Arthur C. Brooks is the president of AEI. Until January 1, 2009, he was the Louis A. Bantle Professor of Business and Government Policy at Syracuse University's Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs and Whitman School of Management. He held joint appointments in the departments of Public Administration and Entrepreneurship. He joined AEI in 2007 as a Visiting Scholar. Mr. Brooks earned his PhD in Public Policy Analysis from the Rand Graduate School in 1998, after a twelve-year career as a professional classical musician (during which time he earned a BA and an MA in economics). Eight years after entering academia, Mr. Brooks was promoted to the rank of full professor at Syracuse; he became a chaired professor one year later. Mr. Brooks conducts research on the connections between culture, politics, and economic life in America. As an academic, he has published five dozen research articles and seven books in the past ten years in subjects ranging from the economics of the arts to military operations research. He is the author of the textbook Social Entrepreneurship: A Modern Guide to Social Value Creation (Prentice-Hall, 2008), and is a member of the editorial boards of seven scholarly journals, including all three of the top academic journals in public policy. He is also a member of several professional advisory boards, including that of the John Templeton Foundation. Outside of his academic writing, Mr. Brooks is a Contributing Editor for Reader’s Digest and a frequent contributor to the Wall Street Journal, City Journal, Condé Nast Portfolio, and other publications. His most recent commercial book is Gross National Happiness: Why Happiness Matters for America—and How We Can Get More of It (Basic Books, 2008). In 2006, he published Who Really Cares: The Surprising Truth About Compassionate Conservatism (Basic Books) about American charitable giving, which the Wall Street Journal called a "lucidly written, carefully distilled and persuasively cogent work, a tidy time-bomb of a book." In his career as a musician that preceded his work in public policy and economics, Mr. Brooks performed more than 1,000 concerts and recorded seven albums. He held positions with the City Orchestra of Barcelona and the Annapolis Brass Quintet.