September 27, 2004

Speaker Biographies

Ben J. Wattenberg is a senior fellow at AEI. He is the moderator of the weekly PBS television program Think Tank with Ben Wattenberg. Mr. Wattenberg's current book is titled Fewer: How the New Demography of Depopulation Will Shape Our Future. Mr. Wattenberg is the author of eight additional books, including Values Matter Most (1995), The First Universal Nation (1991), and The Birth Dearth (1987). He also coauthored, with Richard M. Scammon, The Real Majority (1970), the best-selling "bible" of the 1970 and 1972 elections. Mr. Wattenberg was an aide and speechwriter to President Lyndon B. Johnson from 1966 to 1968. He served as a political adviser to Senator Henry M. "Scoop" Jackson, helping to write the 1972 and 1976 Democratic national platforms. 

Joseph Chamie is the director of the Population Division in the Department of Economic and Social Affairs at the UN Secretariat in New York. He has worked with the United Nations in the field of population and development overseas and in New York for more than a quarter century. Among his other major duties, he was the deputy secretary-general for the 1994 UN International Conference for Population and Development. In addition to completing numerous studies issued under UN authorship, he has also written many studies in his own name on such topics as fertility, marriage, family planning, population estimates and projections, aging, urbanization, international migration, population, and development policy.

Nicholas Eberstadt holds the Henry Wendt Chair in Political Economy at AEI and is senior adviser to the National Bureau of Asian Research in Seattle. Mr. Eberstadt serves as a member of the Visiting Committee for the Harvard School of Public Health, the Board of Scientific Counselors for the National Center for Health Statistics of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the Advisory Committee for Voluntary Foreign Aid for the United States Agency for International Development. He has published over three hundred studies and articles, mainly on topics in demography, international development, and East Asian security.  His books include Poverty in China, Fertility Decline in the Less Developed Countries, The Poverty of Communism, Foreign Aid and American Purpose, The Tyranny of Numbers, Comparing the Soviet and American Economies, Prosperous Paupers and Other Population Problems, and most recently, Health and the Income Inequality Hypothesis.

View Event Details