Join us for a virtual Harwood Salon with one of America’s leading economic historians and best-selling author, Amity Shlaes, Chair of the Calvin Coolidge Presidential Foundation.
Debates about economic history have become central to today’s highly charged policy discussions. No one knows this better than Amity Shlaes, author of The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression (2007) and Great Society: A New History (2019). Join us as she discusses the challenges of writing accurate history about the American economy at a time of hyper-partisanship in a conversation with AIER’s president Samuel Gregg and for the opportunity to pose questions to Ms. Shlaes.
Attendees of this online Harwood Salon will gain deeper understanding of how economic history is written, the pressures involved in challenging established orthodoxies, and why the truth about economic history matters more than ever for America’s future.
About the Speakers
Amity Shlaes chairs the board of the Calvin Coolidge Presidential Foundation, the national foundation dedicated to honoring the values America’s thirtieth president. The Foundation, at which she also serves as CEO, gives the most competitive college scholarship in the United States, the Coolidge Scholarship. She writes a column, the Forgotten Book, for National Review, and serves as a fellow of the National Review Institute. She is currently at work on two books for HarperCollins, one on Theodore Roosevelt and Progressivism, and the other a short history of the Twentieth Century Economy.
Ms. Shlaes is one of the foremost historians of our era. She is the author of four New York Times bestsellers, The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression, The Forgotten Man: Graphic (a graphic novel version of her history), Coolidge, a full biography of the thirtieth president, and The Greedy Hand, a profile of the tax code. In 2019, Ms. Shlaes published Great Society: A New History, a dramatic story with lessons both dark and bright for our current time. Recently, Ms. Shlaes served as executive producer of a full-length documentary, Coolidge: Rediscovering an American President, which has aired on PBS and is available on Amazon Prime.
Ms. Shlaes is a winner of the Manhattan Institute’s Hayek Prize, whose jury she led after winning for a decade. In 2021 she won the most prestigious prize for conservatives, the Bradley Prize. She is co-winner of the Frederic Bastiat Prize. In 2023, she was awarded the William F. Buckley Prize for Political Thought. Over the years, she has served at the Council on Foreign Relations as senior fellow in political economy. Many readers know Ms. Shlaes from The Wall Street Journal, where she served on the editorial board, writing on foreign policy, taxation, and other topics, or from the Financial Times and Bloomberg, where she served as a columnist for a total of ten years. Over the years she has published in many periodicals, including The New Yorker (on the demise of the Deutsche Mark), Foreign Affairs, The New York Times and The Washington Post.
Ms. Shlaes is a magna cum laude graduate of Yale College. She did graduate work at the Freie Universität Berlin on a DAAD Fellowship, and later served in Berlin as JP Morgan fellow at the American Academy in Berlin. She and her husband, Seth Lipsky, editor of the New York Sun, have four grown children.
Samuel Gregg is the President and Friedrich Hayek Chair in Economics and Economic History at the American Institute for Economic Research. He has a D.Phil. in moral philosophy and political economy from Oxford University, and an M.A. in political philosophy from the University of Melbourne.
He has written and spoken extensively on questions of political economy, economic history, monetary theory and policy, and natural law theory. He is the author of seventeen books, including On Ordered Liberty (2003), The Commercial Society (2007), Wilhelm Röpke’s Political Economy (2010); Becoming Europe (2013); Reason, Faith, and the Struggle for Western Civilization (2019); The Essential Natural Law (2021); and The Next American Economy: Nation, State and Markets in an Uncertain World (2022). Two of his books have been short-listed for Conservative Book of the Year, and one of his books was short-listed for the 2023 Hayek Prize. Many of his books and over 700 articles and opinion pieces have been translated into a variety of languages.
He has published in journals such as the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy; Journal of Markets & Morality; Economic Affairs; Law and Investment Management; Journal des Economistes et des Etudes Humaines; Notre Dame Journal of Law, Ethics and Public Policy; Oxford Analytica; Communio; Journal of Scottish Philosophy; University Bookman; Foreign Affairs; and Policy. He is a regular writer of opinion-pieces which appear in publications such as the Wall Street Journal; Foreign Affairs; The Daily Telegraph; First Things; Investors Business Daily; The Spectator; Law and Liberty; Washington Times; Washington Examiner; Revue Conflits; American Banker; National Review; Public Discourse; American Spectator; El Mercurio; Australian Financial Review; Jerusalem Post; La Nacion; and Business Review Weekly. He has served as an editorial consultant for the Italian journal, La Societa, and American correspondent for the German newspaper Die Tagespost. He has also been cited in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Time Magazine, Christian Science Monitor, the Washington Post, the New Yorker, Reuters, and the Holy See’s L’Osservatore Romano.
In 2001, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, and a Member of the Mont Pèlerin Society in 2004. In 2008, he was elected a Member of the Philadelphia Society, and a Member of the Royal Economic Society. He served as President of the Philadelphia Society from 2019-2021. He was made a Distinguished Fellow of the Philadelphia Society in 2023. He is also a Contributor to Law and Liberty and an Affiliate Scholar at the Acton Institute. In May 2024, he was profiled in the Wall Street Journal.
He is the General Editor of Lexington Books’ Studies in Ethics and Economics Series. He also sits on the Academic Advisory Boards of the Institute of Economic Affairs, London; Campion College, Sydney; La Fundación Burke, Madrid; the Instituto Fe y Libertad, Guatemala; and the Friedman-Hayek Center at the Universidad de CEMA, Buenos Aires. He also serves on the editorial boards of the Journal of Markets and Morality and Revista Valores en la sociedad industrial. His acceptance speech.
In 2024, he was awarded the prestigious Bradley Prize by The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation. This Prize honors scholars and practitioners whose accomplishments reflect the Bradley Foundation’s mission to restore, strengthen, and protect the principles and institutions of American exceptionalism.
Register now to attend this virtual Harwood Salon.
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