Amity Shlaes

Amity Ruth Shlaes (born September 10, 1960) is an American author and columnist from New York, who writes about politics and economics.

Education and career

Amity Shlaes graduated from Yale University magna cum laude with a bachelor’s degree in English in 1982.

Shlaes writes a syndicated column for Bloomberg News. She is a senior fellow in economic history at the Council on Foreign Relations. Her many appearances on television and radio include commentary on public radio for Marketplace.

Shlaes wrote columns for the Financial Times for five years, until September, 2005. She was a co-winner of the International Policy Network's Bastiat Prize for Journalism in 2002. Earlier, she worked at the Wall Street Journal, where she was a member of the editorial board. She has written for The New Yorker, The American Spectator, Commentary Magazine, Foreign Affairs, Forbes, National Review, and The New Republic, among others. Her obituary of Milton Friedman appeared in The New York Sun.

She was awarded the 2007 Deadline Club award for Opinion writing, and the Newswomen's Club of New York's Front Page Award for her Bloomberg columns.

Ms. Shlaes teaches an MBA course titled the Economics of the Great Depression at NYU/Stern School of Business. She has lectured at numerous institutions, including Brown university. She is the 2009 winner of the Hayek Prize awarded by the Manhattan Institute. She serves as the Chair of the judging panel for the Bastiat Prize for Journalism.

Books

Her first book was Germany: The Empire Within (ISBN 0-224-02700-X), about Germany at the time of reunification. She followed it with The Greedy Hand: How Taxes Drive Americans Crazy and What to Do About It (ISBN 0-375-50132-0).

Her most recent national best-seller is The Forgotten Man: A New History of The Great Depression (ISBN 0-06-093642-8) devoted to the study of the Great Depression in the United States and the New Deal. This book advances a thesis that both Presidents Herbert Hoover and Franklin Delano Roosevelt promoted economic policies that were counterproductive and prolonged The Great Depression, in part because of the uncertainty created by inconsistent policymaking. It was a New York Times Bestseller for 19 weeks.

The Forgotten Man

Main article: The Forgotten Man

Steven F. Hayward, with the American Enterprise Institute, wrote in the National Review that The Forgotten Man was "The finest history of the Great Depression ever written."

By contrast, economist Paul Krugman has criticized Shlaes's book and taken 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 also specifically accused Shlaes in his New York Times op-ed column of disseminating "misleading statistics"; Shlaes responded to Krugman in the Wall Street Journal, saying that, for her estimates of employment and unemployment during the period, she had used the Lebergott/Bureau of Labor Statistics series. She wrote that statistican 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 said 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 [Shlaes] 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 of the New Republic has called the book self-contradictory, misleading, and inaccurate, notwithstanding its enormous popularity among conservatives. Novelist and essayist John Updike criticized the book as "a revisionist history of the Depression".

The International Herald Tribune review by David Leonhardt comments: "With 75 years of hindsight, surely we can all agree that Roosevelt’s vision was imperfect. Yes, he helped build many pillars of the modern economy — Social Security, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the modern Federal Reserve and more. He also understood the folly of Hoover’s protectionism and pursued a more open trade policy. And his public works slowly, if unevenly, provided employment. (As the historian Eric Rauchway has noted in Slate, Shlaes exaggerates joblessness in the 1930s by counting many people who worked in relief programs as unemployed.) But other attempts to fine-tune the economy truly did fail. From today’s vantage point, the worst of them may have been farm subsidies, which essentially live on, giving a handout to agribusiness while raising the cost of food for everyone else and hurting poor farmers around the world."

Personal

Shlaes married fellow journalist Seth Lipsky in 1988, and has 4 children.

See also

• Tony Badger
• James MacGregor Burns
• William Leuchtenburg

External links

• AmityShlaes.com - Official Site
• The Forgotten Man -- Shlaes's blog at the Council on Foreign Relations
• Shlaes bio at Politico.com
• Video of debate/discussion with Amity Shlaes and Jonathan Alter on Bloggingheads.tv
• Booknotes interview with Shlaes on The Greedy Hand, April 11, 1999.