Chris Berg is a Professor of Economics at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia. He is Co-Founder of the RMIT Blockchain Innovation Hub, the world’s first dedicated social science research centre studying blockchain technology.
Professor Berg is one of Australia’s most prominent voices for free markets and individual liberty, and a leading global authority on regulation, technological change, and civil liberties. He is a highly experienced research leader specialising in the creation and development of large high impact research teams.
He is the author of eleven books, including The New Technologies of Freedom (American Institute for Economic Research, 2020), Understanding the Blockchain Economy (Edward Elgar, 2019), and The Libertarian Alternative (Melbourne University Press, 2016). He has published more than 30 peer reviewed papers including papers in Management Science, Research Policy, the Journal of Institutional Economics, the Australian Journal of Political Science, and Trends in Anaesthesia and Critical Care.
He is deeply involved in public policy in Australia and globally. He has appeared in front of more than twenty government and parliamentary inquiries. His research has been cited in dozens of tabled Commonwealth parliamentary reports. He was a member of the Advisory and then Steering Committee of the Australian Government’s National Blockchain Roadmap between 2019 and 2022, and co-chaired the Roadmap’s working group into the use of blockchain for identity and credentials.
Professor Berg has given hundreds of talks around the world, in cities as diverse as Istanbul, Guatemala City, London, Florence, Ho Chi Minh City, Amsterdam, Barcelona, Prague, Seattle, San Francisco, Dallas, Malaka, Saskatoon, Port Moresby, Shenzhen, Taipei, and Auckland, as well as every Australian capital city.
He has also been an advisor to a number of large number of firms and startups in frontier technology, and has a long standing advisory role with the blockchain firm Agoric. He is a member of the board of Shielded Labs, a non-profit focused on advancing the privacy cryptocurrency ZCash.
Professor Berg is a highly experienced media commentator. He is currently a regular contributor to Crikey, and 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, Overland, and Reason. He is a frequent media commentator on television and radio and appears regularly throughout the electronic press.
Professor Berg holds numerous other professional affiliations, including as a Research Fellow with the University College London Centre for Blockchain Technologies, 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 Mont Pelerin Society.
Before joining academia, 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.
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.
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.