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hello everyone and welcome back to conversations with Tyler today I'm honored to be talking with Jennifer Burns who is a history professor at Stanford University she has a new book out which I just loved it is called
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Milton fredman the last conservative and her earlier book I also like very much that is goddess of the market Ein Rand and the American right Jennifer welcome thanks so much for having me I'm really looking forward to conversation there's
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so much Milton fredman one can read there's a reasonable amount of him on YouTube overall how did writing this book caus you to reassess fredman like what's the Delta that's a great question I came in really interested in him as
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the public figure the YouTuber as it were and over time I got more interested in him as the economist um so I think I came to understand how much that public Freedman was the tip of the iceberg on a just a much bigger base of inquiry
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research thinking not just in economics but in many dimensions of Economics um so I think that was one thing I I hadn't fully appreciated fredman the economist um and then I would think as time went on one thing I came more to
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appreciate was um the way he had both a very consistent message and some change and development in his thought so the the kind of dynamism and stability at the same time now fredman's earliest work on math and statistics why was that important and
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when was that so fredman um be very early in his life was sort of choosing between the field of mathematics and the field of economics and when he came into economics it was really transitioning away from political economy um which was
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you know rooted in 19th century um philosophy ethics um considerations of government to a more quantitative field um that shift would happen around free and what was important is that he was there on the ground floor of that in the
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1930s he was trained by some of the most preeminent mathematical economists of his generation at Colombia not necessarily at Chicago and over time he came to reject that approach this is something not a lot of people particularly economists know about
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fredman but it was significant that he rejected it not out of ignorance but from a position of under understanding mathematical economics having actually made his Mark early in his career with several papers and then deciding that
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intellectually this was unsatisfying and this was not providing him with the portrait of the world um that he thought economics could reveal if done the way that he ultimately did it and his early work on stats that's still cited by
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mathematicians right yeah there's something called the fredman test um which is still included in software packag is so so a lot of that happened so so one he was there in the first era of mathematical economics he was also
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there on the ground of really the first era of big data so during the Great Depression the government was struggling to understand what had gone wrong and how to fix it and one approach they took was to gather as much data as they
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possibly could on consumption what are ordinary Americans buying spending um so they ended up with millions of Punch Cards Right they had this very rudimentary Tech technology and fredman was one of the analysts hired by the federal government you know in the
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mid-30s to figure this uh information out basically to process this data and so as he grappled with that in his work a day life he came up with a couple of statistical I mean shortcuts is is to be a bit flippant but techniques to enable
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you to get through data very quickly um and those became important papers he also had a second Discovery uh that I talk about in the book when he was working at the statistical research group uh which was a secret wartime
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agency and this was a similar task in that um they were given a problem by the army that said basically how can we know if our Munitions work how can we test them more efficiently given that we're fighting the biggest war we've ever
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fought on two different fronts and so he came up with what he called the super colossal test and he was able to conceptualize it and design it but he wasn't able to prove it mathematically because although he was a skilled
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mathematician he said I'm just I'm not there I need to I need to be I need a little bit of a better mathematician so he ended up um bringing in uh Abraham Wald to um finalize the results of the idea they had come up with and this
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became known as sequential analysis and um you know ended up being a huge Boon uh to the US military in terms of enabling them to test their ordinance and move forward so so it's fascinating in terms of freedman's later life his earlier career his intellectual
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discoveries are very much embedded in a growing federal government that's growing because of the Great Depression that's growing because of World War II and this is what enables him to develop that statistical prowess it gives him a
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very strong reputation in the field of Economics but what's interesting is you know within five years of that he's turning his back on those techniques and methods and saying this isn't applicable to understanding human economic behavior
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these these mathematical models and statistical techniques these aren't enough so what's the and how a fredman starting to become some glimmer of say the Milton Freedman of the 70s and 80s what leads him to make the shift and
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decide well I'm going to be some version of America's leading public intellectual and take on this heroic role change the world and everything else I think he had opportunities to do that throughout his life some of which he took and some of
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which he passed on but I would say he had a model of that very young in his life when he was a graduate student um in the figure of Henry Simons who is one of the these forgotten figures in the history of economics who I became
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absolutely fascinated by and Henry Simons had a book that was sort of a big deal in the 1930s it was called a positive program for Le fair and it was an effort to talk about principles of liberalism what we would call Classical
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liberalism and apply them in the New Deal context and use them to critique the New Deal and then Simons became very actively involved in promoting what was called the Chicago plan which was a monetary solution to the Great it was
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actually a would have been a radical reformulation of the banking sector and Simons um you know knew has friends in high places was kind of pushing this through the political system so I think that was an early model for fredman at
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the same time about the 1950s at one point he was offered a birth on Eisenhower's Council of economic advisors and he said no you know he he basically wanted to do his work at the University of Chicago at that point it didn't feel done he didn't want to step
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into the public realm so I think he was always paying attention always thinking about it it's really with um his connection to Barry Goldwater that he has the first phase of being a public intellectual and that also comes after
