Ben Stein

Ben Stein has had what may well be the most diverse career of anyone now on the national scene. He has been an award winning actor, economist, writer, journalist, and teacher, and is equally well known in America's board rooms and in America's dormitories and fraternity houses. He is certainly the only man to be a famous humorous teacher about economics as well as being a famous real life writer and teacher about economics and law.

Ben Stein was born in Washington, D.C., the son of the noted economist and writer Herbert Stein. He received a B.A. with honors in Economics from Columbia, where he was active in the civil rights movement to secure voting and other legal rights for African-Americans.

He was valedictorian of his class, by election of his classmates, at Yale Law School class of 1970, where he also worked strenuously part time as a poverty lawyer and as an activist and demonstrator for civil rights and decent treatment of the poor.

After graduation, he served as a poverty lawyer, a trial lawyer in the field of advertising, and a teacher about the political content of film and TV at American University, UC-Santa Cruz, and Pepperdine. He was also a speech writer and lawyer for Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford.

Ben Stein worked as a columnist for The Wall Street Journal and also wrote editorials for the Journal. In June of 1976, he moved to Hollywood to become a novelist, TV sitcom writer, and movie script writer. He has written and published 30 books, seven fiction and the rest nonfiction. He has also written many screenplays, some of which were actually made into movies. Most of his books are about Hollywood and mass culture, but some are self-help, and finance. He labored especially hard on a decade long project of exposing financial fraud and self dealing at large public companies. His work on the Milken/Drexel junk bond scheme was instrumental in the recovery of billions for investors and taxpayers.

In 1986, with no professional training, Stein became an instant cult hero for his role as the boring economics teacher in Ferris Bueller's Day Off, a scene which was recently voted one of the fifty funniest in American film history. After that, Stein went on to be a recurring character in Charles in Charge, and then in The Wonder Years, and then in 1997, began his long running hit quiz show, Win Ben Stein's Money. The show won seven Emmys, and Stein has one for best game show host.

He is currently a columnist for The New York Times, a regular commentator on CBS Sunday Morning, a commentator for Yahoo!Finance, a commentator for Fox News, and a frequent contributor to CNBC.