Amity Shlaes

Amity Shlaes is a senior fellow in economic history at the Council on Foreign Relations and a syndicated columnist at Bloomberg. She has written for The Financial Times and The Wall Street Journal, where she was an editorial board member, as well as for the New Yorker, Fortune, National Review, The New Republic, and Foreign Affairs.

Her latest book, The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression, is part a of a three-part history of the Twentieth Century, and has been widely praised by prominent figures such as George F. Will, Harold Evans, Newt Gingrich, Arthur Levitt, Mark Helprin, Peggy Noonan, Paul Volcker, and in publications such as The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The American Spectator, The Weekly Standard, and National Review. Paul Johnson raved: “Amity Shlaes, who has established herself as a leading historian of 20th Century finance, has now produced her eagerly awaited analysis of the Great Depression. It shows how inept government intervention turned a necessary market correction into an economic catastrophe and prolonged it into a decade of misery.”

Shlaes is also the author of the national bestseller on the U.S. tax code, The Greedy Hand and Germany: The Empire Within. A decade ago, she published an article outlining the structural obstacles to growth in Germany in Foreign Affairs, “Germany’s Chained Economy”; the article remains a reference.

In 2007, Shlaes gave her second Bradley Lecture at the American Enterprise Institute. This lecture covers the election of 1936 and the establishment of the modern entitlement state. In 2002, she was co-winner of the Frederic Bastiat Prize, a new international prize for free-market journalism. In 2003, she served as the J.P. Morgan Fellow for economics and finance at the American Academy in Berlin. Shlaes has twice been a finalist for the Loeb, business journalism’s most prestigious prize.

Shlaes appears frequently on Bloomberg radio, various talk radio stations, and television. She also contributes to Marketplace, the public radio show. She is a trustee of the German Marshall Fund and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. Shlaes graduated magna cum laude from Yale and studied at the Free University in Berlin on a DAAD fellowship following college. Yale named her to its “Who’s Been Blue,” list of most distinguished alumni.