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he's completed with Anna Schwarz his magnum opus a monetary History of the United States so I think he was both strategic and deliberate and that he wanted to do his major scientific work before he stepped into the public realm
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and so there's kind of two phases of him as a public intellectual there's the 60s to the 7s and then there's the post Nobel Prize when he's retired and then he you know is is uh is still out there but that's when he's on Donahue and um
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you know has more of a presence in the Republican establishment there's a letter you cite from Wesley Clare Mitchell maybe it's from 1947 where mital basically says well fredman is too dogmatic he did this study of incomes of
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the medical profession and we can't really trust it because he's looking for a particular conclusion what do you make of that account for Mitchell was Mitchell himself biased fredman was just flat outright fredman was too dogmatic what
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do you think yeah you know I think about this a lot um because so that's an episode I I found this letter very um just startling and I include quite a bit of it in the book when yeah Mitchell says to Burns you know fredman to to
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Arthur Burns Arthur Burns yeah right so Arthur Burns wanted to hire fredman the national Bure of economic research and and Wesley Mitchell basically said no he he said he can't be trusted not in that he lacks Integrity but that he's so
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committed to what he wants to see that he will selectively interpret the data um and it's interesting because I see in his letters with him and Schwarz at one point he says to her you know we didn't just go and take a bunch of monetary
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statistics to see what we wanted to see we had a hypothesis about what we would see and we went in and gathered data to test that hypothesis and as I was reading this I was thinking you know he doesn't have a consciousness of what we
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would call um you know selective reading or bias or selective recognition of facts to fit a pre-existing I don't think that was part of his he didn't see that as a pitfall or problem on the other hand he does say in some of his
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later work look everyone has a point of view everyone comes from a place there's you know it's it's um it's I wouldn't say it's radical perspectivalism but it's an awareness that you you stand somewhere and we can't get away from this so therefore we just have to
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proceed anyhow so I think he truly believed he was testing um to the best of his ability his priors and he believed that he was willing to revise them um so I think in some cases he was in other cases what he found matched his
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priors I don't think that invalidates his whole intellectual project but I think it's interesting his level of confidence um um in his ability to uh you know to evaluate his own thinking at the same time I also think that I mean
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that is one way to do science right you have a hypothesis you go in with a hypothesis and you see if it's true um so so that was very much how he operated putting aside co-authored Works how do you understand Rose fredman his
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wife to have influenced Milton's career putting aside what's the Deep the Deep psychological way in which this all fits together clearly they wrote Things together you mentioned she shaped or maybe even edited a lot of his Newsweek columns but at the margin was she
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telling Milton be more out there or Retreat to your academic life or what's what's she doing so she was definitely telling him to be more out there I don't think we'd have Milton the public intellectual without Rose and that is
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specifically putting together capitalism and freedom I was never able to untangle exactly what she did because that portion of the archive is is missing I think not coincidentally um but both of them said she's the one who put this book together
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like she went into the notes and made it into a book I don't think he would have done that um she and his son David also convinced him to do Newsweek um they said you know you you owe it to yourself to the country you got to do this theyve really pushed him so I think he would not have been so prominent in the public eye without her um and I I think there's other contributions just allowing him to be really singularly focused on his work
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because she took care of everything else how else did David Freedman Milton son influence him so as far as I can tell David was an important connection for Milton fredman to the sort of student libertarian movement um that coales
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really around ending the draft but um David was involved in conservative student organizations at Harvard and then at Chicago where he was a graduate student so um fredman always had a connection to those communities there's sometimes I forget exactly where but
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I've seen some libertarian material from the 70s where like David convinced fredman to do an interview or call into a conference and for Libertarians in the 60s late 60s and 70s fredman was a bit of a a court intellectual he wasn't he
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was too statist for their tastes um but he stayed engaged with them I think David was kind of the conduit David at that uh point was much more of an anarco capitalist than his father um so I think he helped the Elder Freedman sort of
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keep his pulse on what was happening uh with a younger and more radical student movement what was Milton's courtship of Rose Freedman like they it started because of their name so roses was originally Rose director at Milton
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fredman so they were seated next to each other um in class and so it was very much a study buddy thing at first I think Milton always um had his eye on rose rose was like the only woman in a class of you you know 30 some Economist
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so she she had I'm sure more than one Suitor although she doesn't go into any detail in this and so um they studied together um they spent time together and there's a anecdote I recount in the book where at the end of their first year in
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graduate school you know as they were getting ready to depart for the summer Milton tried to kiss Rose and she sort of rebuffed him and um then they were apart for a year and when they came back together uh things had changed and she
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was ready to you know be in a relationship with him so then they were in a you know sex head of couples who spent all their time together um there's then a period where it it kind of seems unclear like what is going to happen next and um I don't think that Milton freedan ever seriously had another girlfriend or considered another uh another partner and same for Rose but it was the 1930s economic prospects were slim and it was very much you know a
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cultural Mo that a man had to be able ble to support his wife and children before he would consider marriage so there's a couple year period where they're still together and Rose is thinking they're about to get married and Milton is not so sure and I I think
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at some point like his friends were like what are you doing just wise up and marry her and at some point she kind of called his bluff and said look we have to get married and they did so um I don't think there was any ever any
