Speaker biographies

Michael Barone is a resident fellow at AEI, where he studies politics, American government, and campaigns and elections. The principal coauthor of the biennial Almanac of American Politics (National Journal Group), he has written many books on American politics and history, including, most recently, Our First Revolution: The Remarkable British Upheaval That Inspired America’s Founding Fathers (Random House/Crown Forum, 2007). Mr. Barone is also a senior writer for U.S. News & World Report and a Fox News Channel contributor.

Douglas J. Besharov is the Joseph J. and Violet Jacobs Scholar in Social Welfare Studies at AEI, a professor at the University of Maryland School of Public Policy, and director of the Welfare Reform Academy. Between 1975 and 1979, he was the first director of the U.S. National Center on Child Abuse and Neglect. His many books include Recognizing Child Abuse: A Guide for the Concerned (Simon and Schuster, 1990), Rethinking WIC: An Evaluation of the Women, Infants, and Children Program (AEI Press, 2001), and Family and Child Well-Being after Welfare Reform (Transaction, 2003). Mr. Besharov is currently the president of the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management.

Nicholas Eberstadt holds the Henry Wendt Chair in Political Economy at AEI and is also a senior adviser to the National Bureau of Asian Research in Seattle. He serves on the advisory board of the Korea Economic Institute of America and is a founding member of the U.S. Committee for Human Rights in North Korea. Mr. Eberstadt is currently, inter alia, a member of the President’s Council on Bioethics and the Visiting Committee for the Harvard School of Public Health. Mr. Eberstadt is regularly consulted by governmental and international organizations, including the U.S. Census Bureau, U.S. State Department, the U.S. Agency for International Development, and the World Bank. He has also offered expert testimony before Congress on a variety of topics. Mr. Eberstadt has published over three hundred studies and articles in scholarly and popular journals, mainly on topics in demography, international development, and East Asian security. His dozen-plus books and monographs include Poverty of Communism (Transaction, 1988); The Tyranny of Numbers (AEI Press, 1995); The End of North Korea (AEI Press, 1999); Korea’s Future and the Great Power (National Bureau of Asian Research, 2001); The North Korean Economy: Between Crisis and Catastrophe (Transaction, 2007); Europe’s Coming Demographic Challenge: Unlocking the Value of Health (AEI Press, 2007); and most recently, The Poverty of 'The Poverty Rate': Measure and Mismeasure of Want in Modern America (AEI Press, 2008).

William Galston is the Ezra K. Zilkha Chair in governance studies and senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. Mr. Galston specializes in issues of American public philosophy and political institutions. Prior to joining Brookings in 2006, he was the Saul Stern Professor and dean at the School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland. He is working on several high-profile projects pertaining to core questions of American public philosophy. He is the author of eight books, including his most recent book Public Matters: Politics, Policy, and Religion in the 21st Century (Rowman & Littlefield, 2005). Mr. Galston is also a coauthor of Democracy at Risk: How Political Choices Undermine Citizen Participation and What We Can Do About It (Brookings Institution Press, 2005). He is the author more than one hundred articles on questions of political and moral philosophy, American politics, and public policy.

View Event Details