Jim’s Life

James Martin Shields (Jim) Powell was the only child of Frank and Madeline (née Shields) Powell.

Jim was born in May 1944 in Newport News, Virginia where his father served in the navy.

Early in Jim’s life, the family moved to Oyster Bay on Long Island where Frank and Madeline built a house. Frank had an entrepreneurial streak and became a partner in a small firm that made high-fidelity pick-ups for vinyl records—advanced technology at the time. Madeline had been educated at Barnard and became a reference librarian as well as a homemaker.

Jim attended private, co-educational Eastwoods School in Oyster Bay through eighth grade, then boarded at Millbrook School in the Hudson Valley through 12th grade.

In Oyster Bay, as a young child, Jim was caught on film climbing a kitchen counter to snitch cookies from a cookie tin, and cuddling his cat Smoky. Later, Jim could often be found sailing. At Millbrook, he played ice hockey and became photography editor of the school paper. He was also engaged with the school’s zoo—still reported to be the only high-school zoo in the country. Eastwoods and Millbrook both had strong influences on Jim. He often reflected on the strong character of Edward Pulling, the founding headmaster at Millbrook, and at being kicked out of class on one occasion for coming unprepared. He remained in touch with classmates from both schools for much of his life.

During his childhood and adolescence, Jim became interested in ideas about individual liberty and limited government by reading his father’s copies of The Freeman, published by the Foundation for Economic Education.

Jim’s commitment to these ideas became one of the defining pillars of his life.

These ideas drew Jim west for college, to the University of Chicago. He was particularly attracted by the presence of Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek, George Stigler, Frank Knight and others who advocated limited government to promote individual liberty and prosperity and avoid the horrors of more war. As luck would have it, Jim’s assigned roommate at Chicago was David Friedman, Milton’s son. Jim and David roomed together for several years. Jim became a research assistant for Milton (as well as others) during his undergraduate years. Jim remained in touch with Milton and Rose Friedman for much of his life, and David visited Jim in Westport during the early 2000s.

Jim’s interest in photography also persisted throughout his life. As a young man, Jim studied with landscape photographer Ansel Adams in workshops where he developed his eye for composition. Photography was a form of adventure, and sometimes life dragged the photographer out from behind the lens. Once, while Jim was traveling in the southern U.S. with a group of black blues musicians, photographing them during their performances, the troupe was accosted by angry white locals. A peacemaker by disposition (and as the only white person in the group), Jim was able to defuse the tense situation.

Graduating from Chicago with a degree in history, Jim first worked in advertising as a copywriter, then became a partner in a small direct response advertising firm. Direct response firms differed from their splashy display-advertising cousins because in direct response, advertisers measure the results of every ad in terms of response and revenue generated—a bit like what social media does today—in a very simplified and less intrusive way. Direct response ads often took only a few square inches in a newspaper or magazine and had to produce—or the account could be lost. Among the products for which Jim wrote ads: lots of gold and silver, and VisiCalc, the first widely distributed electronic spreadsheet. Jim’s direct response experience gave him a keen focus on word selection and headlines—the power of a few carefully chosen words and phrases to draw people in or lose them completely. As Jim continued to develop as a writer, he would retain this focus on simple and direct language, and on the need to engage the reader. For him, writing was not an act of academic braggadocio—no matter how much he knew, which was considerable. Instead, it became a means to share ideas that had become critical to him, and which he believed could help many individuals to lead freer, richer lives.

Over the decades that followed, Jim would continue to hone his writing skills, and would increasingly devote his skills to the ideas he most cared about: individual liberty, free markets, and the case for keeping government limited and accountable.

First he moved from advertising to writing for magazines and newspapers. He wrote over 300 articles for publications such as Antiques World, Town and Country, Barron’s, the Wall Street Journal, Good Housekeeping, and Travel Holiday among others. Jim wrote about gardens, antiques, the art market and financial markets. For a few years in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Jim focused on travel writing with visits especially to Asia. He enjoyed recounting a story of dropping onto his knees, heavy pack still on his back, to crawl across a long, swinging, poorly constructed, rope bridge in India suspended high above a rushing, rock-filled river. He enjoyed the adventure and was always happy to smile at himself and let people know he had been terrified!

