Review: Milton Friedman by Jennifer Burns

Intellectual biographies are a weakness of mine (see also: Jacques Derrida and Edgar Allan Poe). I’m interested in how people learn, form, and live their ideas, and if those people are intellectuals, so much the better. Education, study, and becoming an expert in something matters greatly to me. Reading about how others have done that provides lessons for me. This applies even if I disagree with or think their work has driven society in the wrong direction. That’s why I wanted to read Milton Friedman by Jennifer Burns. I may not agree with Friedman’s politics, but his contributions to and effects on the fields of economics are undeniably large. He is the most influential American economist even if the modern right took his ideas and ran them to the absurd end of the spectrum. Jennifer Burns has written a biography that’s wonderful and accessible even to non-economists like me.

Disclaimer: The publisher provided a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review. Any and all opinions that follow are mine alone.

TL;DR

Milton Friedman by Jennifer Burns is a highly readable intellectual biography of the most influential American economist. From intellectual development to his death, Friedman, alongside his ideas, is examined in depth. Highly recommended.

From the Publisher

One of The New York Times‘s 33 Nonfiction Books to Read This Fall | Named a most anticipated fall book by the Chicago Tribune and Bloomberg

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 longstanding collaborations with women, including the economist Anna Schwartz, as well as his complex relationships with powerful figures such as Fed Chair Arthur Burns and 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.

Burns starts off her biography with a brief discussion of why she chose Friedman. The subtitle of the book is “The Last Conservative,” and she provides a good reason for labeling Friedman as such. Readers are firmly situated for when she begins diving farther into Friedman’s life. But first, Burns tells readers that she’s going to focus on two aspects of Milton’s thinking on economics: price theory and monetarism. And she does focus on these aspects of Friedman’s intellectual life; they are constant threads throughout the book. Burns broke up the book into six parts: Origins, New Deal Washington, The Second Chicago School, Conscience of a Conservative, The Great Inflation, and The Age of Monetarism. This results in fifteen total chapters covering his life from education to his death in 2006. (At least, this is how my ARC was organized.) Burns covers his intellectual as well as his political life. She also covers the women who influenced his life, such as his wife Rose, who was as much an economist as he.

Milton Friedman by Jennifer Burns is a balanced, nuanced look at a great economist. Friedman’s work wasn’t solely economic; it was political as well. Burns acknowledges this and treats Friedman as human with the good and the bad coming through. The writing is detailed and thoroughly researched. Burns’s research took her beyond Friedman’s books into his notes, his letters, and his life. Economic concepts are explained, though, not in depth. (Rightly so.) Burns provides enough context to explain what was happening around Friedman at each time in his life. For example, early in the book, readers learn about his intellectual development. Burns lays out the intellectual environment in which Friedman develops, and she also includes the university political currents flowing around him. She introduces readers to the important people in the Chicago school of economics and their cliques.

Burns balances depth of information without losing focus on Friedman. Readers see how Friedman’s goal was to shift the country’s politics to the right, and economics was a tool for that. But importantly, Friedman doesn’t see the difference between economic and political partisanship. In order to combat socialism, he believed Americans needed to be individuals. He believed in small government and individual responsibility. This should sound familiar to anyone who claimed to be a conservative prior to 2016. Friedman’s thoughts suffused conservatism and the Republican party prior to the Tea Party strain of populism that has currently infected it.

Intellectual Development

Of particular delight to me was the early chapters on Friedman’s intellectual development. From undergrad to grad school, Friedman was surrounded by intellectual pioneers. During his education, the Great Depression was in full swing, and economists all over the nation were attempting to understand the underlying causes and provide the government with solutions. Interestingly enough, even conservative economists were making solutions that would presage the New Deal. Friedman, himself, voted for FDR, which I didn’t know. This lovely bit of info will probably break the minds of some of Friedman’s die-hard supporters.

In addition, Burns grounds Friedman among his peers. Him and his peer group idolized Frank Knight, who fully embraced anti-socialism politics and encouraged followers. Seeing the intellectual environment and the political currents flowing around Friedman is a great grounding for his intellectual growth. Not only does curriculum influence thinkers, but their peers, their friends, and their mentors do equally as much. Burns provides readers insight into all of that. In a way, she shows us the ‘bubble’ in which Friedman’s conceptual thinking began. At the same, she shows how Knight’s influence was both good and bad.

At this moment in my life, I found the early sections much more fulfilling. Since my interest right now is in intellectual development, I was delighted by Burns’s detailed writing here. To be clear, this detailed level of writing is maintained throughout the book, and for others, the later sections where Friedman’s national influence is on the rise or peaking might be more interesting.

Friedman's Influence

Because I grew up in a conservative household in the 80s, I can’t correctly gauge Friedman’s influence without this book because his influence suffused daily life. His intellectual projects were thoroughly incorporated by the time I began my own intellectual development. Ideas about individualism, small government, and low taxes were built into life through my parents, my friend’s parents, and most adults that I knew. Socialism was, of course, evil, and liberals hated America. Maybe Friedman isn’t responsible for all that, but he greatly influenced conservatives in those directions.

I would have liked Burns to extend her thoughts about Friedman’s influence to the conservatives of today more than she did. Likely what I would have liked to see is beyond the scope of her work. She notes that Friedman had little in common with the John Birch society, but I don’t think that’s true. Prior to Trump, conservatism didn’t want to acknowledge that it relied on conspiracy groups to advance its causes. The John Birch Society was something that mainstream conservatives, like Friedman, would distance themselves from; yet, they relied on votes from those people. At the same time, they held ideas in common: the supremacy of the individual can only come from limited or small government. These ideas feed into the modern Republican attempts to destroy government altogether. Does Friedman play into that? Burns notes that Friedman didn’t want a reactionary conservatism. Yet, here we are. Has modern conservatism abandoned Friedman in practice while paying homage to him in name only?

Conclusion

Jennifer Burns’s Milton Friedman is an imminently readable intellectual biography. It’s fair, nuanced, and well-researched. Though I’m not an economist, I found the book to be quite enjoyable. Friedman undoubtedly shaped the society that I live in, and to see how those changes came about was interesting. Burns provides not only the implementation of Friedman’s ideas but their development as well. This belongs on the shelf of anyone interested in the post-World War 2 U.S. shift, both politically and economically, toward conservatism.

Highly recommended.

Milton Friedman by Jennifer Burns is available from Farrar, Straus and Giroux on November 14^th, 2023.

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Review: Milton Friedman

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From the Publisher