Milton Friedman
The Last Conservative
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $17.99
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- $17.99
Publisher Description
An Economist Best Book of 2023 | One of The New York Times’ 33 Nonfiction Books to Read This Fall | Named a most anticipated fall book by the Chicago Tribune and Bloomberg | Finalist for the 2024 Hayek Book Prize
“Wherever you sit on the political spectrum, there’s a lot to learn from this book. More than a biography of one controversial person, it’s an intellectual history of twentieth-century economic thought.” —Greg Rosalesky, NPR’s Planet Money
The first full biography of America’s most renowned economist.
Milton Friedman was, alongside John Maynard Keynes, the most influential economist of the twentieth century. His work was instrumental in the turn toward free markets that defined the 1980s, and his full-throated defenses of capitalism and freedom resonated with audiences around the world. It’s no wonder the last decades of the twentieth century have been called “the Age of Friedman”—or that analysts have sought to hold him responsible for both the rising prosperity and the social ills of recent times.
In Milton Friedman, the first full biography to employ archival sources, the historian Jennifer Burns tells Friedman’s extraordinary story with the nuance it deserves. She provides lucid and lively context for his groundbreaking work on everything from why dentists earn less than doctors, to the vital importance of the money supply, to inflation and the limits of government planning and stimulus. She traces Friedman’s long-standing collaborations with women, including the economist Anna Schwartz; his complex relationships with powerful figures such as the Federal Reserve chairman Arthur Burns and the Treasury secretary George Shultz; and his direct interventions in policymaking at the highest levels. Most of all, Burns explores Friedman’s key role in creating a new economic vision and a modern American conservatism. The result is a revelatory biography of America’s first neoliberal—and perhaps its last great conservative.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Stanford historian Burns (Goddess of the Market) delivers a robust if somewhat dry survey of the evolution of Milton Friedman's economic thought—particularly his struggles to make sense of inflation—and his lasting impact on global monetary policy and conservative politics. Friedman's economic philosophy, known as "monetarism," sought to balance the maximization of personal freedom through limited government involvement in economic matters against the belief that inflation needed to be managed, and the best way to do so was to " upon government control of money." (This includes the printing of money and the international system of floating exchange rates.) Burns explains that Friedman's ideas about freedom and government were forged in his young adulthood during the Great Depression (he argued against the direct government intervention, such as hiring public works employees and price controls, that characterized the American response), and can be traced through his other social and political beliefs, among them his resistance to the civil rights movement ("his concept of freedom was woefully thin," Burns writes). Friedman's personality occasionally shines through (when his wife dragged him to the opera, he brought along a book to read), but Burns's focus is on the institutional ramifications of his theory and activism (she notes that by teaming up with far-right politician Barry Goldwater, Friedman "solidified an alliance between libertarian economics and reactionary populism"). It's a comprehensive accounting of Friedman's legacy.
Customer Reviews
Not all Keynesians
The author is a US historian, whose last book was ‘Goddess Of The Market: Ayn Rand and The American Right’ (2009). That was impressively researched and at least as, if not more, thorough than any biography of the always controversial Ms Rand. (The fact that I have read more than one biography of Ayn Rand, and am prepared to admit it, probably says more about me than it does about either Ms Rand or Ms Burns.)
Having penned a biography of Rand, doing one on Friedman is an understandable, rather than logical, progression. He is far more substantial subject matter: one of the two most influential economists of the 20th century, the other being Keynes, of course. (F A Hayek has a bit too much Rand about him for my comfort, but what would I know?) Both were fascinating and frighteningly intelligent men with important things to say about much more than just economics. There are many more published biographies of Keynes.
Ms Burns effort is not a traditional biography in that she devotes considerably more time to dissecting Friedman’s ideas and economic theories than to documenting his day-to-day life. Notwithstanding his reputation as an arch-conservative, his first job after getting his doctorate was in the Roosevelt administration at the height of the “New Deal”. The going gets tough at times a id all the technical detail. Plenty of big names (economically and politically speaking) get dropped, but there is limited exploration of perhaps the greatest influence on him: his wife Rose, also a trained economist.
The ideas of Keynes and Friedman go in and out of favour depending on the politics of the day, but they never go away. Keynes ruled the roost in the mid-20th century, Friedman the latter decades of the century, and Keynes returned to the fore during the 2008 financial crisis. Interestingly, it was Friedman who first said, “We’re all Keynesians now.” (Nixon stole the line in the early 1970s) Had Friedman still been alive in 2008 (he died in 2006), he might have said it again.
In April 2020, pursuing fiscal stimulus with abandon, President Joe Biden loudly proclaimed, “Milton Friedman isn’t running the show any more.” Less than two years later, inflation soared and the Fed ramped up interest rates. It seemed that inflation was “always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon” after all, as Friedman had always maintained.
My favourite Friedman quote: “Many people want the government to protect the consumer. A much more urgent problem is to protect the consumer from the government,” followed closely by, “Nothing is so permanent as a temporary government program.”