The cover of Jennifer Burns's impressive new biography of Milton Friedman is inviting and, frankly, hilarious. Pictured there is an impish yet slightly serious-looking Milton, holding up a freshly minted uncut sheet of dollar bills, inspecting it like he was reading the evening newspaper or studying the wine list at a favorite restaurant. The photo is in black and white but the book-jacket color is, appropriately, green.
Burns intends her book to be both an accessible introduction to her topic and a contribution to the scholarly literature. Her goals are to tell Friedman's many stories (as husband, colleague, scholar, policy adviser, public intellectual, debater), to place him in the context of his times, and to explain the development of his ideas. In telling those stories, she walks the reader through the changes that took place in the economics profession in the twentieth century, explaining the contending schools and providing sketches of the many personalities, capturing well the ebb and flow of our profession's history. While she writes for a general reader who might have little to no background in economics, she manages to convey all the essential ideas clearly yet without oversimplification. It is rare to find a historian who actually “gets” economics. Burns is one of these, and she also writes beautifully. Each chapter has an informative epigraph, and there are numerous set pieces to illuminate themes or capture a revealing viewpoint. In short, the book is a complete, well-crafted whole, carefully thought out with a story engagingly told. It is a model for anyone who aspires to write an intellectual biography.
It is only when one inspects the endnotes, though, that her full accomplishment can be appreciated. Burns immersed herself in the archives of Friedman and of his many correspondents. She interviewed family members and others who knew him. She visited the town where he grew up (Rahway, New Jersey), and she dug through the city directory and past issues of the local newspaper, even dipping into the Scarlet and Black, his high school newspaper (Friedman was its editor; he was also the class valedictorian). She puts these variegated materials to excellent use in exploring her subject. As an example, the book opens with Friedman's June 1927 Scarlet and Black editorial message to the Rahway High graduating class, where he urges his peers to go on to college because doing so will allow them to earn on average three times the amount they would if they ceased their education with secondary school. Although his own plan after high school was to become an accountant, he was already thinking like an economist.
The endnotes provide not only a thorough guide to all things archival but also to the massive secondary literature that has grown up around this controversial figure. When appropriate, she addresses claims made in existing major works (e.g., Burgin 2012, Nelson 2020, and Tavlas 2023), in Two Lucky People (the Friedman and Friedman autobiography [1998]), and in the many journal articles that describe or assess his contributions. She explores myriad popular stories about Friedman, confirming true ones and providing evidence to combat the inevitable distortions and misconceptions that have been advanced by both friends and foes. Virtually every claim that she makes is carefully documented. She is no hagiographer: Milton's flaws are exposed along with his virtues. Burns was praised for her evenhanded treatment of Ayn Rand in her acclaimed first book, Goddess of the Market (2009). She demonstrates the same skills here.
A general reader will learn a lot about Friedman and his times in this volume, but so will the specialist. I will here list just a handful of interesting tidbits that caught my eye.
Even when he was devastating opponents in debate, Milton always maintained a cheery disposition. Surely he was born that way, but it also helps to know that he basically won the birth-order sweepstakes. He was both the youngest child and the only son, with three older sisters and doting parents (20–23).
Burns makes a convincing case that the contrast between Friedman's first year in graduate school at Chicago (1932–33), which he spent learning price theory and where the phrase “social control” was verboten, and his second year spent at Columbia, which was a hotbed of institutionalist thought, set him on his path as a spokesman for the price theoretic approach. As a second-year student he, together with Moses Abramovitz, even organized a class in price theory for their benighted Columbia classmates (58–61). Once he got back to Chicago, we learn of a dusty storage room in the Social Science Research Building where Milton and a host of characters (among them Henry Simons, Aaron Director, George Stigler, Allen Wallis, Paul Samuelson, and Friedman's future wife, Rose Director) talked economics and politics and tried their best to parse the opaque pronouncements of Frank Knight (66–68). Burns rightly concludes that “Room Seven was not just a break room, but rather the origin point of a conservative intelligentsia” (79).
Everyone recognizes Friedman as a proponent of the negative income tax as a poverty-fighting tool. When did he come up with the idea? It was in 1939, and strangely enough it emerged as the result of conversations he had had with, of all people, the Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal (100–101).
Some may think that because Milton voted for Roosevelt and helped during the war to originate the withholding tax that he may have had a “Keynesian moment” during the late 1930s and early 1940s. Burns demolishes this claim, using as part of her evidence statements found in the lecture notes he prepared for the year he spent at Wisconsin (1940–41) to make her case (119–23).
Friedman and George Stigler both attended the founding 1947 meeting of the Mont Pèlerin Society. Harold Luhnow of the Volker Fund ultimately agreed to pay the travel costs for several Americans to attend but at one point sent to Hayek, the organizer of the meeting, a letter saying that the fund objected to paying for certain of the men on Hayek's list. Burns speculates, reasonably in my opinion, that Friedman and Stigler were the unnamed people to whom Luhnow objected, this because of the brouhaha surrounding the publication of their pamphlet Roofs or Ceilings? (176).
