The Case for Scrooge with Amity Shlaes

For more information, contact John Morton at (616) 454 -3080 or jmorton@acton.org [2]

Some Economists advise us that debt is good for America. Those who advocated government saving, or austerity, were treated as throwbacks and ridiculed. But Scrooge is sometimes right.  In a speech that is as much a story as much of human character as of economics, Amity Shlaes tells how a jovial sinner named Warren Harding and a silent New Englander named Calvin Coolidge, the Scrooge, brought down debt and unemployment with policy we can emulate and envy today.

Amity Shlaes, a sought-after keynote speaker who places the current economy in the context of the past has given speeches and lectures covering a wide range of topics to financial institutions, corporations, colleges, universities, and historical societies. She writes a syndicated column for Forbes, is Chairman of the Board of the Calvin Coolidge Memorial Foundation, directs the 4% Growth project at the George W. Bush Presidential Center, and teaches at New York University’s Stern School of Business in the MBA program. Shlaes is the author of three New York Times best-sellers, The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression (named by The Wall Street Journal as one of the best books to read during a financial crisis), The Greedy Hand, and Coolidge, which debuted at number three on the Times nonfiction list and was a Times “Editor’s Choice”. Coolidge is a comprehensive biography and reassessment of President Calvin Coolidge (president from 1923 to 1929) whose style of management discipline can be applied to today’s fiscal crisis.