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question of the love I think it was just um there was some hesitation because of their economic fortunes now how is it that you read their joint Memoir two lucky people I mean is the title jesting like they were lucky uh when I read the
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book I was surprised how bored I was and I wasn't sure well they did this because they wanted to like manicure the story which is super upright to begin with to be clear as I think you would agree or is it actually how they approach things
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like when I read quin's Memoir I was super bored and I concluded tentatively well maybe was just boring right how do you think about this yeah I mean yes it many people even those who love Milton Freeman find this not a very compelling
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read it's more of a travelog I I read it as a book that's fundamentally generous in that everybody was someone they enjoyed the conversations were spirited the arguments were friendly um which is simply not very accurate to how their life was lived but
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I and I'll I'll provide an anecdote about that they talk though I think of it this is a couple in their '90s that's had a good life they're looking back they're reflecting they're not trying to settle scores um they're trying to put
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the most positive spin on anything possible so I think it's generous in that Spirit but it's not very accurate and so um after a while I realized the biggest person that I was writing against in the in my biography was not
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another biographer but it was two lucky people like that was the text that everybody had in mind that was just simply not accurate in many ways so I'll tell you two ways I that I see it as being inaccurate um one is um fredman
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recounts um an episode of him testifying to Congress and he says I had no and this isn't the uh early 1940s I had no idea how Keynesian I was and you know there's been maybe five to 10 books and articles that have jumped off that to
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say well Milton Friedman was once a Keynesian and then he had some type of conversion and I I just I do not see that in any of the record I've looked at and I I go into some detail uh both in the in the text and more detail in the
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footnotes about why I don't think this is accurate and it's you know fredman's looking at his Congressional testimony reads it in five minutes and says oh this sounds Keynesian you know from his vantage point in the 90s so it's it's
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not an accurate depiction of his views or um of his location in American economics the 1940s but it's taken as gospel because he said it um the other thing I would say I I talk about this in in some detail as well in the 1950s
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there was a large Conflict at the University of Chicago between fredman and a group associated with the economics Department the cow's commission and that was actually um a group of mathematical economists many leftists in nature and fredman didn't
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like their economics and he didn't like their politics and it was basically an extended Turf War and you know they met mention this briefly um but when you dig down a little bit more um so they mentioned Charing Charing cman who's the
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leader of um koh's at that point and you know it's kind of along the lines of Spirited discussion some conflict I in reality there's accounts that indicate cman went through a sort of mental breakdown as part of his conflict with
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fredman and had to take time away from the University had to go to like a music camp um to rest his mind and um you know fredman was successful in um getting their Rockefeller Grant cancelled basically cutting off their funding
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sources and you you wouldn't you would know there was conflict but you wouldn't know that it was very intense and and dark conflict and you don't see that in the Memoir which again maybe to his credit he's trying not to exume all the
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the negative things he did but he's kind of glossing over um how intense this was this was like academic street fighting it really was I'm struck by your portrait of the profession in the 40s and 50s how Petty it was how much people would hold up
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dissertations uh how much individual personalities probably mattered more then than they do now I mean is that the impression you have of the work you did on that time it just sounds horrible and you think like oh things have gotten
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worse but actually maybe they've gotten better you know it was a it was a professionalizing um it was professionalizing economics was professionalizing so in the absence of strong professional Norms there was a lot of room um for personality for
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prejudice for all this sort of thing um you know so there's several economists who were hired without dissertations you know and they could you could be hired and have a good career without actually finishing your dissertation you know
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which is completely unheard of today um so and then the story I go into in some detail involves um Anna Schwarz and how um the Columbia faculty simply would not give her appe PhD um they just wouldn't do it they could not be convinced that
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she deserved a PhD it's very clearly sexism at work and it it really took uh fredman had to put his foot down and really chew some people out before they decided to give her the degree so um yes I think in the absence of professional
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Norms you have a lot more room um for power plays um for unfairness for prejudice that said I think the professional Norms can get too rigid to the point where you cultivate group think and you close out the possibility
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of New Perspectives new ideas New Paths so um this was definitely a moment of formation how do you think about all the work Milton did with women Anna Schwarz most of all but his ideas on consumption he drew from several women researchers
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that was unusual back then obviously the work with rose is he in your mind a Proto feminist or this is coincidence or what was it for him sort of neither I think you wouldn't have Milton free without these women and I sometimes I
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give a talk called Milton Freeman was a woman because I think if you pulled all the wom out of his life you'd have a a good Economist I don't know that you'd have a great Economist I don't think you would um because they did several things
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what they really did was provided a a Counterpoint to his natural inclinations so take a monetary history this would not really have been a narrative or a history it would have been a bunch of like charts and graphs about the the
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money supply it would have been closer to say KET studies of national income and so it's really Schwarz that has a love for history that puts it into a narrative that convinces him to make it a much longer story and that's why that book resonates because it's not just
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data it's a narrative it's a story um when it comes to the consumption uh theory of the consumption function he was basically drawing on the Women's World of consumption economics which was something that had been a big part of
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the field but because of this professional process which also was driven by men so there was a sort of machismo to it uh a lot of men had turned away from consumption economics and since Freeman had not he had sort of an advantage he was zigging where
