About

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Chris Berg is a Principal Research Fellow and Co-Director of the RMIT Blockchain Innovation Hub, the world’s first dedicated social science research centre studying blockchain technology, based at RMIT University, Melbourne.

Associate Professor Berg is one of Australia’s most prominent voices for free markets and individual liberty, and a leading authority on regulation, technological change, and civil liberties.

He is the author of eleven books, including most recently The New Technologies of Freedom.

Associate Professor Berg is a Research Fellow with the University College London Centre for Blockchain Technologies, a Founding Board Member of the Worldwide Blockchain Innovation Association and the International Society for the Study of Decentralised Governance, is an Academic Fellow with the Australian Taxpayers’ Alliance, and is on the Academic Board of the Samuel Griffiths Society.

He is a member of the Steering Committee of the Australian government’s National Blockchain Roadmap, and is co-chair of the committee’s working group into blockchain for credentials.

In 2019 he was awarded the RMIT Vice Chancellor’s Award for Research Impact (Early Career Researcher) and the RMIT College of Business Award for Research Impact. He was awarded the Australian Libertarian Society’s ‘Libertarian of the Year’ prize in 2018.

Associate Professor Berg has been a regular columnist with the Sunday Age and ABC’s The Drum. In addition, his articles have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, The Australian, the Australian Financial Review, and the Sydney Morning Herald, as well as magazines such as Quadrant, Spectator Australia, Meanjin, and Overland. He is a frequent media commentator on television and radio and appears regularly throughout the electronic press.

Before joining academia, Associate Professor Berg had a background in think tanks and public policy. From 2004 and 2017 he was a policy analyst and research leader with the Institute of Public Affairs. He was a long-standing editor of the IPA Review, Australia’s oldest political magazine, published by the Institute of Public Affairs. Under his editorship, the IPA Review won the 2008 Sir Anthony Fisher Memorial Award for best magazine. Between 2017 and 2020 he maintained an honorary Adjunct Fellow position with the IPA, and was the co-host of the podcast Looking Forward.

He holds a PhD in economics from RMIT University, which was awarded in 2017. His thesis was titled Safety and Soundness: An Economic History of Prudential Bank Regulation in Australia, 1893-2008, and offered the first comprehensive history of the politics and economics of prudential bank regulation in Australia. The thesis was awarded the RMIT Prize for Research Excellence in the Enterprise category.

He also holds a bachelor’s degree in history and political science from the University of Melbourne. His undergraduate thesis was titled ‘The Biggest Giveaway in the History of the Nation’: A Legislative History of the 1962 Communications Satellite Act, and looked at the political economy of the creation of the United States Communications Satellite Corporation.