Stuart Butler

Stuart M. Butler (born 1947) is a Senior Fellow in Economic Studies at the Brookings Institution. Until 2014, he was Director of the Center for Policy Innovation at The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think-tank in Washington, D.C. He is a health care analyst and commentator, and he has also written extensively about urban policy and welfare, credited with introducing the idea of urban enterprise zones to the United States. Butler was an adjunct professor at the Georgetown Public Policy Institute. Early life and education Butler was raised in Shropshire, England and emigrated to the United States in 1975. He holds bachelor’s degrees in physics and mathematics, a master’s degree in economics and a doctorate in American economic history from the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. Career Butler joined The Heritage Foundation in 1979 as a policy analyst, specializing in health care and urban issues. After visiting tenements in the South Bronx and Washington, D.C., to discuss with residents how best to address problems with public housing, Butler published a paper for Heritage that introduced the idea of Urban Enterprise Zones in the United States. The idea caught the attention of many politicians, including Jack Kemp and, later, the Reagan Administration. By the mid-1990s, more than 30 states and the District of Columbia had instituted enterprise zones in depressed urban areas. During the 1980s, Butler wrote three books on issues central to his work: Enterprise Zones: Greenlining the Inner Cities (1981), Privatizing Federal Spending (1985), and Out of the Poverty Trap (1987), co-authored with Anna Kondratas. In 1989, Butler also co-authored A National Health System for America with Edmund Haislmaier.