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everyone was zagging now why um why was fredman able to do this you know was he more enlightened than other economus of his day I would say both yes and no so there's definitely I've had some anecdotes and stories that you know he
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was not feminist in his behavior on the other hand compared to economists of his day um he very much was I didn't find any letter you know that mentioned um anything negative about um you know any of his collaborators as women I I think
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that's not true for other economists um there's some cases I think it's Samuelson who will you know write letters supposedly in support of his female students that turn out to actually be very negative and and sort of very sexist in tone
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I tended to think that fredman had a way of sort of missing some social cues and social norms then waya could be detrimental I think when it came to the women working with him he had an ability that maybe others didn't to sort of see
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the person before he saw the woman um and so if it was a very smart woman he would sort of recognize first and foremost that this was a smart woman and secondly kind of um register that you know this was a woman and then maybe
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that would would come with some of supposed limitations but he really was um generous and supportive of the women in his life as intellectuals and I I think that's like his secret sauce because no one else is really doing it
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at the time and so it gives him New Perspectives um you know I mean when you look at his the work he was cited for in the Nobel Prize um you know it most of it has a major woman collaborate you know it's a a monetary history theory of
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the consumption function um there's a third which isn't coming to mind but those two would not have been done without a female collaborator so and I knew nothing about this when I started you know and I was like this is strange
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you know um I also think it's why he wrote books you know he wouldn't have written books without these collaborators and I think books still are very very powerful even in a field that's moving towards papers books retain their power why did fredman
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oppose the courtesy appointment to fek and the economics department at Chicago you know I don't have a ton of information about that because one of the interesting things that happens right when you would think Freedman and
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hak's relationship is the most important so Hayak comes I believe it's basically 1950 to 1960 he's at Chicago so right when he arrives at Chicago you lose the paper trail because now he's there and so there there's not a lot of discussion
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my sense is that he didn't consider hyek an economist because he wasn't empirical enough so so when fredman turned away from mathematical economics he was turning away from theoretical models he wasn't turning away from data per se and
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he really believed you had to have Theory which for him was price Theory empirics such as his collaborators gathered through the study of consumption and you had to test that theory with the empirics and so he saw hyek although hyek really did influence
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and teach him intellectually I would say he saw him not as a proper Economist because he wasn't doing that Empirical research he wasn't trying to test his theories with empirical data sets I don't think he wanted Hayak training
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graduate students um he was happy to put h on the syllabus happy to have him teaching seminars very involved with him in the broader intellectual Endeavors but I think he had a an idea of what and how economics should be and Hayak didn't
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fit into that at that point how is it you think that fredman's influence differed in Britain compared to the United States how did it differ in Britain so there is I see every country has its own version of Milton Friedman they're
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all a bit inaccurate but he had influence in many places how is Britain different well I think Britain had one it had a sort of pre-existing um set of ideas that was called monetarism which actually wasn't fredman inspired but
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linked up with him very closely I think fredman actually he had sort of more and less influence um I think the the presidential lecture he gave in 1967 saying there wasn't a longrun trade-off between inflation and unemployment
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there's definitely several key figures in the British political establishment who found that that made a big impact on their thinking because they felt like they were living that um you know we've been trying to you know spend money to
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bring down unemployment and now we've spent all this money and unemployment is still going up and inflation is going up and so in a lot of ways freemen seemed to be explaining what was happening in Britain and it happened sooner on the
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other hand he also became a sort of symbolic figure very quickly in um in uh British politics both because the British monetary system is different it was different at that time so his advice um wasn't technically suitable in many ways
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and secondly he became a much more prominent figure after the Nobel Prize and after his controversy over his um connection to the penos regime in Chile so he then became a sort of Whipping Boy of left and right so um he does have one
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a substantive intellectual impact and two a symbolic impact you know I don't think his celebrations of individual Freedom maybe have the same cultural resonance in Britain as they do in the United States I think in the United
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States he's in some ways tapping into the kind of rugged individualism Frontier Spirit uh or Americans and were free he he's got more of that to play with than I think he did have in Britain so you don't see capitalism and freedom
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you know falling off people's lips in the same way in England as it did in the United States you know there's a uh debate in one of the episodes of free to choose where Peter Jay who is British takes on M fredman I don't know if you remember
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this and Jay says well ml you're always inconsistent you site utility when you want to make an argument but when utility is not on your side you switch back to Liberty which is it which one is your master was Peter J right was Milton
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wrong what's your view I love that exchange because if you recollect Peter Jay keeps pushing and pushing and finally fredman says I think this is verbatim freedom is my God and I was like wow like freedom is your god you know I was I expected the
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lightning bolt to come down I mean it was very intense but I I think that is ultimately it and so I think um Freedom didn't want to believe you had to choose between freedom and greater Prosperity you know between an unregulated uh
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economy and um widespread differentials of wealth um he really didn't want to make that choice um because one Freedom was his God and two he was not an egalitarian but he definitely was concerned about those who had less and
