Hoover Institution — September 12, 2008 — Amity Shlaes challenges the received wisdom that the Great Depression occurred because capitalism broke and that it ended because FDR, and government in general, came to the rescue. According to Shlaes, it was the government that made the Great Depression worse. And was FDRs progressivism, as evident in the New Deal, really all that new, or was it a step along a progressive continuum that already had been established?

Biography
Amity Shlaes joined New York University Stern School of Business as an Adjunct Associate Professor of Economic History in fall 2008.

Professor Shlaes is a journalist and author whose emphasis is economic history. Professor Shlaes is currently senior fellow in economic history at the Council on Foreign Relations. Her syndicated column is carried by Bloomberg; formerly, the Financial Times carried it. She is also a contributor to Marketplace . She recently published a new history of the Great Depression, “The Forgotten Man,” (HarperPerennial), a national bestseller. She has also published another bestseller, “The Greedy Hand,” a profile of the tax code, as well as “Germany: The Empire Within,” an examination of German nationalism. She formerly served as editorial board member for The Wall Street Journal. Over the years, Professor Shlaes has published in periodicals ranging Tax Notes to the New Yorker, Fortune and Forbes. Professor Shlaes is winner of the Bastiat Prize and has served as J.P. Morgan fellow in finance at the American Academy in Berlin and was a DAAD fellow in journalism and history at the Freie Universitaet Berlin.

Professor Shlaes received her B.A. magna cum laude from Yale University.