Ben Stein
Economist, Actor,
Writer, Journalist and Teacher
Stein spoke September 22, 2005
Ben Stein (Benjamin J. Stein) was born November 25, 1944 in Washington, D.C., (He is the son of the economist and writer Herbert Stein) grew up in Silver Spring, Maryland, and attended Montgomery Blair High School. He graduated from Columbia University in 1966 with honors in economics. He graduated from Yale Law School in 1970 as valedictorian of his class by election of his classmates. He helped to found the Journal of Law and Social Policy while at Yale. He has worked as a poverty lawyer in New Haven and Washington, D.C., a trial lawyer in the field of trade regulation at the Federal Trade Commission in Washington, D.C., a university adjunct at American University in Washington, D.C., at the University of California at Santa Cruz, and at Pepperdine University in Malibu, CA. At American University he taught about the political and social content of mass culture. He taught the same subject at UCSC, as well as about political and civil rights under the Constitution. At Pepperdine, he has taught about libel law and about securities law and ethical issues since 1986.
In 1973 and 1974, he was a speech writer and lawyer for Richard Nixon at The White House and then for Gerald Ford. (He did NOT write the line, "I am not a crook.") He has been a columnist and editorial writer for The Wall Street Journal, a syndicated columnist for The Los Angeles Herald Examiner (R.I.P.) and King Features Syndicate, and a frequent contributor to Barrons, where his articles about the ethics of management buyouts and issues of fraud in the Milken Drexel junk bond scheme drew major national attention. He has been a regular columnist for Los Angeles Magazine, New York Magazine, E! Online, and most of all, has written a lengthy diary for ten years for The American Spectator. He also writes frequently for The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, op. ed. and almost every other imaginable magazine. |
"Ben Stein is probably the closest any man comes these days to being a true renaissance man. His financial and economics work was cited in the efforts of the recent Nobel prize winner in Economics, George Akerlof. He is also the host of the long running comedy quiz show on Comedy Central, Win Ben Stein's Money, a show that has won seven Emmies. He has written hundreds of thousands of words about financial fraud and investment policy, but two words made him a household name: "Bueller" and "Anyone, Anyone." ( From his iconic role in "Ferris Bueller's Day Off.") He has written novels that the New York Times describes as "stunning," but what you have probably heard him talk about recently are "dry eyes, red eyes, and clear eyes." He worked and demonstrated and struggled for voting rights for African Americans, and he also was a speech writer for Richard Nixon and for Gerald Ford. He introduced the world to complex concepts of the politics of culture, but he also introduced the world to Jimmy Kimmel and made possible The Man Show. Lawyer, teacher, actor, comic, economist, father, novelist, essayist, expert on finance, meet Ben Stein!"
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