Joseph Bast is president and CEO of The Heartland Institute, a 24-year-old national nonprofit research center located in Chicago, Illinois. Prior to being hired as The Heartland Institute’s first employee in 1984, Bast was coeditor of the bimonthly magazine Nomos and studied economics as an undergraduate at The University of Chicago. He was elected a member of the Philadelphia Society in 2002 and elected to the board of directors of the American Conservative Union in 2007. Joseph Bast is president and CEO of The Heartland Institute, a 26-year-old national nonprofit research center located in Chicago, Illinois. According to a recent telephone survey, among state elected officials The Heartland Institute is among the nation’s best-known and most highly regarded “think tanks.” Bast is the coauthor of 12 books, including Rebuilding America's Schools (1990), Why We Spend Too Much on Health Care (1992), Eco-Sanity: A Common-Sense Guide to Environmentalism (1994), and Education & Capitalism (2003). His writing has appeared in Phi Delta Kappan, Economics of Education Review, Wall Street Journal, Investor’s Business Daily, The Cato Journal, USA Today, and many of the country’s largest-circulation newspapers.