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he wanted there to be fewer poor people and so he didn't really want to confront that tension he spent a lot of time trying to massage it I think that's where the his interest in what we would call Ubi comes from but the other thing
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I really do want to stress is in his era it looked plausible that you didn't have to choose in other words it's the era of the sort of convergence of incomes it's the era where as countries develop economically their income inequality
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goes down um and so he's seeing a very different set of figures you know than than we look at today and as a result he was much more optimistic that the more capitalism spread the more inequality would decline um the better off
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everybody would be and he really didn't wrestle very much although he started to a bit at the end of his life with the conundrum what if capitalism spreads and things get worse for a lot of people what do I do then you mentioned Freedman
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and Chile what's the bottom line on that whole episode in your opinion I think in most of it it was manufactured as a campaign um against fredman um because I think ultimately his impact was similar to what any Western trained Economist would have had
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and he was not the architect of the Hun he was not particularly connected to Pinos he came in after an economic catastrophe and you know prescribed what pretty much any Western trained Economist would have prescribed to stop inflation and he was then
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tagged as the sort of architect and Western um endorser of the regime which was not the case but I think he came to stand in for people's discomfort with the idea that the Nick administration had perhaps supported the coup and I
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think there's another piece of it is that the the dream of aende was there could be a peaceful road to socialism um and the coup seemed to suggest that that was not true that the peaceful road to socialism um could not happen and so if the coup
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was not inevitable because it was the manufactured by Western economists and Western governments then perhaps we could get back on the Via chalena and make our way to the peaceful redistribution of property and power and
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the and the the success of a socialist government so I think he got really Tangled Up In all these questions about you know is it possible to have a peaceful transition to a socialist or communist government and making fredman the problem enabled
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you to focus on fredman or Nixon rather than the very real problems created by the aend government in Chile you use the word prescribed like what just physically literally what did he do what's the thing I can talk about that
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for sure and he actually didn't do that much which is interesting so it's I'll get a little bit granular um basically um poosha takes over uh from a a country where the state sector has expanded dramatically and inflation is I think it's I think it's
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almost 600% I could be wrong it's it's hundreds of percent it makes our stress about you know 6% inflation uh really puts it in perspective so um uh when the Hun comes in they basically keep doing everything they've been doing in terms
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of State control of the economy they rep privatize a little bit um but they don't really know what to do um so say that the Socialist governor of uh the mine is replaced by a military governor of the mine um and then nothing is improving
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economically so um it's about a year a year and a half in there's a Changing of the Guard internally in the Chilean regime and a group of economists um several of who did have Chicago training um basically are able to get the ear of
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the dictator and say look we need to do things differently um we we need to privatize we need to open markets um we need to repr privatize rather we need to open markets to International Trade we need to do all this stuff and um penos
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basically says okay let's do it and it's at that point that they're like let's bring in Milton Freedman so then fredman comes in the policy has been decided and basically his role is to speak to what I kind of jokingly call the Chilean deep
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State he goes around and he meets with all of you know the fun military functionaries who will carry out these policies and he explains you know in his very lucid way here's why this is the right medicine for chile he does
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interviews he meets a lot of different people he meets um Pino very briefly um and he tells them you know you have to um cut spending to cut inflation and he also reportedly says according to someone who's in the meeting you know if
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you give the people economic freedom eventually it's going to mean political freedom and apparently p is like yeah yeah you know whatever sure um what what what I found in the in the records that I read the big question that everyone had for
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Freeman was this is going to be too painful we can't do this this is going to hurt too many people so even in the military regime they are worried if we cut all the state supports that have been created and we try to stop printing
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money and stop inflation this is going to cause a huge amount of economic pain and so fredman's sort of like a broken record like yes but you have to do this and the quicker you do it the quicker it'll be over cut the spending provide
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emergency economic support and you'll get through it and basically he uses a metaphor of cutting off a dog's tail which is sort of a horrific metaphor but he says you got to do it all at once you can't drag it out so I would say His
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function is to certify and explain a policy change that has already happened um and so he's basically like a big name flown in to tell everybody here's a new program here's why it's going to work you know let's get let's get psyched and do it so
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he's not The Mastermind in any way um part of the reason it's so controversial is I mean the real reason his presence there is so controversial is the Nobel Prize which is awarded it's I think it's about a year later and the really
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unfortunate part is the Nobel Prize announcement comes just a few weeks after peno's goons have assassinated a regime critic on the streets of Washington DC they blow up his car on the streets of Washington DC and then a
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couple weeks later Freedman wins the Nobel Prize now there's no connection between these events but it appears that this sort of you know right-thinking people of the western world are patting the dictator on the head that's how it's
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framed like we nobody cares about what's happening in Chile look they're celebrating this economist who's somehow responsible for for what has happened um so I think it it all gets kind of mushed together to make a political Point
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um what's the future of Milton fredman say 30 40 years from now where will the reputation be because University of Chicago is no longer Fred manite right we know that there are fewer outposts of Fred manite thinking than there had been yeah would he be
36:22
underrated or somehow reinvented or or what I I mean okay let me look into my crystal ball um I think he's going to be I don't think the name will have faded I mean I think we there are still names that people read you know people still
36:36
