Milton Friedman
The Last Conservative
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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.
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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.
