Amity Shlaes

Amity Ruth Shlaes is a conservative American author, writer, and columnist. She writes about politics and economics from a classically liberal perspective. Shlaes has authored five books, including three New York Times Bestsellers. She currently chairs the board of trustees of the Calvin Coolidge Presidential Foundation and serves as a Presidential Scholar at The King's College in New York City. She is a recipient of the Bastiat Prize and, more recently, the Bradley Prize.

Before writing her column for Bloomberg, Shlaes was a columnist for the Financial Times for five years until September 2005. Before that, she was a member of the editorial board of The Wall Street Journal, specializing in economics. She followed the collapse of communism for The Wall Street Journal Europe, and in the early 1990s, she served as the Journal's op-ed editor.

Over the years, she has written for The New Yorker, The American Spectator, Commentary, The Spectator (UK), Foreign Affairs, Forbes, National Review, The New Republic, the Süddeutsche Zeitung, and Die Zeit, among others. Her obituary of Milton Friedman appeared in The New York Sun.

For two years (2012 and 2013), Shlaes worked at the George W. Bush Presidential Center, leading the economic growth project. In 2011, she was named director of the 4% Growth Project at the George W. Bush Institute. This initiative aims to illuminate ideas and reforms that can yield faster, higher-quality economic growth. Before joining the Bush Institute, she served a decade as a senior fellow in economic history at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), an independent, nonpartisan membership organization, think tank, and publisher.

As a senior fellow in Economic History at CFR David Rockefeller Studies Program, Shlaes worked within the Maurice R. Greenberg Center for Geo-economic Studies (CGS), dedicated to promoting better understanding among policymakers and academic specialists of how economic and political forces interact to influence world affairs.