Arthur C. Brooks

Brooks left the AEI in mid-2019, explaining that staying in the job longer would ultimately be bad for the organization and for himself personally. He described the job of running the AEI as one requiring more fluid, rather than crystallized, intelligence, and that he was moving into teaching, which benefits from more crystallized intelligence.

In 2015 Brooks published The Conservative Heart, which lays out his vision for a new conservative movement focused on reducing poverty and expanding opportunity, particularly for vulnerable people. Greg Mankiw summarized Brooks's main thesis: "He wants conservatives to speak more in moral terms, to be seen fighting for people rather than against policies, to spend more time engaging with moderates and liberals, and to embrace the persona of a happy warrior."

In 2015, Brooks defined the role of the American Enterprise Institute as providing "a conservative intellectual movement that helps us to understand how culture and policy can be propelled forward. That's how we think of ourselves. So experts – true experts who are on the level of the best university professors – that are dedicated to the ideas of freedom, and opportunity and enterprise and human betterment and flourishing working together for a better world."

The second section of the book is dedicated to the economic dimensions of happiness. Opportunity breeds happiness, Brooks writes, and "efforts to diminish economic inequality—without creating economic opportunity—will actually lower America's gross national happiness, not raise it." Opportunity allows for good jobs, and "job satisfaction actually increases life happiness." Brooks argues that work makes people happy because they are creating value, a theme he explored in a textbook also released in 2008 on "social value creation."

In 2014, Robert Doar was appointed the inaugural fellow in AEI's Poverty Studies Program. In a conversation with President Barack Obama in 2015 at the Catholic-Evangelical Leadership Summit on Overcoming Poverty at Georgetown University, Brooks said he is in the free enterprise movement because poverty is "the thing I care about most." He has been credited with shifting Republican politicians' focus towards poverty in recent years.

He asks the reason why, if the U.S. is a 70–30 nation favoring free enterprise, are the 30 percent who want to change that culture in charge? He submits that while the numbers appear to favor a traditional free enterprise culture, the 30 percent coalition has a tremendous amount of influence in key places such as academia and entertainment and has effectively influenced a large number of young Americans.

In the fall of 2013, Brooks traveled to Dharamsala, India to meet with the exiled leader at his temple. At this meeting, Brooks invited the Dalai Lama to visit AEI in February 2014 for a conference on happiness, free enterprise, and human flourishing. In 2016, Brooks and the Dalai Lama contributed to a joint op-ed in The New York Times entitled Dalai Lama: Behind Our Anxiety, the Fear of Being Unneeded.

Brooks published The Road to Freedom: How to Win the Fight for Free Enterprise in 2012. He attempts to explain the paradox discussed in his previous book, The Battle, which stated that even though most of the U.S. claims to support a free enterprise system based on limited government, the size and scope of federal and state governments has steadily increased over the past century. Brooks argues that advocates of limited government often rely on complex, data-driven arguments, but progressives wrap their arguments in moral language, appealing to Americans' hearts rather than their heads. In making that claim, Brooks relies heavily on the work of psychology professor Jonathan Haidt, which shows that humans process moral judgments more quickly than rational ones. The answer, then, according to Brooks, is for the right to defend free enterprise on its moral foundations.

In April 2010, Brooks published The Battle: How the Fight between Free Enterprise and Big Government Will Shape America's Future in which he lays out a moral vision for the resurgence of the ideals of individual liberty, equal opportunity, entrepreneurship and self-reliance that have formed the U.S. identity.

This book was named WORLD magazine's 2010 "Book of the Year" in June 2010.

In April 2008, Brooks published a survey and analysis of U.S. happiness research entitled Gross National Happiness: Why Happiness Matters for America—and How We Can Get More of It. Drawing his title from the Bhutanese measurement of national well-being, Brooks argues that despite the fact that the U.S. is one of the few countries in the world to enshrine happiness in its credo, happiness tends to get discounted in public policy in favor of other priorities. Brooks reviews survey data to understand the contours of how happy individual Americans are and how individual happiness translates into nationwide satisfaction.

