Ev Ehrlich was born in a log cabin in a fifth-floor apartment in Jackson Heights, Queens; the inaccurate paper records of the day put it at 1950.  After attending New York City’s prestigious Newtown High School (where he joined the list of famous alumna that includes Don Rickles, Omar Minaya, and the New York Dolls), he enlisted in the student revolution at S.U.N.Y. Stony Brook, where he rose to the rank of provocateur before being discharged with a B.A. in 1971.

           

Ehrlich has spent much of his career under the misimpression that he is an economist, a delusion fostered by earning a Ph.D. in that subject at the University of Michigan.  Since then, he has pronounced and declaimed in a variety of positions.  As Under Secretary of Commerce (in the first term of the Clinton Administration) he was the chief executive of the nation’s economic statistical system and principal economic policy official for Commerce Secretaries Brown and Kantor.  He led a major modernization of the featured measures of the economy and the first comprehensive strategic review of the nation's economic statistics in four decades and the redesign of the 2000 decennial census.  He co-chaired the White House working group on the restructuring of the U.S. economy in the face of information technology, was a leader in the U.S.’ planning effort of the  two G-7 “Jobs Summits,” and oversaw the Administration’s economic analysis of global climate change. 

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He had previously been and Vice President for Strategic Planning of Unisys Corporation (which was a Fortune 50 company when he arrived there, but not when he left), Senior Vice-President of the Committee for Economic Development, Assistant Director of the Congressional Budget Office for Natural Resources and Commerce, and a Legislative Assistant for Congressman John Conyers, Jr..  

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He is now the mostly-retired President of ESC Company, a Washington-based economics consulting firm serving leading industrial and financial corporations and trade associations, and such diverse organizations as the Pew Center on Global Climate Change, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, and the Major League Baseball Players Association.  He is also a Senior Fellow of the Progressive Policy Institute.  His conscience is clear.

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He was for eight years a regular economics commentator on National Public Radio’s Morning Edition, and an occasional contributor for such publications as The Financial Times, The International economy, Los Angeles Times, and Christian Science Monitor, and a much-sought-after (but never apprehended) speaker on business and the economy.

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Ehrlich wrote his first novel, Big Government (Warner Books, 1998), in a series of furtive moments during his career in government, intent on capturing the culture and values of politics before they captured him.  It is widely regarded as the funniest writing to come out of Washington with which Ken Starr was not directly involved.  His second novel, Grant Speaks (Warner Books, 2000), is the hitherto fore undiscovered first draft of Ulysses Grant’s Memoirs, a satiric first person “tell all” in which the dying President and General rips the lid off the 19th century.  Critically acclaimed, it is the most entertaining book we know of in which 600,000 people die.  His third novel, The Adventures of Brightthinking McCoy, a satire about speculation on the frontier in 1780, awaits publication; he is now at work on a fourth effort, Birds of America, about John James Audubon’s search for a rare bird.   Ehrlich has also written radio plays, been an aspiring comic book artist, and was cofounder of Red Shadow: The Economics Rock & Roll Band, an all-economist, political band that sounded as bad then as the idea does now – their two albums, Live at the Panacea Hilton and Better Red can be found on one CD at CDBaby.com.  

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Father of three, grandfather of four (to date) and husband of one, Ehrlich now lives in the woods outside Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, where he writes, gardens, rehabs his aching joints, fishes, follows the World Champion Washington Nationals, and serves as assistant to his beekeeper spouse.