Press Release

Amity Shlaes Joins George W. Bush Institute

The George W. Bush Institute announced today that Amity Shlaes has been named director of the 4% Growth Project, a key part of the...

The George W. Bush Institute announced today that Amity Shlaes has been named director of the 4% Growth Project, a key part of the Institute’s focus on economic growth. Miss Shlaes will open the project’s office in New York.

The aim of the project is to illuminate ideas and reforms that can yield faster, higher quality growth in the United States, and to underscore the importance of growth in America’s future. Part of that work involves finding ways to make growth and economics generally accessible to more Americans, especially younger Americans.

The program will conduct and sponsor research on all aspects of economic growth, host conferences, as well as partner with other institutions in such endeavors.

Earlier this year, The Bush Institute kicked off the program by convening Four Percent Growth Conference whose participants included four Nobel Prize winners. The role of tax policy, monetary policy, budget policy, immigration, innovation, federalism, and energy policy in growth will all be explored at the Project.

“The growth project represents an unprecedented opportunity to widen the discussion of growth in our economy and to focus on the American individual who powers that growth,” said Miss Shlaes.  “I am proud to join the Bush Institute, which will lead that change.”

Miss Shlaes comes to the Bush Institute from a post assenior fellow in economic history from the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. She is author of the forthcoming “Coolidge” (HarperCollins) a full biography of Calvin Coolidge, the nation’s thirtieth president. In addition she is coauthor, with Paul Rivoche, of “The Forgotten Man: Graphic,” a graphic version of her New York Times bestseller, “The Forgotten Man.” The Forgotten Man has sold over 250,000 copies in the United States, and is available in German, Italian, Chinese (Mandarin), Chinese (Taiwanese), Korean, and Japanese. Miss Shlaes is also the author of another New York Times bestseller, “The Greedy Hand,” a book on the tax code. Her first book was “Germany,” which addressed the German national awakening at the time of reunification.

“The Bush Institute is thrilled that Amity Shlaes is joining us,” said James K. Glassman, executive director of the Bush Institute. “She brings intellectual breadth, depth and seriousness to an important job – finding ways to boost U.S. economic growth at a critical time. Not only is Amity an innovative economic thinker, she is also a historian of Europe, the Great Depression and the American presidency. She brings great perspective and energy to the Bush Institute.”

Bloomberg carries her syndicated column, which she has written for the past ten years. She also rotates, with Lee Kwan Yoo, David Malpass and Paul Johnson, as a front-of-the-book columnist for Forbes. Readers also know her work from theFinancial Times, and the Wall Street Journal, where she worked for a decade and a half, serving, at the end, as editorial board member concentrating in economics. She is a commentator on “Marketplace.” She teaches the economics of the 1930s at New York University’s Stern School of Business. She is a trustee of the Calvin Coolidge Memorial Foundation and Chairman of theBoard of the International Policy Network, home to the world’s leading prizefor free-market journalism, the Bastiat Prize.

Miss Shlaes is a magna cum laude graduate of Yale. She and her husband, the newspaper editor and author Seth Lipsky, have four children.