Visiting Scholar Allan H. Meltzer

AEI's highest award, presented at the Institute's annual dinner, will henceforth be known as the Irving Kristol Award. Each year the Kristol Award will go to an individual, selected by the AEI Council of Academic Advisers, who has made exceptional intellectual or practical contributions to improved government policy, social welfare, or political understanding. The first recipient will be economist Allan H. Meltzer.

"In naming our annual award for Irving Kristol," AEI president Christopher DeMuth remarked, "the Institute intends to mark his singular achievements as thinker, writer, editor, and godfather to several generations of academics and intellectuals-and to set the highest standard of aspiration for public intellectuals in the future."

Kristol, a senior fellow at AEI for more than twenty-five years, has been coeditor of the Public Interest, America's leading policy journal, since he founded it in 1965, and was publisher of the National Interest from its founding in 1985 until last year. Kristol received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President George W. Bush in July. The medal inscription read in part, "Irving Kristol transformed political debate on every subject he approached, from economics to religion, from social welfare to foreign policy."

Meltzer is being recognized for his pioneering academic work in monetary policy, political theory, and economic history; his many practical contributions to improved economic policy; and his unswerving devotion to individual liberty and government reform. He will receive the award and deliver the Irving Kristol Lecture at AEI's annual dinner on February 26, 2003.

One of the world's foremost monetary economists, Meltzer published a series of pathbreaking studies in the 1960s (many in collaboration with the late Karl Brunner) that presented a fresh and sophisticated account of the role of money and financial institutions in the economy and the relationship of money supply and demand to prices, output, employment, exchange rates, and other aspects of economic performance. The American Economic Association, in electing Meltzer a distinguished fellow in 2002, noted that his early econometric work "has stood the test of time as have few empirical studies in economics."

Meltzer is Allan H. Meltzer University Professor of Political Economy at Carnegie-Mellon University, where he has taught since 1957. He has been a visiting scholar at AEI since 1989. He has served as a policy adviser to several U.S. administrations beginning with that of President John F. Kennedy and to several foreign governments and central banks, and he was a member of President Ronald Reagan's Council of Economic Advisers from 1988 to 1989. The author of more than 300 academic studies and a regular contributor to the Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, and Los Angeles Times, he is currently completing A History of the Federal Reserve, whose first volume will be published this November by the University of Chicago Press.

The Irving Kristol Award replaces the Francis Boyer Award, AEI's highest annual award for the past twenty-five years. Named for a distinguished chief executive of SmithKline in the 1940s and 1950s, the Boyer Award was first conferred in 1977, on former President Gerald R. Ford. Boyer Award recipients have included prominent statesmen, intellectuals, jurists, educators, and business executives-among them, in 1991, Irving Kristol. A list of Boyer Awards, and the texts of most of the Boyer Lectures delivered at the AEI annual dinner, are posted on the AEI website.