fellow at the Independent Institute in Oakland, California, and co-director of the Johns Hopkins University's Institute for Applied Economics, Global Health, and the Study of Business Enterprise in Baltimore, Maryland.
Hanke is known for his work as a currency reformer in emerging-market countries. He was a senior economist with President Ronald Reagan's Council of Economic Advisers from 1981 to 1982, and has served as an adviser to heads of state in countries throughout Asia, South America, Europe, and the Middle East. He is also known for his work on currency boards, dollarization, hyperinflation, water pricing and demand, benefit-cost analysis, privatization, and other topics in applied economics. He has written extensively as a columnist for Forbes, The National Review, and other publications. He is also a currency and commodity trader.
Hanke has been accused of spreading misinformation about the COVID-19 pandemic as a result of his critique of the effectiveness of lockdowns, as well as the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, and was listed as a Russian propagandist by Ukraine's Center for Countering Disinformation.
Early life and education
Hanke was born in Macon, Georgia, in 1942 and grew up in Atlantic, Iowa, where he attended Atlantic High School. He then attended the University of Colorado Boulder in Boulder, where he was a member of the Phi Delta Theta fraternity. Hanke earned a B.S. in business administration and a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Colorado.Academic career
Hanke's first academic appointment was at the Colorado School of Mines in 1966, when he was 24. During this time, Hanke developed and taught courses in mineral and petroleum economics, while completing his Ph.D. dissertation on the impact of meter installation on municipal water demand. Hanke then joined the faculty of the Johns Hopkins University, where he initially specialized in water resource economics. After six years at Johns Hopkins, including a one-year visiting professorship at the University of California, Berkeley, Hanke attained the rank of full professor within the Department of Environmental Health and Engineering at the Whiting School of Engineering, one of the fastest promotions to that rank in the school's history. At present, Hanke teaches courses in applied economics and finance that are widely recognized as a gateway for Hopkins students to gain employment on Wall Street.Over the course of his career, Hanke has held editorial positions with a number of academic journals, including the Journal of Economic Policy Reform; Water Resources Research; Land Economics; and Water Engineering and Management. He currently holds editorial positions with The International Economy, The Independent Review, Cato Journal, Review of Austrian Economics, Economic Journal Watch, and Central Banking. In 1995, Hanke and Johns Hopkins University history professor Louis Galambos founded the Johns Hopkins Institute for Applied Economics, Global Health and Study of Business Enterprise. Hanke is also a senior fellow and director of the Troubled Currencies Project at the Cato Institute, a special counselor to the Center for Financial Stability, and a member of the Charter Council of the Society for Economic Measurement. Hanke is a senior advisor at Renmin University's International Monetary Research Institute, in association with Nobel laureate Robert Mundell of Columbia.
Water resource economics
In 1969, Hanke began his academic career as a water resource economist in the Johns Hopkins Department of Geography and Environmental Engineering, a department founded by famed sanitary engineer Abel Wolman. At the time, the department was known as the premier water resource engineering department in the country, and was home to world-renowned sanitary engineer John C. Geyer, with whom Hanke would frequently collaborate. Hanke was hired to continue the water-related research program at Johns Hopkins that began during the Geyer era. During his initial years in the department, Hanke focused on issues including water pricing and demand, benefit-cost analysis, system design, and leak detection and control. He produced a number of important pieces of scholarship, including the first event study of the impact of water meter installation on water use, as well as sewer interceptor design criteria which are still commonly used today in Europe.During this time, Hanke served as the associate editor of the Water Resources Bulletin and Water Resources Research, as the economics editor for Water Engineering and Management, and as a member of the editorial board of Land Economics. He was also an adviser to the French water companies Compagnie Générale des Eaux and Compagnie Lyonnaise des Eaux, as well as to the engineering firms Snowy Mountains Engineering Corporation in Australia, and Binnie & Partners in London. In 1981, Hanke was appointed a senior economist with the president's Council of Economic Advisers, where his responsibilities included the Reagan White House's water portfolio. While at the CEA, Hanke led a team that re-wrote the federal government's Principles and Guidelines for Water and Land Related Resources Implementation Studies, to include more rigorous benefit-cost analysis requirements. Hanke continues to be active in the water resources field, focusing primarily on municipal water system privatization. He is a member of the Johns Hopkins University Global Water Program.
