ABOUT THE AUTHOR

MICHAEL H. SHUMAN is an economist, attorney, author, and entrepreneur, and a leading visionary on community economics. He’s director of local economy programs for Neighborhood Associates Corporation, a nonprofit affordable housing

company, and currently an adjunct instructor at Bard Business School in New York City. He performs economic analyses for cities and businesses through Council Fire, where he’s a senior associate. He is credited with being one of the architects of the 2012 JOBS Act and dozens of state laws overhauling securities regulation of crowdfunding.

He has authored, coauthored, or edited nine other books besides this one. One of his previous books, The Small-Mart Revolution: How Local Businesses Are Beating the Global Competition (Berrett-Koehler, 2006), received a bronze prize from the Independent Publishers Association for best business book of 2006. He also wrote a pioneering book on local investment called Local Dollars, Local Sense: How to Shift Your Money from Wall Street to Main Street and Achieve Real Prosperity (Chelsea Green, 2012).

A prolific speaker, Shuman has given an average of more than one invited talk per week, mostly to local governments and universities, for the past thirty years in nearly every US state and more than a dozen countries. He has appeared on numerous television and radio shows. Shuman has written nearly one hundred published articles for such periodicals as the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Nation, the Weekly Standard, Foreign Policy, Parade, and the Chronicle on Philanthropy. In 1980, he won first prize in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists’ Rabinowitch Essay Competition on “How to Prevent Nuclear War.”

Shuman received an AB with distinction in economics and international relations from Stanford University in 1979 and a JD from Stanford Law School in 1982. Between 1987 and 1990, he was a W. K. Kellogg National Leadership Fellow. He is also a member of the District of Columbia Bar.