read canes and Mill and figures like that to see what did they say in their day that was so influential um I do think that I think that fredman has kind of got into the water and into the air a bit um and I I do some work on tracing out his
36:52
influence um within economics no one's going to say oh I'm a Freedman night or a fewer people are but you know this is someone whose major work was done you know half half a century or more ago so I don't think that's surprising it would
37:04
be surprising if economics had bet at a standstill such as you know fredman still called the tune um I do think you know when you think about the way we Accord importance to the modern Federal Reserve of course there were things that
37:19
happened in the world but fredman's ideas did so much to shape that understanding um he's still in policy makers Minds he's still in the monetary policy establishment's Minds even if they're not fully following him I think
37:33
we're in the middle of a big Reckoning now you saw all the debate about M2 and the pandemic and monetary spending I don't know where it's all going to settle out and it's a more complicated world than the one that Freeman looked
37:46
at I tend to think he's he's sort of an essential thinker that the basics of what he talked about are going to be known 50 years from from now for sure did Milton fredman have friends he did he did he had lots ofs who is his
38:03
best friend not colleagues not co-authors but other friends well so now that's an interesting thing because most of his friends were his colleagues and were those in agreement with him um sort of ideologically um he had a friendship
38:19
with someone named Leo Roston um who is a humorist kind of a humorist great writer wrote a lot of books about eish culture yes exactly so he was friends with him um but Roston agreed with fredman mostly right you read Roston on
38:32
the Industrial Revolution it sounds very Friedman I probably I mean he probably glossed a lot of what he was hearing from fredman he apparently did have a friendship with Daniel Boron who's a historian at the University of Chicago um I would say most of his close
38:47
friends though were I would say either um George Stigler or Aaron director were probably his closest friends and you know Aaron director was his brother-in-law and George Stigler was his um you know grad school friend and
39:00
eventually became his colleague so this is one thing I've really noticed in the book that for fredman sort of friendship and ideological sympathy and commitment to a certain political Vision they're all intertwined um so you know he had
39:18
cordial relationships with a lot of different people but they weren't quite friends you know um and even I think the great crisis in his friendship with Arthur Burns is a policy disagreement and for fredman that policy disagreement
39:35
just calls into question the whole friendship although he very quickly tries to reestablish that connection and he he won't let that connection go but the fact that it is so test so stressed by their disagreement over monetary policy I think is really indicative so
39:53
yeah he walked talked breathed economics all the time your other biography it's of Ein Rand again it's called goddess of the market Ein Rand in the American right before the novels was she a good screenwriter let's see I think she
40:08
probably was I mean she had success in a pretty competitive industry most of them tended to be these kind of melodramatic um plots um I actually like the film we the living that they did a fairly good version of it um the other thing that's
40:24
hard to say is she didn't ose a ton of original screen plays what she would do is take uh an existing screenplay and kind of tart it up a little bit make it more interesting so I don't know that will ever fully that would be a project
40:39
actually to try to excavate what it Which films did she have a hand in um but the fact that she went from penales immigrant you know to having a creative role in one of the major Studios of her time there must have been something um
40:57
that was recognized also again as a woman in an era when that wouldn't have counted in her favor to any means which do you think is the best of the novels um some would say least bad but either way yeah yeah I like I said I'm
41:10
partial to We The Living um it's set in Russia you know uh During the Revolution so it has that historical flavor I like it it's it's sort of a Romano cleff it's it's characters and family she knew so while the sort of central love triangle
41:25
is quite imaginative and will strike many readers as as not true to to human nature the the sort of ancillary characters I think do ring true so I think that um her flights of imagination were sort of tempered by the fact that
41:41
she was working from this material and I think um it's just a fascinating glimpse into you know Russia 100 years ago um so I think those are and it's it's long but it's not quite so long um you know the the the pity with Atlas Shrugged is she
41:57
was uneditable by that time and she really needed to be edited the sex scenes in Atlas Shrugged and Fountain Head what what do you make of them as a reader today I think they're part projection I think they also can be very usefully read as part
42:12
of the Romantic genre like if you were to pick up a romance novel um in the supermarket you would find a very similar plot structure um and so it's very much against our sensibilities that sort of rape as romance as romance but
42:28
again if you read a sort of dim store romance novel this is like a Trope that's very common so I think she was kind of pulling on these tropes and then I think she was imagining this kind of heroic manly man that if she actually
42:42
ever met in real life you know she would not be attracted to and probably not even be able to tolerate but in Her Imagination this could be sort of an idealized partner I recall at age 13 visiting the foundation for economic education and
42:57
Leonard Reed boasting to me in his office that he had had IR Rand on his desk and pointing to where that happened I mean what was the equilibrium in her love life how did that work um so let's see I don't know if I mean I'm sure she
43:12
flirted with Leonard Reed that would make sense um the equilibrium was she was always drawn to younger men um and that is sort of true from the beginning so she was very much drawn to her husband she was kind of the aggressor in
43:26
that relationship and then there's a couple of before Nathaniel Brandon who was her student and then her collaborator and you know her longtime lover think 25 years her Junior there's a couple of other young men who she was
43:41
testing as potential romantic Partners so I found a couple in reminiscences of the archive she would start a friendship they would come visit her and then in retrospect they were like you know what if I had wanted to pursue this
43:55
romantically it she would have been willing or she was trying to set me up she was trying to seduce me but she was going a little slow and I didn't know what was going on so there's like I think there's maybe two people that were kind of in that
44:07
position before Nathaniel Brandon um and then I think once she was with Brandon she was pretty content with him she wasn't looking elsewhere so I think her equilibrium was what she achieved briefly which was a doting and
44:19
supportive husband and an exciting secret lover much younger than her um so she had it brief but it didn't last what was the role of the Roy child's open letter to IR Rand that's a great uh moment so Roy Childs um writes this
44:36
letter to Ein Rand he's basically saying if I remember correctly like be an anarco capitalist like you haven't gone far enough like if you follow the logic of your thought there should be no State whatsoever um I mean she she wasn't
44:51
really paying attention and what did she call them hippies of the right you know she hated anarch she hated libertarian she by the end of her life she hated anyone who liked her which was a difficult uh position to be in um so I
45:03
don't think that it had an impact on her but I think it it was one of these documents that said to all of you who like IR ran but feel like she hasn't gone far enough um let's go there together and we can appreciate her without um feeling like we have to stay
45:21
with her um understanding of the state or her you know CL to this sort of atavistic state and my my feeling on both her and fredman and they're not going all the way to Anarchy um I I think it has something to do with their backgrounds in in Ran's
