Amity Shlaes Popular Books

Amity Shlaes Biography & Facts

Amity Ruth Shlaes ( SHLAYSS; born September 10, 1960) is an American conservative author, writer, and columnist. Shlaes has written five books, including three New York Times Bestsellers. She currently chairs the board of trustees of the Calvin Coolidge Presidential Foundation and serves as a Presidential Scholar at The King's College in New York City. She is a recipient of the Bastiat Prize and, more recently, the Bradley Prize. Education and career In 1982, Shlaes graduated from Yale University with a bachelor's degree in English, magna cum laude. She attended the Freie Universitaet Berlin on a DAAD fellowship. She is Jewish. She is a current events columnist for Forbes at the front of the magazine, rotating with Paul Johnson and David Malpass. Until 2013, she wrote a syndicated column for Bloomberg News. Shlaes also writes a print column for Forbes magazine, rotating with Lee Kwan Yew, David Malpass, and Paul Johnson. Shlaes is also a regular contributor to Marketplace, the public radio show. She has appeared on numerous other radio and television shows over the course of her career. Before writing her column for Bloomberg, Shlaes was a columnist for the Financial Times for five years, until September 2005. Before that she was a member of the editorial board of The Wall Street Journal, specializing in economics. She followed the collapse of communism for The Wall Street Journal Europe and in the early 1990s she served as the Journal's op-ed editor. Over the years, she has written for The New Yorker, The American Spectator, Commentary, The Spectator (UK), Foreign Affairs, Forbes, National Review, The New Republic, the Süddeutsche Zeitung and Die Zeit, among others. Her obituary of Milton Friedman appeared in The New York Sun. For two years (2012 and 2013), Shlaes worked at the George W. Bush Presidential Center, leading the economic growth project. In 2011, she was named director of the 4% Growth Project at the George W. Bush Institute. This initiative is aimed at illuminating ideas and reforms that can yield faster, higher quality economic growth. Before joining the Bush Institute she served a decade as a senior fellow in economic history at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), an independent, nonpartisan membership organization, think tank, and publisher. As a senior fellow in Economic History at CFR David Rockefeller Studies Program, Shlaes worked within the Maurice R. Greenberg Center for Geo-economic Studies (CGS), dedicated to promoting better understanding among policymakers and academic specialists of how economic and political forces interact to influence world affairs. Since Fall 2008, Shlaes has served as an adjunct associate professor of economics at New York University Stern School of Business, teaching a course titled "The Economics of the Great Depression". She also serves as a Presidential Scholar at The King's College in New York City. She chairs the jury for the Hayek Prize of Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, a $50,000 book prize. She has served on the jury of the Bastiat Prize. Shlaes has won both prizes. In the past, she was a trustee of the German Marshall Fund. Books and other writings Germany: The Empire Within Shlaes's first book was Germany: The Empire Within, about German national identity at the time of reunification. She has also written articles about this time period, including a piece in The New Yorker on the Deutsche mark and the euro. The Greedy Hand She followed that book with The Greedy Hand: How Taxes Drive Americans Crazy and What to Do About It. It was a national bestseller. Fred Goldberg, a former IRS Commissioner, called it "a terrific book on the history of politics and taxing in America ... a must read—whether you come from the left, right, or mushy middle." Steve Forbes described The Greedy Hand as "the economic bible for those who believe in growth". The Forgotten Man Shlaes's next book, The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression, was published in 2007 and was a study of the Great Depression in the United States and the New Deal. This book argues that both Presidents Herbert Hoover and Franklin Delano Roosevelt promoted economic policies that were counterproductive, prolonged the Great Depression, and established a modern "entitlement trap." The Forgotten Man was a New York Times bestseller for 19 weeks, with over 250,000 copies in print. It has also been published in German, Italian, Korean, Chinese (Mandarin) and Japanese. Economist Paul Krugman has criticized The Forgotten Man, taking issue with its central tenet that New Deal policies exacerbated the Great Depression. Krugman wrote of "a whole intellectual industry, mainly operating out of right-wing think tanks, devoted to propagating the idea that FDR actually made the Depression worse.... But the definitive study of fiscal policy in the 1930s, by the MIT economist E. Cary Brown, reached a very different conclusion: Fiscal stimulus was unsuccessful 'not because it does not work, but because it was not tried'." Krugman specifically accused Shlaes of disseminating "misleading statistics." Shlaes responded to Krugman in The Wall Street Journal, specifically saying that for her estimates of employment and unemployment during the period she used the Lebergott/Bureau of Labor Statistics series. She wrote that statistician Stanley Lebergott "intentionally did not include temporary jobs in emergency programs—because to count a short-term, make-work project as a real job was to mask the anxiety of one who really didn't have regular work with long-term prospects." Shlaes went on to say that if the Obama administration "proposes F.D.R.-style recovery programs, then it is useful to establish whether those original programs actually brought recovery. The answer is, they didn't." Writing in Forbes, Hudson Institute fellow Diana Furchtgott-Roth first lays out Shlaes's view: "She points out that federal spending during the New Deal did not restore economic health. Unemployment stayed high and the Dow Jones Industrial average stayed low." After then explaining Krugman's position that "the New Deal failed to spend enough money to achieve full employment," Furchtgott-Roth concludes, "the new president needs to listen to many voices." Journalist Jonathan Chait has called the book self-contradictory, misleading, and inaccurate. Novelist and essayist John Updike criticized the book as "a revisionist history of the Depression". Coolidge Shlaes is the author of Coolidge, which debuted at number three on the New York Times bestseller list. Former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan listed it as one of the best books of 2013. On February 13, 2013, MSNBC published an excerpt of Coolidge onto its Morning Joe blog as part of a discussion on "books breaking new ground on the way we think about American presidents ... [including] Coolidge who has reemerged as a hero of small government Republicanism.". During the show, Sam Tanenhaus, editor of The New York Times Book Rev.... Discover the Amity Shlaes popular books. Find the top 100 most popular Amity Shlaes books.