Fans of economist Milton Friedman (and I am one of them) should be fortunate that Stanford historian Jennifer Burns has written a detailed biography of him. Based on the kind of thorough archival research that only a patient, first-rate historian can perform, she covers the various stages of his intellectual life, from his high school days until his death. Along the way, we see his struggle to find his role in academia in the 1930s and, to some extent, the 1940s. Burns also details the key influences in his life and the various ways in which he later influenced the economics and policy worlds: taxes, monetary policy, welfare policy, and conscription, to name just four of the most important examples.
Her book is by no means a hagiography — she criticizes Friedman at various points, sometimes unjustly, and his wife, the economist Rose Friedman, a little unfairly — but this makes Barnes’s many positive assessments of Milton’s work all the more credible.
As I said, she is a historian, not an economist, and she occasionally makes small errors in her explanations of economics, but her understanding of the big picture is impressive, especially when it comes to that most puzzling of issues: monetary policy. In fact, she explains the fact that the Federal Reserve does not directly control interest rates better than many economists I have read.
These are my review Jennifer Burns’s book Milton Friedman: The Last Conservative, RegulationSummer 2024.
As I will explain near the end of this review, I don’t really like the title of this book, to say the least, but that’s not the most important part of my review: I praise many things about this book and criticize a few things.
read All.
