Jim Powell is Senior Fellow at a libertarian think tank, the Cato Institute in Washington, D.C., with which he has been associated since 1988. He has also done work for the Manhattan Institute, the Institute for Humane Studies, Citizens for a Sound Economy, the National Right to Work Committee and Americans for Free Choice in Medicine.
Powell is an author on the history of liberty. He wrote three books that reported findings about the unintended consequences of major presidential policies. Altogether he has written eight books and is perhaps best known for FDR's Folly, which has been praised by Nobel Laureates Milton Friedman and James M. Buchanan, Harvard historian David Landes and historian Thomas Fleming. Powell's books have been translated into Japanese.
He has contributed several hundred articles for an unusually broad array of publications. He has given talks internationally as well as at Harvard, Stanford and other universities across the United States.
Video Jim Powell (historian)
Biography
Powell was born in Norfolk, Virginia and grew up on Long Island. His father, Frank Coburn Powell, was a partner in a company that principally manufactured high quality phonograph turntables and cartridges. His mother, Madeline Shields Powell, was a catalog librarian. Both were from Indianapolis. Powell graduated from East Woods School (Oyster Bay, New York) and Millbrook School (Millbrook, New York) before entering the University of Chicago where he earned a B.A. in history. His professors included William H. McNeill (The Rise of the West), Donald F. Lach (Asia in the Making of Europe) and Earl J. Hamilton (War and Prices in Spain). As an editor of the student quarterly New Individualist Review, Powell helped publish articles by future Nobel Laureates F.A. Hayek, Milton Friedman and George J. Stigler. Other contributors included Ludwig von Mises, Murray Rothbard and Yale Brozen. Powell worked as a researcher for future Nobel Laureate Ronald H. Coase.
Powell started his career as a direct response advertising copywriter, doing the bulk of his work for financial services companies like J.P. Morgan, Merrill Lynch and GE Capital. In 1976, he began freelancing for Barron's, then for other business publications, then publications in the art market and general-interest magazines. Writing for travel magazines took him to Argentina, Brazil, China, Hong Kong, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, India, Belgium, Switzerland and Dubai.
Powell is a frequent contributor to Forbes Online. Among topics covered:
- How dictators come to power in a democracy
- Rich nations that went broke by spending too much
- How our friend Iran became our enemy
- The most important secret of a prosperous economy
- Why politicians lose so much money trying to pick winners
- How bad economies recover fast when governments get out of the way
- Two of the all-time greatest successes in cutting taxes and spending
- Why wars often go wrong
- Global oil and gas markets, our best energy security
- Why soak-the-rich taxes end up soaking everyone
- How entrepreneurs created the great boom that made modern Japan
- An amazing command of the obvious
- Why there's no human progress without capitalism
Powell's early books were about the art market, commercial real estate and Japanese finance. By the late 1980s, Powell began to author books on liberty.
Maps Jim Powell (historian)
Books
- The Fight For Liberty, Critical Lessons From Liberty's Greatest Champions Of The Last 2,000 Years (2012)
- Greatest Emancipations, How the West Abolished Slavery (2008) ISBN 0-230-60592-3
- Bully Boy: The Truth about Theodore Roosevelt's Legacy (2006) ISBN 0-307-23722-2
- Wilson's War: How Woodrow Wilson's Great Blunder Led to Hitler, Lenin, Stalin, and World War II (2005) ISBN 1-4000-8236-6
- FDR's Folly: How Roosevelt and His New Deal Prolonged the Great Depression (2003) ISBN 0-7615-0165-7
- The Triumph of Liberty: A 2,000-Year History Told through the Lives of Freedom's Greatest Champions (2000) ISBN 0-684-85967-X
- Gnomes of Tokyo (1988) ISBN 0-396-08964-X
- Risk, Ruin and Riches: Inside the World of Big-Time Real Estate (1986) ISBN 0-02-598530-2
- An Investor's Guide to Under-Valued Art and Antiques (1983) ISBN 0-399-12692-9
References
External links
- About Jim Powell
- Cato Institute Biography
- Appearances on C-SPAN
- Jim Powell at Goodreads
Source of the article : Wikipedia
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