Milton Friedman: The Last Conservative
by Jennifer Burns
(Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $35)
Though he stood about 5 feet tall, said Peter Boettke in National Review, “Milton Friedman was a giant among economists in the 20th century.” A Nobel Prize winner, best-selling author, popular TV guest, and adviser to world leaders, he was a celebrity in his time, and his emphatic belief in free-market economics, deregulation, and global cooperation continues to shape public policy today. His roughly 65-year run as an influential thinker makes his life difficult to summarize, but author Jennifer Burns is “every bit up to the challenge.” The Stanford historian keeps the context of her subject’s journey always in sight, and her “beautifully written” book “makes the personal and intellectual life of Friedman jump off the page.”
Though the book mostly focuses on Friedman’s monetary concepts, “glimpses of his personality do emerge.” said Jennifer Szalai in The New York Times. Born in 1912 and raised in New Jersey, Friedman possessed a “relentlessly sunny disposition” that served him well in academic life. At the University of Chicago, where he began teaching in 1946, he “didn’t just teach students; he created converts.” Yet while the book argues for the subtlety of Friedman’s thinking, “what becomes clear is how frequently drawn he was to an insistent simplicity,” a faith that an unfettered market could solve most social ills. Burns gets “windy and protective” when she revisits Friedman’s most controversial actions, such as opposing the civil rights movement and steering Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet into adopting a ruthless austerity program. Still, her book is “far from a hagiography.”
“Today, Friedman might seem to belong to a bygone world,” said Kim Phillips-Fein in The Atlantic. The Trumpian wing of the Republican Party cares little about economics. Still, Friedman “bears more responsibility for the rise of a far right in the U.S. than Burns’ biography would suggest.” Sure, he was a reasonably varied thinker. But he also zealously promoted relentless individualism and wrote that corporations have no social responsibility. A half-century after his thinking became “the reigning consensus,” we’re still battling its effects.