While developing his skills and enjoying the challenge of writing for mass, popular markets, Jim also cultivated his interest in and connections with the world of ideas about liberty and free markets. He married these interests—writing for a popular market and ideas about individual freedom—when he became the catalog editor for Laissez Faire Books. The catalog functioned as a mini-magazine, highlighting people and ideas in that tradition, as well as books. Writing hundreds of capsule reviews of books on politics, history, and economics, as well as profiles of thinkers who shared his convictions, Jim was at the center of a vibrant intellectual community—and had a front-row view into the world of books. Jim was proud of this work that so many would consider mundane. He worked hard to bring his subjects—people, books and ideas—to life for the everyday, distracted reader.

Even as Jim was writing magazine and newspaper articles, he knew that he wanted to work in a longer format with more scope, so, along with magazine and travel work, he began writing books. His first book covered subjects from his magazine days: antiques and the art market. But he quickly turned to the subjects that were most important to him—free trade, limited government, and the history of freedom. His first book in this vein, The Gnomes of Tokyo (1988), advocated free trade with Japan and the benefits of Japanese investment in the U.S. when many popular voices shouted for trade restrictions. He followed this with The Triumph of Liberty (2000), a narrative history based on profiles of individuals who fought for liberty, past and present, and around the world. In both these books and his later works, Jim continued to hone his focus on making people and ideas come alive. He subsequently wrote several histories including Greatest Emancipations: How the West Ended Slavery, FDR’s Folly, and others, examining American political figures and policies through the lens of his deep conviction that individual freedom is the foundation of human flourishing.

Shortly after the Berlin Wall fell in late 1989, Jim visited West Germany and was inspired by the sight of ordinary citizens helping to demolish the wall which had been a symbol of authoritarian tyranny. Jim bought a few small chunks of heavy graffitied concrete from busy entrepreneurs chipping away at the wall. Not what most people would bring home from their travels as a souvenir, but part of an experience that was deeply meaningful for Jim.

Jim spoke frequently at events sponsored by the Institute for Humane Studies, the Cato Institute, and FreedomFest, a long-running annual convention of free-market and libertarian thinkers. For many years, starting in the early 1990s, Jim attended and then moderated the Junto, a gathering of free-market thinkers founded by Victor Niederhoffer, which met monthly in Manhattan to learn about and debate classical liberal ideas. The Cato Institute, a think-tank dedicated to advancing individual liberty and limited government, supported Jim’s work for many years and named him a senior fellow.

Jim fell in love with Marisa Manley in the 1980s, and moved in with her in the early ’90s. Their son Justin was born in 1993, and daughter Kristin two years later. Jim and Marisa were married in 2006, with Justin and Kristin as ringbearers.

Originally, Jim and Marisa each had their own home offices in separate rooms. Always eager to spend more time with Marisa, Jim moved his desk to share Marisa’s office—even though that meant occasionally donning lawnmower-grade ear protectors to stay focused while she was on phone calls. In addition to his over-sized ear protectors, Jim’s office set up usually included one of the family cats, sitting, and often purring, on his lap. Jim loved greeting Marisa with a kiss when she came home from work. He admired that she ran her own business, and supported it however he could, writing text and working on layouts for its promotional brochures, and teaching himself Adobe PageMaker to build her company its first website.

Jim became a father later than most. It brought him great joy and he was wholly committed to living this part of his life fully. He clocked more than a hundred thousand miles driving Justin and Kristin to and from school, swimming lessons, piano lessons, tennis lessons, cross-country and track meets, squash games, softball games, rowing meets, choral concerts, school plays, playdates, birthday parties, and sleepovers. Jim served on the board of Justin and Kristin’s elementary school for ten years. He was always ready to volunteer. When the school was struggling with traffic jams at drop-off and pickup times, he donned a fluorescent vest and headed out to the parking lot—even though one irate parent tried to run him over to secure a coveted parking spot!

Jim was also a devoted son and son-in-law. Jim and his mother Madeline shared a love of gardening. He and his mother-in-law Rosalynd enjoyed catching up on the latest Yankees games they had heard on the radio. Later, when Madeline contracted a blood cancer, Jim drove her to doctor’s appointments in New York City and Waterbury. When Rosalynd could no longer drive, Jim pitched in to help drive her to and from her job at a local shoe store (certainly with the car radio tuned to the Yankees’ game).

Jim was diagnosed with Lewy Body dementia in 2019. Marisa cared for Jim throughout his decline, along with help from Justin and Kristin and skilled professional caregivers. Throughout the course of Jim’s dementia, Marisa fought to sustain for Jim the freedom and individual autonomy he himself had worked so hard to promote.

Jim died peacefully at home in December 2025 at the age of 81-and-a-half—every day counts!

Jim is survived by his wife, Marisa, son Justin, daughter Kristin, and cats Mango and Mocha.