Amity Shlaes

Amity Shlaes, senior fellow in economic history at the Council on Foreign relations and author of The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression, delivered Cornell College’s Roe Howard Freedom Lecture on October 7, 2008.

Shlaes is a leading historian on 20th century finance, and is a syndicated columnist at Bloomberg. She has been featured in The New Yorker, Fortune, National Review, The New Republic, and Foreign Affairs. She has been awarded the Frederic Bastiat Prize for writing on political economy, served as the J.P. Morgan Fellow for economics and finance at the American Academy in Berlin, and has twice been a finalist for the Loeb, business journalism’s most prestigious prize. Her book The Forgotten Man, which will serve as the topic for the lecture, traces the causes of the Great Depression to government intervention, rewriting the history of the period.

Shlaes also meet with students and faculty over lunch and in Professor Santhi Hejeebu's ECB: 2-255 Antitrust Policy and Government Regulation course, where she discussed a chapter from her book written about the Schechter chicken butchery and their prosecution under the NRA. Also in attendance was Professor Charles Connell's GER 205 Intermediate German course.

*co sponsored by the Roe Howard Freedom Lecture