At AEI’s annual dinner, which was held on February 15 in Washington, D.C., the Institute honored its president, Christopher C. DeMuth, with the 2000 Francis Boyer Award.

AEI’s Council of Academic Advisers, chaired by the eminent political scientist James Q. Wilson, selects the recipient of the Boyer Award, which recognizes individuals who have made exceptional practical or scholarly contributions to improved government policy or social welfare. Previous winners include Gerald Ford, Alan Greenspan, Henry Kissinger, Ronald Reagan, Thomas Sowell, and George Will. The pharmaceutical corporation SmithKline Beecham established the annual award in 1977 to honor a former chairman of the firm.

DeMuth, a leading authority on regulation, has brought the Institute from the verge of bankruptcy to financial health and renewed scholarly acclaim in the thirteen years since he accepted its presidency. In that time he has recruited dozens of distinguished academics and policy experts to the Institute and has built new areas of research strength in environmental, banking, and securities issues.

The lecture given by DeMuth in accepting the award was titled, "After the Ascent: Politics and Government in the Super-Affluent Society." In it, he identified three serious challenges facing America at a time when, in his judgment, we can fairly say that the problems of how to secure freedom and prosperity have "in all essentials been solved." The three challenges are to extend our wealth and freedom at home and abroad, to make appropriate use of those blessings, and to relimit our government.

He focused his remarks primarily on the last of those challenges. "Much of government today has no theme or theory, just momentum," he noted. " It is government sprawl, strip-mall socialism—ubiquitous, undistinguished, strictly utilitarian in the service of innumerable small middle-class wants and gripes."

To undo the accretion of governmental power and to harness our wealth and freedom, DeMuth called for "a gale of constructive competition" in the political and social spheres: "Competition is already the first principle of contemporary welfare school and welfare reform. . . . It should also be a central principle of those who wish to maintain a healthy, productive culture."

Christopher Clay DeMuth was born in 1946 and raised in Kenilworth, Illinois. After his graduation from Harvard College, he worked in the Nixon White House under his former teacher, Daniel P. Moynihan, on urban and environmental policy issues, before earning a law degree at the University of Chicago Law School.

From 1977 to 1981, DeMuth taught economics, law, and regulatory policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and directed the Harvard Faculty Project on Regulation. His work on regulatory policy attracted the attention of President Ronald Reagan, who appointed him executive director of his Task Force on Regulatory Relief and administrator for regulatory policy at the Office of Management and Budget. Between his second White House tour and his appointment as AEI’s president, he was managing director of Lexecon Inc., a law and economics consulting firm.

The 2000 Francis Boyer Award is inscribed:

To Christopher C. DeMuth
A scholar, servant, and
entrepreneur for the public good
A tireless and enthusiastic champion
Of limited government and
private enterprise
And a beloved colleague
and leader

Excerpts of the 2000 Boyer Lecture are included in this newsletter.