As part of a project for Capital Matters, called Capital Writing, I’ll be interviewing authors of economics books for the National Review Institute’s YouTube channel. This time, I talked to Jennifer Burns of Stanford University and the Hoover Institution about her book Milton Friedman: The Last Conservative. Below you will find an edited transcript of a few key parts of our conversation as well as the full video of our interview.
Dominic Pino: You call him “the last conservative.” This is kind of a funny title to give him. He’s of course most well known in libertarian circles. He’s very well known for certainly not being a partisan thinker. He’s willing to sort of smash sacred cows on anybody’s side as long as he thinks that it’s the right thing to do from his philosophical perspective. Why do you call him a conservative as opposed to a libertarian or something else?
Jennifer Burns: So there’s kind of two ways in which I mean this title. One is that when I researched his economics, one thing I found was really distinctive about him is that he had a way of using economic approaches and methodologies and ideas that most of his contemporaries had decided were old fashioned and no longer helpful or interesting. So one example of this would be the quantity theory of money, which was an older idea that he really rehabilitated and used as a foundation for monetarism. Another would be just simply the practice of going out and measuring what individual consumers were doing in the economy and trying to kind of add up all those figures as opposed to making a more abstract model that looks from the top down. So in that way, I think of him as an economist who tried to conserve what was best about economic thought in the past. And in some ways, he’s really a political economist because he tied these ideas to a larger vision of state and society and markets and individual freedom.
And so the second dimension of him being a conservative is that he worked most closely with political leaders and intellectuals and organizations that consider themselves part of the American conservative movement. And it’s a conservatism in America that is distinctive in that it does incorporate, or it did in the 20th century incorporate, these ideas similar to those Friedman espoused on individual freedom, capitalism, markets. And those ideas were sometimes in tension with other aspects of the coalition. But I try to show in my work really how fundamental Friedman was to that style of conservatism, which really emerged after the post-war era and became very dominant for the next 50 or 60 years.
DP: Eventually, famously, Ben Bernanke would admit that Friedman and Anna Schwartz were right about the Federal Reserve’s role in worsening and prolonging the Great Depression. One of the things about Schwartz as well that you kind of work in as a subplot of the book is the difficulties that she faced with getting her PhD. And it sounds like a completely crazy thing to us nowadays because now it’s completely normal for women to get PhDs, but also because Schwartz was a huge contributor to this work that for Friedman would be part of the reason he would win the Nobel Prize. He would win the Nobel Prize for other things he did as well that did not involve Schwartz, but his monetary history was a big part of the reason that the Nobel committee awarded him that prize. And so clearly the research was fantastic. Clearly this is a person who should have the credential to match it. But for the longest time, Anna Schwartz could not get her PhD.
JB: Yeah, that was a really fascinating and somewhat sad story to see through the archive. She had started a PhD at Columbia in the 30s, and by the 60s, she still had not gotten a PhD because they kept saying, well, you didn’t really do that work, you did it with someone else. But interestingly, Friedman also did a co-authored dissertation and didn’t face the same pushback. So I think it just goes to show how powerful, you know, once you adhere to a set of ideas — which in this case was women aren’t independent economic thinkers, they are technicians who can help the men who have the ideas, but they don’t have their own ideas, and they don’t really make important contributions — once that idea is afoot and people buy into it, they ignore the evidence in front of them.
So what was interesting for me was both what she faced and then why Friedman was able to see what was in front of his eyes and his colleagues weren’t. And I don’t know that there’s one particular answer. I think part of it is he just took people on the merits. It came a little more easily to him to think, “Who is this economist in front of me?” as opposed to thinking, “Oh, this is a woman, therefore, a lesser economist.”
And then he also was in an economics department that had a tradition of having at least one female faculty member at the University of Chicago. That was unusual. So he had studied under and seen women in positions of somewhat authority and somewhat respect as economists. So I think that actually served him very well. And as I talk about in the book, you add all the women up who contributed to his work, it’s really quite substantial. And if you took them away, he would have a very different profile.
DP: One of those people, of course, is his wife Rose, who was a very able economist herself. They met in Chicago and then would get married. They co-authored one book sort of later in life, but she was there a lot of the time as well and helping him to sharpen his ideas. You talk in the book about how their household must have just been so argumentative, not necessarily in a bad or nasty way, but just to sort of constantly sharpening arguments intellectually, and doing that at the dinner table and just in other situations where people would just be making small talk, they were arguing about these big ideas.
JB: Yeah, they had a dinner table code, which was a series of numbers. And No. 1 was: I was wrong and you were right.
Rose was a fascinating figure. One thing that was tricky about trying to understand the work that she did is she helped put together the archive. So Friedman’s papers are held here at the Hoover Institution, where Friedman was a fellow in the last years of his life. Rose helped organize the papers and put them in boxes and things, and she took out anything about herself. She was a very private person. She didn’t want someone like me coming along and snooping in her business. So I’ve had to reconstruct somewhat indirectly the role she played. But we know from their own testimony that she was really the driving force behind getting Capitalism and Freedom published and then also essential to the Free to Choose series and the book that came out of it.
