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Amity Shlaes

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

Education and career

Shlaes graduated from Jonathan Edwards College, Yale University magna cum laude[1] with a bachelor’s degree in English in 1982.[2]

Shlaes writes a syndicated column for Bloomberg News.[3] 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.

In 2005, Shlaes wrote a Financial Times column warning about Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and considering nationalization and privatization. She said: "It is time to end Fannie's creepy relationship with government. Few projects could do more to sustain the American dream."[1]

Her Wall Street Journal piece on New Deal job creation argued that such jobs may not always increase productivity.[2]

She wrote a column for the Financial Times for five years, for which she won the International Policy Network's Bastiat Prize for Journalism in 2002.[3] Before that, she worked at the Wall Street Journal, where she was a member of the editorial board. She has also written for The New Yorker, The American Spectator, Commentary Magazine, Foreign Affairs, National Review, and The New Republic, among others. Her obituary of Milton Friedman appeared[4] in The New York Sun.

She was awarded the 2007 Deadline Club award for Opinion writing.[5] She was also awarded the Newswomen's Club of New York's Front Page Award for her Bloomberg columns.[6]

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 0-0609-3642-8) 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.[4]

The Forgotten Man controversy

Liberal Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman criticized Shlaes, accusing her in his New York Times op-ed column of disseminating "misleading statistics";[5][6] Shlaes rebutted Krugman's attacks in the Wall Street Journal, noting that she was simply citing to statistics generated by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.[7] Shlaes noted the importance of the debate because 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."[7][6] Writing in Forbes, former United States Department of Labor chief economist and Hudson Institute fellow Diana Furchtgott-Roth called it the "economic fight of the year."[8] Historian Matthew Dallek has called Amity Shlaes a "revisionist" with a "blind view of the New Deal." [9] Historian Eric Rauchway asserted that Ms. Shlaes ignored historical GDP easily available in the Historical Statistics of the United States. [10]

Personal

In 1988, Shlaes married fellow journalist Seth Lipsky[11].

References

  1. ^ http://www.ashbrook.org/events/lecture/2008/shlaes.html
  2. ^ Online Yale Alumni directory
  3. ^ http://www.amityshlaes.com/bio.php
  4. ^ Shlaes, Amity (June 25, 2007). "The Real Deal". Wall Street Journal. {{cite news}}: |access-date= requires |url= (help)
  5. ^ http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/10/opinion/10krugman.html
  6. ^ a b http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/14/books/review/InsideList-t.html?ref=review
  7. ^ a b http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122792327402265913.html
  8. ^ http://www.forbes.com/2008/12/03/new-deal-debate-oped-cx_df_1203furchtgottroth.html
  9. ^ http://dyn.politico.com/printstory.cfm?uuid=6CF51F59-18FE-70B2-A858CD862CDC69EA
  10. ^ http://www.slate.com/id/2169744/pagenum/all
  11. ^ Amity Shlaes Married to Seth Lipsky - New York Times
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