45:40
case living through Revolution and living in Europe in fredman's case a very real consciousness of his Jewish identity and I think for both of them while they felt this state often discriminated against minorities I think
45:53
they were more fearful of what would happen without a state in a situation of Anarchy in which they would be identified as you know racial or ethnic or religious minorities I think they had a visceral fear of that um for
46:08
themselves and for any other community that would be in that situation and so I think that kept both of them from saying you know blow everything up and let's just see what happens you know Roy later in his life admitted Rand was right and
46:20
that his own open letter was wrong I didn't know that changed his mind yes did Rand and fredman Milton Freedman know each other they did and what did fredman call her a um like something like a dog terrible and dogmatic woman who did a
46:37
great deal of good and um to go back to Leonard Reed uh the big Schism between Ein Rand and Leonard Reed so Leonard Reed was an early publisher of libertarian pamphlets and materials came when he published um freedan and
46:52
stigler's roofs or ceilings which was an economic an analysis of rent control and they were analyzing rent control from the position of economic efficiency like the rent control is economically inefficient and um they were also
47:06
philosophically opposed to rent control but they decided really strategically rather than get into this whole philosophical battle we're just going to talk about this being economically inefficient it's the policy choice and policy argument and Reed had uh irran
47:22
understood that Leonard Reed had agreed to use her as a kind of ideological gatekeeper and that he was according to her going to show everything the foundation published to her and she would give it a thumbs up or thumbs down and then it would be
47:36
published so this may or may not have been the arrangement whatever it was Reed did not follow that process he published roofs or ceilings and I Ren read it and she hit the roof and you have this just fascinating situation
47:51
where this one sort of Titan of the American right Ein ran is calling another you know figurehead of American conservatism Milton Freedman a communist she thought that Stigler and fredman were Communists because she could tell
48:04
they were using this utilitarian argument and scrupulously avoiding any kind of moral argument and she viewed that as a sort of um veiled way of neutralizing discussion of economic issues such that you couldn't make an ethical case on behalf of private
48:23
property um and so she became livid she and Reed had a huge fight letters back and forth she's going to have nothing to do with Leonard Reed now interestingly Reed and fredman also had a huge fight over this and um part of it was because
48:39
the original version of the pamphlet although it was mostly utilitarian in its argument it did have a nod to the idea that fredman and Stigler would like more equality than there is now and they said something like you know even if you
48:53
want more equality the way we do like you should still support this on you know efficiency grounds or something like this and this is that influence of Henry Simons again who was much more egalitarian then fredman and and when he
49:05
was close to Simons fredman had a more egalitarian cast well Leonard Reed his um he had a henchman uh Orville Watts he was uh very very almost a social darwinist I would say Watts did not want that in there and so Watts cut that out
49:21
and the and uh Freeman and Sigler said no no no you need to keep it in there and they said okay okay we'll keep it in and then they footnoted it and said something like well we disagree with this and then they published in a bridge
49:32
version of the pamphlet that cut it out entirely so Freeman and Sigler were so mad and they wouldn't talk to Reed for like five years so it to me this episode is just so Illuminating because it's a question of how do we in 1946 coming out
49:48
of the World War II era coming out of the depression coming out of the success of the New Deal how do we talk about um economics equality and fairness um should we talk about it in the old idiom you get what you deserve um should we
50:04
talk about it in the new idiom Let's help everyone um have the basics um or should we not talk about it at all and use a language of economics about what is the most efficient which ultimately will redown to the greatest good for the
50:16
greatest number and it's not really worked out and people have really different positions on this and so this question of run control is really huge there like like huge percentage of housing stock in the United States was rent controlled at that time due to the war there was an enormous housing shortage um and so this was a really big issue was coming up for congress so everyone kind of got in and they couldn't figure out how to talk about it
50:38
in a way they just couldn't figure out how to talk about it period um so that's like the big explosion moment I think it's 46 and you know in another decade they'll be closer to kind of figuring out these questions what do you think of the Chris
50:52
Kara argument that Rand drew a lot of her BAS basic ideas from earlier Russian philosophy I think there's probably a good deal to it um I don't know that I would lay it all he he really emphasizes it I think it's the Russian silver age I
51:08
mean I think to my mind the clearest through line for her is friederick n who would have been a presence in you know Russian intellectual circles but it's not necessarily Russian and so you know the Fountain Head in its original
51:22
conception had a headnote from n and each of its four sections and she pulled those right before publication because she thought um it's too much so I would say you know this idea she loved the phrase from n like the noble Soul has
51:39
reverence for itself um she loved all those ideas and they just resonated with her very powerfully I think um even in her unpublished work she really takes them kind of a bit to the edge of Madness they're more tempered in the
51:53
Fountain Head so but I I mean I definitely I'm like yeah she's a Russian novelist look at those books they're huge they're panoramic you know um she's very convinced of her role she's very convinced of the power of the intelligencia right that was a complete
52:08
conviction that a salon of committed intellectuals could cause profound social and intellectual change which of course she had seen happen um so I definitely think she's part of that tradition but there's also you know she's not just Russian she's Russian Jewish and so I think there's a kind of CounterPoint to that in her concern with you know the powers of the state um and her focus on rationality and her celebration of you know other cultures a
52:40
sort of high European cultures Beyond Russia she in the end would say Russia it's just a mystical State you know and it's it's interesting because in in recent years when we've seen you know uh the glories of fantasies of you know
52:54
Mother Russia or the role of the Russian Orthodox church or all this you know the Mythic importance of keev or whatever it may be I think back to einan grumbling like it's just a mystical State like they're all obsessed with mysticism I'm
53:06
like well she was right right yeah maybe so how did Randon misus get along Randon misus it's a complicated story there's a there's a you some of your more um your viewers and readers who are more into uh uh this literature might have heard of
53:24
an anecdote or supposedly they screamed at each other at a party that appears to not be true that appears to be a rumor started by William F Buckley to kind of cause trouble um she actually loved ludig vanan mises his ideas she felt she
53:39
said on several occasions my economics is from misus everything I know about economics I know from misus um so I think she you know they are both um thinkers who kind of have this rational framework um who kind of you know have a
53:54
few maatic first principles that they then build a system upon so I think um she really didn't know a ton about economics and hadn't thought about it until she read misus so in person they did tend to clash they are both pretty
54:11
difficult personalities sort of in the same way um but the letters between them were always respectful and it was one of misis was one of the few people living people that she didn't cut down to her students that she recommended her students read if you
