Ames Brown

Ames Brown, FREOPP’s co-founder and former Chairman, is one of Those People.

That is to say, the kind of guy who gets more done before 9 a.m. than most people get done in a day. He has two significant jobs: assisting FREOPP’s Board of Directors and running Capital Counsel Management LLC, an investment firm in New York. Easy as pie for someone who has run more than 35 marathons.

Ames first got the policy bug as an undergraduate at Yale, where he served a term as chairman of the Independent Party of the Yale Political Union. More recently, he spent two years studying econometrics in a doctoral program jointly run out of Harvard and MIT.

In between, Ames earned two master’s degrees from Columbia: one in Strategic Communications, and the other in Business Administration. If you were taken aback when a certain candidate discussed the size of his hands at a 2016 presidential debate, well, Ames Brown wasn’t. Ames may be the only person in America to have harnessed computational methods to study politicians’ hand gestures, cadences, and policy arguments in real time. “Why don’t the hardcore quants and the communications experts talk to each other?” Ames wonders. Ummm…

Ames has a special passion for two policy areas: making higher education more affordable, and on building better fiscal models for studying major changes to the federal budget. “Don’t people looking for a job, and those seeking a college education without crippling debt deserve the most carefully-designed policies our country has to offer?” he asks. “FREOPP is the natural home for such important research at this level of rigor.”

Ames and his wife Allison were married in August of 2015. Immediately afterward, they spent a month trekking in Nepal. They live in New York City.