Brooks believes the financial crisis of 2008–2009 was an opportunity for the statists to attack the free enterprise system as too risky for the U.S. to allow to continue in its current form but ignore the role of government policy and focus instead on greed and stupidity in the private sector.

On July 14, 2008, AEI president Christopher DeMuth announced that Brooks would succeed him. "I am thrilled and honored to be asked to serve as the president of AEI," Brooks said. "With research ranging between prophetic ideas and technical policy details, AEI has always acted as a steward of American ideals of private liberty, individual opportunity, and free enterprise. Time and again, AEI's mix of great people and strong values has produced the right ideas at the right time for America and the world. To serve as the Institute's president in the coming era is a truly wonderful and humbling opportunity, and I am fully committed to building on the Institute's amazing record of success." Brooks became AEI's eleventh president on January 1, 2009. In March 2018, Brooks announced his intent to step down as AEI's president.

In February 2007, after the release of Who Really Cares, Brooks briefed President George W. Bush and First Lady Laura Bush on his findings. Later that year, Brooks joined the American Enterprise Institute as a visiting scholar.

Brooks's first book was published in 2006 with Who Really Cares: The Surprising Truth about Compassionate Conservatism. Originating in his research on philanthropy and drawing on survey data, he articulates a charity gap between the 75% of Americans who donate to charitable causes and the rest who do not. Brooks argues that there are three cultural values that best predict charitable giving: religious participation, political views, and family structure. 91% of people who identify themselves as religious are likely to give to charity but only 66% of people who do not. The religious giving sector is just as likely to give to secular programs as it is to religious causes.

After a stint at Georgia State University, Brooks landed at Syracuse University in 2001. In 2005, he became a full professor, and held the Louis A. Bantle Chair in Business and Government Policy from 2007 to 2008. At Syracuse, Brooks held joint appointments in the public affairs and management schools. In 2019, Brooks was awarded an honorary degree from Brigham Young University.

In the early 2000s, Brooks began to look deeper into behavioral economics, often using the General Social Survey. During his time at Syracuse, Brooks continued his academic work on philanthropy and nonprofits, authoring several articles and textbooks.

After receiving his PhD in policy analysis in 1998, Brooks continued to be affiliated with RAND, for which he produced a number of studies, mostly on arts funding and orchestra operations. He eventually began to study the junction of culture, politics, and economics that would come to be his trademark. "He kept his head down during the early years of his academic career, publishing the usual economics fare on philanthropy—such as how tax rates and government spending affect giving," writes Ben Gose. Brooks himself said, "I made my academic career doing that stuff, but the whole time I knew I was missing something."

Toward the end of his professional music career, Brooks began pursuing his higher education with a bachelor's degree in economics in 1994 from Thomas Edison State College in New Jersey, a public university that offers distance and nontraditional education programs to working adults. He received a master's degree in economics from Florida Atlantic University in 1995 before pursuing a doctorate at the Frederick S. Pardee RAND Graduate School, a public policy program located at the RAND Corporation.

After high school, Brooks pursued a career as a professional French hornist, serving from 1983 to 1989 with the Annapolis Brass Quintet in Baltimore, from 1989 to 1992 as the associate principal French hornist with the City Orchestra of Barcelona in Spain, and teaching from 1992 to 1995 at The Harid Conservatory, Music Division.

Arthur C. Brooks (born May 21, 1964) is an American social scientist, musician, and contributing opinion writer for The Washington Post. He was the president of the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank, for a decade. As of July 2019, he joined the faculty of the Harvard Kennedy School and Harvard Business School. Brooks has researched the junctions between culture, economics, and politics. He is the author of 11 books, including two New York Times best sellers: The Road to Freedom: How to Win the Fight for Free Enterprise (2012) and The Conservative Heart: How to Build a Fairer, Happier, and More Prosperous America (Broadside Books, 2015). Politically, he is a center-right independent.