54:27
read the objectivist newsletter those mentions of him and articles on him um so I think that was an important connection why is it in the 20th century in America fiction seems to have been so much more important for the left than
54:43
for the right especially if you take away Rand why that huge difference that's such an interesting question um it may have to do with I think uh a General truism that the sort of artistic and creative and life is often a Bohemian life as well in which
55:03
um Traditions whether they be you know traditional marriage or traditional uh monogamy things like that are questioned as part of the kind of creative process it seems to be where things ferment and so you know if you are a person who
55:19
values tradition and values um established norms and social practices um that may not be you know an environment conducive to creating imaginary worlds you know um so I think you need a culture to support artistic creation and fiction creation and I
55:37
think the culture um once a culture tips a certain way it kind of goes that way so I could certainly imagine societies and perhaps your listeners will will know ones too where you know the production of fiction is done more by
55:49
conservative writers or thinkers but I would imagine they have a culture to support that even if it's just a city a university uh a small tradition a literary school but I do think as much as creativity is individual it flourishes in community so you don't have that Community it doesn't get written why are there so few successful business women in American fiction so there's Rand there's Gone With the Wind but very little else comes to mind oh
56:17
like why are there so few depictions of women as successful businessmen or business there we go I just said it myself whatever you want to call I think you know fiction is trying to reflect um reflect the Human Experience and it's
56:31
it's to this date there's just been more men who've applied their life's work and business than women so I think that's part of it um I think it's too bad I think you know rand's created some memorable characters because of that on the other hand there
56:46
is a way in which sure her characters are women but they're not engaging in Pursuits that the vast majority of women engage in such as motherhood um you know they are kind of living masculine lives um although she's describing them as
57:03
highly feminine um so they're a bit of a blend in some ways did Milton Friedman read much fiction not that I can tell I mean there's some stories where I guess um Rose uh wanted him to come to the Opera with her and he was like well can I
57:21
bring a book so I can read if I get bored um um you know he didn't he didn't really appreciate culture and so there's there's also hna Schwarz had a story where um he was spending you know a semester in Paris and she was like oh
57:35
the museums will be so wonderful and he said to her why would I go to a museum like just literally didn't know why he would spend his time that way so um I think he enjoyed like I said he enjoyed the fiction of Leo Roston that's really
57:50
the only fiction I've heard of him you know mentioning you know the literature on am musia which is a condition where you're not able to enjoy music sometimes sites Freedman as having had a musia I'm not sure that's confirmed do you know
58:04
anything about that no I don't that's interesting I haven't I I'm not familiar with that literature it's it it's that does make sense though with this story and I wonder if maybe they they saw that story where um you know Rose she loved
58:17
the symphony she loved the Opera and he was basically like okay fine I'll go but like I need to bring my own entertainment along um so what he did for recreation he really enjoyed woodworking um Aaron director was a a skilled woodworker and his
58:32
basement had a whole setup and so I think fredman built all the furniture for their first home by hand so he he liked building um he played tennis and he liked skiing um so I think his relaxation was you know with his hands
58:48
or sort of physical in nature um I think otherwise when he was reading he was reading for work I also learned from your book by the way that Aaron director and Mark Rothco had been childhood friends isn't that fascinating it's
59:01
really fascinating I have to say there's a um historian I think he's at the University of Rhode Island Robert Van Horn who's really excavated a lot of the early life of Aaron director and it's absolutely fascinating very last really question or
59:16
set of questions but what will you do next that's a great question I have a couple of book projects in mind um one is to just kind of look back a little bit more rather than write a biography of you know a central figure to kind of
59:29
put them together into a broader story of um the intellectual history of we call American conservatism or something like that um so that's one more of a synthetic history I would say there's just been such an outpouring of
59:42
literature on the subject I think it would be uh some days I think it would be fun to bring it all together other days I think it's going to be um maybe not so fun to have to pick through all that um I'm also interested in writing
59:56
something sort of a history of postmodernism because I've been teaching um an intellectual history class here at Stanford that's been kind of tracing it across the century and I think that's potentially really interesting it would
1:00:07
be quite different than what I've done thus far and so I guess I'll have to wait and see do I want to strike out for a new terrain or keep kind of plowing the field I'm in so stay tuned is all I have to say on that just one follow-up
1:00:21
question on that many of us observing history have the sense that the intellectual tradition within the American right has been in Decline for several decades like a do you agree and B if so what most fundamentally is driving that change I
1:00:38
think there are you know it's a less vigorously intellectual culture I mean one thing I sometimes face with undergraduates is they're genuinely surprised when I say well yeah the conservatives had all the ideas you know
1:00:53
in the in the 20th Cent cury and the conservatives really made an impact because they came up with all these ideas that were really powerful and important and they just it doesn't really compute um because I think the conservatism they've grown up with is
1:01:06
not driven by ideas in any meaningful way so I think that's certainly true I would say one of the reasons I think it's happened is that you know conservatism became an establishment and then you kind of have a set of greatest
1:01:20
hits and you have a variety of ways you can make you're living within this establishment provided you sort of adhere to the greatest hits so there's not a ton of incentives to do things differently um I do think there's a lot of you know ideological ferment on the
1:01:35
right or amid conservatives right now it's it's heavy on ideas it's often in you know internet forums that are not like deep engagement with ideas I would say um in the same way as when you know you're reading books and magazines I
1:01:51
think it's more faster and more rapid um so I just I it's very it's really interesting like any we're all there's much more competition in the realm of ideas than there was right besides reading a book or going to college like
1:02:06
you can get ideas they're sort of coming out of everywhere coming out of the ether so I think that's going to lend less coherence um and I think you can have a lot of people who are intellectual leaders of smaller tribes rather than having a couple of the big
1:02:21
leaders that everyone's heard of you know fredman haek this and that um I just think we're in a more fragmented place I tend to attribute it to this kind of the media environment we're in which probably isn't going away anytime
1:02:32
soon so the question is can we live and thrive in this fragmented attention ecosphere or are we going to recreate something akin to the you know three big networks you know to kind of filter and manage all the information we have I
1:02:46
think we'll we'll see that evolve uh or not over the next 50 years again everyone the book is Milton fredman the last conservative by Jennifer Burns BNS highly recommended Jennifer thank you very much thanks so much Tyler