Prager University Video: Was Calvin Coolidge the Best President of the 20th Century?

Amity Shlaes has been a syndicated columnist for more than a decade. Bloomberg View carries her column. She directs the economic project at the Bush Center, the Four Percent Growth Project. Amity is committed to economic education. This department sponsors a national economic presidential debate program for varsity and new debaters. Watch footage here. For the past five years, Miss Shlaes has taught the economics of the 1930s in the MBA program at New York University/Stern. Until 2000, Miss Shlaes was member of the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal, specializing in economics. In the early 1990s she served as the Journal's features, or "op ed" editor. Prior to that she followed the collapse of communism for the Wall Street Journal/Europe. Over the years she has published in the National Review, Forbes, the New Republic, Foreign Affairs (on the German economy), the American Spectator, the Suddeutsche Zeitung and Die Zeit. In 2002 she contributed an article on the US tax code to the thirtieth anniversary anthology of Tax Notes, the scholarly journal. Miss Shlaes is winner of the Hayek Prize and currently chairs the jury for the prize, sponsored by the Manhattan Institute. She has twice been a finalist for the Loeb Prize in commentary. In 2002 she was co-winner of the Frederic Bastiat Prize, an international prize for writing on political economy. In 2003, she was JP Morgan Fellow for finance and economy at the American Academy in Berlin. In 2004, she gave the Bradley lecture at the American Enterprise Institute. Her lecture, titled "The Chicken vs the Eagle" looked at the effect of the National Recovery Administration on the entrepreneur in the New Deal. Miss Shlaes is the author of The Forgotten Man (2007), a national bestseller that National Review called "the finest history of the Great Depression ever written." The Forgotten Man is available in German, Italian, Japanese, Chinese and Korean. She authored The Greedy Hand (Random House/Harvest paperback), a U.S. national bestseller on America's experience with its tax code. She is also the author of Germany: The Empire Within (Farrar, Straus), a book about German national identity. In 2004, she was, with the late Robert L. Bartley, co-author of the contribution on tax philosophy to "Turning Intellect to Influence," an anthology chronicling the progress of free-market ideas as advanced by the Manhattan Institute. Miss Shlaes is a trustee of the Calvin Coolidge Memorial Foundation.