Privatization
Hanke has produced eight books and numerous articles and proposals dealing with the privatization of public-sector resources. In 1972, he was a research associate at the National Museums of Kenya, where he worked with anthropologist and conservationist Richard Leakey on the economics of big game cropping and hunting, as well as the privatization of big game reserves to combat poaching. Hanke also worked with Barney Dowdle of the University of Washington and the Confederated Tribes of Siletz Indians of Lincoln County, Oregon, on a proposal to privatize portions of their reservation, as a means of improving economic opportunity on Native American reservations. While at the White House, Hanke worked closely with his long-time associate, CEA member William A. Niskanen. He was known as a member of the supply-side economics movement within the Reagan administration. It was during this time that Hanke was noted for developing United States Ronald Reagan's program for privatizing public assets and services, particularly municipal water systems, and public grazing and timber lands. This plan was endorsed by one of Reagan's closest allies, the then Nevada senator Paul Laxalt, among others.Hanke's work to privatize public lands put him at odds with Secretary of the Interior James Watt and members of the Sagebrush Rebellion, who sought to transfer federal public lands to state control, rather than to private ownership. In 1982, Hanke left the CEA, joining a number of influential Reagan administration supply-siders, including Martin Anderson, Norman B. Ture, and Paul Craig Roberts. In 1984, Hanke was appointed a senior adviser to the Joint Economic Committee of the U.S. Congress, where he advised Senators Steve Symms and Paul Laxalt on privatization. Although the English term "reprivatisation" first appeared in The Economist magazine in the 1930s, and subsequently in various academic journals, Hanke and his wife, Liliane, are often credited with popularizing the term "privatization" – derived from the French term privatise – in the American economic lexicon during the 1980s, as well as for bringing about its inclusion in Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary. Hanke has authored numerous articles on the subject of privatization, including the entry for "Privatization" in the 1987 edition of The New Palgrave: A Dictionary of Economics.
Currency boards and dollarization
After Hong Kong reinstated its currency board in 1983, Hanke began to collaborate with his fellow Johns Hopkins professor, and Margaret Thatcher's personal economic adviser, Sir Alan Walters, on the subject of currency boards. A currency board is a monetary authority that issues a local currency that is fully backed by a foreign reserve currency, and which is freely convertible with the foreign reserve currency at a fixed exchange rate. Walters was a key advocate of the reestablishment of Hong Kong's currency board. Hanke and Walters established a currency board research program at Johns Hopkins. One of Hanke's first post-doctoral fellows in that program was Kurt Schuler. Shortly after Schuler's arrival at Johns Hopkins, Hanke and Schuler discovered that John Maynard Keynes was an advocate of currency boards. Hanke and Schuler presented these findings, including original documentation, in a book edited by Walters and Hanke.During this time, Hanke began conducting research on dollarization, whereby a country replaces its domestic currency with a stable foreign currency – creating a de facto fixed-exchange-rate monetary system between two countries. Over the course of his career, Hanke has written over 20 books and monographs and over 300 articles on currency boards and dollarization. Many of these were written in collaboration with Kurt Schuler. Hanke also co-authored with Sir Alan Walters the entry for "Currency Boards" in the 1992 edition of The New Palgrave Dictionary of Money and Finance. In addition, he played a central role in drafting and bringing about the inclusion of the Hanke Amendment in the 1993 Foreign Operations Appropriations Bill. This measure, sponsored by Senators Phil Graham, Bob Dole, Connie Mack, Jesse Helms, and Steve Symms allowed U.S. contributions to the International Monetary Fund to be used for the purpose of establishing currency boards.