May 10, 2005

Speaker Biographies

Christopher DeMuth is president of the American Enterprise Institute. Before coming to AEI in 1986, he was managing director of Lexecon, Inc., an economics consulting firm (1984–1986); editor and publisher of Regulation magazine (1986–1987); administrator for regulatory affairs at the U.S. Office of Management and Budget and executive director of the Presidential Task Force on Regulatory Relief in the Reagan administration (1981–1984); lecturer at the Kennedy School of Government and director of the Harvard Faculty Project on Regulation (1977–1981); and a lawyer in private practice (1973–1977). His articles on government regulation and other subjects have appeared in The Public Interest, the Harvard Law Review, the Yale Journal on Regulation, the Wall Street Journal, Commentary, The American Enterprise, and elsewhere.

Nicholas Eberstadt holds the Henry Wendt Chair in Political Economy at AEI and served for many years as a member of Harvard University's Center for Population and Development Studies. He is also on the board of advisers of the National Bureau of Asian Research and the Statistical Assessment Service and is a member of the Environmental Literacy Council. He frequently serves as a consultant for the U.S. Census Bureau and other government organizations on such topics as demography, international development, and East Asian security. Mr. Eberstadt has published over two hundred studies and articles in scholarly and popular journals, including Foreign Affairs, the New York Review of Books, Commentary, The New Republic, the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal. His books include Prosperous Paupers and Other Population Problems; The End of North Korea; The Tyranny of Numbers: Mismeasurement and Misrule; Korea Approaches Reunification; and, most recently, Korea's Future and the Great Powers.

Deepak Lal is the James S. Coleman Professor of International Development Studies at the University of California at Los Angeles and professor emeritus of political economy at the University College London. He has been a member of the Indian Foreign Service (1963–66), a lecturer at Jesus College and Christ Church in Oxford (1966–68), a research fellow at Nuffield College in Oxford (1968–70), a lecturer and reader in political economy at the University College London (1970–84) and professor of political economy at the University of London (1984–93). Mr. Lal has been a member of the UK Shadow Chancellor's Council of Economic Advisors since 2000 and a distinguished visiting fellow at the National Council for Economic Research in New Delhi since 1999. His next book, The Case for Classical Liberalism: Globalization, Capitalism, and Prosperity, will be published in 2006.

Allan H. Meltzer is a visiting scholar at AEI and the Allan H. Meltzer University Professor of Political Economy at Carnegie Mellon University. He served as the honorary adviser to the Institute for Monetary and Economic Studies of the Bank of Japan from 1986 to 2002. Mr. Meltzer was a member of the President's Economic Policy Advisory Board during the Reagan administration. He has been an acting member of the President's Council of Economic Advisers and a consultant to the U.S. Treasury and to the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System. In 1999 and 2000, he served as the chairman of the International Financial Institution Advisory Commission, which was appointed by Congress to review the role of these institutions. The author of several books and numerous papers on economic theory and policy, Mr. Meltzer is also a founder of the Shadow Open Market Committee. In 2002, he was elected a distinguished fellow of the American Economic Association. He received the first annual Irving Kristol Award and delivered the Irving Kristol Lecture at AEI’s annual dinner in February 2003.

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