Capitalism and Freedom (Friedman with Friedman 1962) was probably Milton and Rose's most famous book, but its initial sales were paltry. Then Barry Goldwater began his campaign to become the Republican candidate for president. Friedman had met with Goldwater, and as the Arizonan's campaign began to take off, the press identified Milton as his economics adviser. This did great things for the sale of Capitalism and Freedom: “The once obscure text now appeared like the Rosetta Stone, able to clarify Goldwater's ideas and agenda” (262). Goldwater lost the election, but the Friedmans’ book became a perennial bestseller.
Speaking of Rose, Burns documents how important her many contributions were to Milton's success, as well as those of Anna Schwartz and such “hidden figures” as Dorothy Brady and Margaret Reid. Milton was often but not always generous in acknowledging their efforts. Although we do not know how the decision was made, the authors of Capitalism and Freedom were listed on the title page as Milton Friedman with Rose D. Friedman, and the cover carried only Milton's name.
So what is not to like about this new biography? Very little, but if I were to choose, the subtitle would be my nominee. Milton Friedman thought of himself, and indeed described himself, as a liberal, not a conservative. And although we live in a period in which realignments of positions are rife on both the left and the right, to call him the last conservative surely seems premature. It also seems to contradict Burns's own epilogue, where she catalogs Friedman's various contributions to policy debates over flexible exchange rates, the all-volunteer military, educational choice, human capital formation, universal basic income, and, of course, the role of money in the economy. Burns knows all this—she admits that she settled on the subtitle “with some trepidation” (14). The problem she faced is that in American usage “liberal” means left-wing progressive, so its use would confuse at least some nonacademic readers. She notes further that there is some justification for the term, in that Friedman was associated with the conservative political movement in America and that his own approach to economics in terms of “intellectual techniques, approaches, and ideas” drew on an older tradition (15). But still, it is difficult not to concur with Deirdre McCloskey's statement (this as part of her back-cover blurb for the book) that the reader will “emerge from the experience . . . seeing him not as a ‘conservative’ but as the truest liberal of modern economics.”
This may look like an academic dispute over labels, but the distinction is an important one. Starting at the 1947 Mont Pèlerin Society meeting and continuing at subsequent meetings and at Chicago in the 1950s, Hayek, Friedman, Director, and their compatriots tried to elucidate the principles that might underpin a liberalism that would be meaningful in the twentieth century. A guiding principle was equal treatment before the law, the equal enforcement of general rules, as an ideal to be striven for. They viewed this not as a guarantee of justice—general laws can still be very bad laws—but as a condition that just laws would share. And in particular it would provide a safeguard against laws that privileged certain individuals or groups and, conversely, an antidote to laws that discriminated against certain individuals or groups. These were intended to be constraints that applied to laws. Private individuals could hold whatever beliefs they wanted; it was not the role of the state to dictate in such matters, social, religious, moral, or otherwise.
Recognizing Friedman as a liberal helps one better understand some of the views he held. At the 1947 Mont Pèlerin Society meeting both he and Aaron Director echoed their recently deceased friend Henry Simons's view that a progressive income tax was an essential tool for combating inequality. The progressive income tax was actively discussed at future meetings and at two seminars Hayek ran at Chicago: one on “equality and justice” and another on “liberalism.” By the time Capitalism and Freedom was published, Friedman still maintained some progressivity in the form of a negative income tax as a poverty-fighting tool, but at higher levels of income he favored a proportional rather than a progressive tax. Why the change? It was not due to his becoming more conservative but to embracing liberal principles more fully. Although the rich still pay more under a proportional system, it takes the same percentage from each taxpayer, thereby meeting the principle of equal treatment before the law. On the other hand, once you go down the progressivity route, what principle does one invoke to decide where to set the tax rate? This argument had considerable resonance in 1950s America. When the US income tax was first instituted in 1917 the top rate was 7 percent. By the 1950s it had reached 91 percent.
Similar principles drove Friedman's endorsement of school choice. Burns shows that in their everyday lives both Friedman and Barry Goldwater were what would then be described as “racial liberals” (263). They were not personally prejudiced. As liberals they opposed Jim Crow laws, a blatant form of legal discrimination. In the education field this involved court-mandated segregation. When the Supreme Court overturned such state laws in 1954, Friedman and some other liberals made clear that they did not favor as a replacement court-ordered integration. They might have preferred integration personally but did not feel it was the role of the state to order either one. If one realizes that freedom of association is another liberal principle, their position becomes far more understandable.
One might strenuously object to these views—Burns takes Friedman to task for them, claiming that he was naive or overly optimistic in hoping that competition in the provision of schooling would raise all boats and in ignoring how such policies might play into the hands of segregationists. But she also describes a telling incident that clearly reveals his commitments. When his own son David faced anti-Semitism at a school club, Milton sent a long letter of complaint to the authorities, but in his arguments he never denied the right of people to hold anti-Semitic views, to choose their own associates, and so on (263–66). These are liberal arguments, not conservative ones. The phrase “free to choose” may sound like something off a bumper sticker, but it would inform Friedman's views from the 1950s onward. Calling him a conservative rather than a liberal makes it easier to miss the foundations that informed his thought. To her credit, Burns's text makes clear his commitments. As she notes in her conclusion to the episode with David, “Even with his son in the cross-hairs, Friedman would not abandon his principles” (266). That quite nicely sums him up.
My final comment is a word of warning to future authors: Be careful with your choice of subtitles! Or even better, avoid them entirely, especially if they may mislead. Friedman surely would have agreed.