DP: Free to Choose is something that sort of brought Friedman to a more popular audience. He was of course already a major player on the political scene. He was an advisor to presidents. He was seen as a very prominent economist. He had already done basically all of his original research and theorizing and all of his academic papers by that point. But then in 1980 with Free to Choose he tries to make a television series that anybody could watch about his political philosophy. One of the things that blew me away in your book is you reported that they had viewership of three million people for this. This was in a country with about 100 million fewer people than today. I just can’t imagine having three million people sitting down on their couch watching Milton Friedman talk about the Great Depression in like excruciating detail — because if you watch Free to Choose, he doesn’t dumb it down, right? He’s actually going through a lot of his scholarship at a very high level and three million Americans are watching this. What was that like in that time and why is it so different now?
JB: Well, it was a very consolidated media landscape. So there were a couple of major magazines, a couple of major television networks. Friedman had this public profile first through his association with Barry Goldwater, and then he was on the cover of Time magazine in the early ‘70s. He was on the cover of the New York Times magazine, and then he had a column in Newsweek that ended up running for almost 20 years. So people knew who Milton Friedman was and it wasn’t like this was a completely unknown economist turning up. So they had some knowledge of him, some curiosity. But it wouldn’t happen today because those three million viewers are spread out over so much so much more.
Free to Choose is definitely worth a look. It’s kind of kitschy to our modern sensibility. The first half of the series is him explaining different economic concepts, often in a different locale. And the second half is a debate. And it’s a real debate. He brings in people who really disagree with him and even seem to dislike him and people who agree with him. And he doesn’t always win the debate. So yeah, I think people knew who Friedman was. I think also they understood Friedman was part of the Reagan campaign, but he was part of a shift afoot in the country, a sense that with the stagflation of the 1970s, the Carter presidency kind of winding to an end, Reagan looking like a contender, it was understood that Friedman was kind of embodying a new shift in ideas and politics that would be trying to limit government, trying to roll back regulations, trying to reduce taxes.
And so in some ways, this TV series was a preview of things to come. So I think people were drawn to it both because of Friedman’s reputation and his charisma, and their sense that this could be our political future, or do we want it to be our political future. It was part of something larger. It was part of a larger political and even social shift.
DP: I would be remiss now, you know, you mentioned Reagan, his influence on Reagan, of course, a very prominent figure in the American conservative movement. Another one is Bill Buckley. Buckley and Friedman were friends as well. Buckley had Friedman on Firing Line for one of the earlier episodes in the late ‘60s. So this was before Free to Choose, before all that stuff, he was on Firing Line at that point. Friedman and Buckley were close. Can you talk a little bit more about their friendship?
JB: Yeah, for sure. So in the beginning, Friedman was a little bit unsure about Buckley because Buckley ran a critical article about the Mont Pelerin Society in National Review. And so Friedman sort of chastised him for that, saying, young man, you don’t know what you’re talking about. But then when Buckley tried to push the John Birch Society out of the organized conservative movement, Friedman was very supportive of that. There were kind of warm letters back and forth. And then in the mid 1960s, Friedman spent a year in New York City as a visiting professor at Columbia. And that’s when they really connected. And I think Friedman represented for Buckley kind of where he was trying to take the conservative movement.
Friedman was educated. He was extremely articulate. He was a Jewish man, which helped separate Buckley-style conservatism from an older, more isolationist, antisemitic conservatism. So it really was a relationship of mutual advantage. And then they were both very witty and quick and smart and loved to talk. And so they got along really well. By the 1980s, they were taking a ski trip together every year to Utah. And Buckley writes about that quite fondly in one of his memoirs. So I think eventually it was a real meeting of the minds and of the personalities because, you know, the two of them could talk like no one else and really connect.
DP: It’s crazy to think that they had that connection given the huge differences in their backgrounds. I mean, like you said, Friedman was Jewish. Of course, Buckley was Catholic. Buckley grew up in a very wealthy family. Friedman, not so much. But it was sort of the union of their ideas here that brought them together.
JB: Yeah, and I think that goes back to kind of some of the opening discussion of the synthetic nature of 20th-century conservatism. Buckley was very traditional in his religious beliefs and his social approach, yet he also really appreciated a figure like Friedman, who was more libertarian, more focused on individual freedom, more focused on capitalism, and the two of them could just work together really well and didn’t perceive that they had to fight and argue and did perceive that they wanted much of the same things on the global scale and on the domestic scale, and they would work together in partnership. And I think that was really a strength. Either one of these men could have been a purist and could have said, “I don’t agree with you in these ways and we can’t work together.” But they looked for what they had in common, not what was different.