university professor dan cynic and shares his book, big fiction, where he examines how book publishing monopolies have changed the art of writing fiction. then at 12:00 am eastern, journalist mark chissano looks at former new york congressman george santos's rise in politics, to his removal from congress, with his book, the fabulist. watchable tv every sunday on c- span two and find a full schedule on your program guide or watch online anytime at journalist mark chissano looks at former new york congressman george santos's rise in politics, to his removal from congress, with his book, the fabulist. watchable tv every sunday on c- span two and find a full schedule on your program guide or watch online anytime@booktv.org. your new bon the last conservative, is the

first full biography of milton friedman let's start offith, who was milton friedman? your new book, milton m friedman, the last conservative, is the first full biography of milton friedman. let's start off with who was milton friedman. >> so milton friedman was probably best known as a famous economist. he, along with john maynard keynes, is one of the most influential economist in the 20th century, and he worked over the course of his career to establish an alternative to keynesian economics and keynesian economic policy, and he was awarded the 1976 nobel prize in economics. but as i show in my book, while he's first and foremost an

economist, he's much more than that. i also called him a philosopher of freedom because he articulated a vision of individual freedom, limited government, personal initiative that really became wrapped up in the 20th century conservative movement and made him really a political icon and also a household figure. >> how did americans really come to know friedman? so i read his famous book capitalism and freedom in high school, but he was also a figure on television. he had a column. how did americans really come to know friedman? >> here is what's interesting. i thought, like maybe you would imagine that oh, capitalism and freedom was the famous book that everyone started reading. but actually his most famous book that really gets him started as a political figure is this 800 page book of economic history that he co-

authored with anna schwartz called a monetary history of the united states. and in this they tell a story of 150 years of american history through the lens of money, how much money there is in the economy, which sounds kind of dry. but then what they do in their most famous chapter, which is called the great contraction, is they go back and they examined the great depression. you have to imagine this book comes out in the early 1960s. it's not that far away in time. people are still around who lived through the great depression, say 30 years before or less. friedman and schwartz argue that the reason the great depression was so bad and lasted so long was because the united states lost a third of the money in circulation due to the banking crisis, and then they go on to argue that the federal reserve system, which was supposed to act as a lender of last resort, had not done its job and had therefore let this crisis in the banking sector spread throughout the whole economy and create decades of misery. now why this is important beyond that critique of the federal reserve is because it feeds into this larger question about the great depression at about capitalism itself. and what friedman and schwartz are implicitly arguing is not

there is a nascent flaw in the capitalist system that emerged in the 1930s. rhetoric, they are saying we can understand this as a failure of human judgment and of state management of the economy, and therefore we know a few things we can fix, and we need not have erected the large apparatus of policy, excuse me, government agencies, policy interventions and government supporting the economy in response to the great depression. they basically say everyone got it wrong. so this argument comes out and it's immediately arresting. it's immediately read by policymakers, widely reviewed by academics, and is also very interesting to politicians. one of the politicians who becomes very interested in this idea is sen. barry goldwater, who is now taking a run for the president in 1964. so the first moment comes with the publication of this book

and this broad discussion, and then friedman signs on as an advisor to goldwater and becomes one of the most effective spokespeople for what he calls the goldwater view of economics. >> that was quite a radical thesis of the time, wasn't it? you take a look at the dominant keynesian models that were there at the time, the dominant paradigms in economics, and what's shocking, at least to a modern audience, i think, and especially to non-economist, is how little role money played in our understanding of the economy before friedman and schwartz really came along and made it a big deal in their book. is it fair to say that this influence, his influence and her influence has lasted to

today and still influences us? >> yeah, absolutely. and i think a lot of what friedman and schwartz proposed seemed outlandish and today seems common sense. when they were writing the book, monetary policy was often said to be pushing on a string. we didn't have any purchase in the economy. our money was kind of a veil that laid over actual economic activity, and their argument is subtle because they are basically saying it is true that the fundamentals of economic growth and activity have to come from other things besides the monetary system. you can't sort of boost the economy by pushing him a lot of money and have that last in any meaningful way. but monetary policy can really knock the economy off course if done badly. so there's a subtlety to the argument but it's safe to say that when they made that, there really wasn't much focus on money at all and we didn't have that kind of data we had today. and basically on a schwartz in particular went and sort of assembled this historical series of the actual quantity of money in the economy at

different points in time, and with that 150 year lens it really gave them a broad perspective and enabled them to make arguments that other economists really weren't interested in or hadn't seen, so yes, it's a great case of two scholars kind of burrowing into an area that their field has left behind and finding something really interesting. >> i want to come back to schwartz in a second, but friedman became really associated with and was, i think there to say, the prime mover for this new way of thinking about the economy, about macroeconomics called monetarism, which really had a long history after him. you mentioned today, what is monetarism and how has it impacted the world and central banking since then? >> so probably the easiest way to summarize monetarism is with the saying that friedman loved to repeat, which is inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon. and so what he meant by that is inflation starts with the central bank or with the monetary authorities, and it also ends there, and this was a very different idea than those

that had been held at the time. so people thought of maybe inflation is caused by labor unions asking for higher wages and you get a wage/price spiral. friedman is like well, maybe that is happening, but it's only happening if you have enough money in the economy to be driving prices up such that labor unions feel they have to ask for that and have to pressure for that. they couldn't do it themselves. in other words, if the quantity of money was fixed there wouldn't be that elasticity to push prices up. and when he talks about inflation he's really talking about a pervasive and consistent rise in the price level generally. so today we tended to modify inflation by saying no, it's gas price inflation or housing price inflation or wage inflation, and friedman was really trying to go a little deeper and say i'm not talking about specific sectors, in the economy i'm talking about a

pervasive trend. what he really did was get everybody's attention on the monetary authorities and their ability to let inflation go or their ability to hem it in, and i think what jumps off both of monetarism and friedman's later theories, which point to the role of expectations and inflation is our whole monetary framework and model today. so the fact that the federal reserve is very open today, first of all it was not in friedman's time. it was like a secret club. they only released reports of what they had done after the fact. they didn't really tell anyone what they were talking about. and one of friedman's insights was inflation, while it's connected to the monetary authorities, it has a pace driven by what people think is going to happen next, so that's why you see things like forward guidance and all the communication with the fed. the other piece of monetarism that's really important is friedman's policy idea, and over time, he came up with what he called a monetary growth rule, and he basically said fine, maybe we have to have a federal

reserve. maybe we are not ready to end the fed although earlier in his career he thought that might be a good idea. so if we have a federal reserve, they should be more accountable to congress and they should be more accountable to everybody by saying this is what we are going to do, and he wanted them to grow the supply of money at a fixed rate. eventually he said something about 4% would be good and it needs to grow because you need to have economic growth, demographic change, expansion. you can't have a flat money supply. but if it's growing at a steady rate, everybody can make their plans and their predictions around that steady rate, and then what should happen is we should forget about monetary policy. if we do it right we should completely forget about it and it sort of shouldn't matter because it's background noise, and the other factors such as innovation, productivity growth, you know, a change over time, these should be what drives economic growth. so again, while we don't talk

about a monetary growth rule per se, the sort of modifications that were made to that idea by central bankers and by monetary economists basically came out to where we are today, which is inflation targeting or frameworks for monetary policy, in which the policymaker says here is what we are trying to do, and that gives outsiders the capacity to judge how well they're doing that. >> one of his famous lines that you bring out many times is he wants to replace the fed with a computer, to do that job. but it's not just that friedman was from the outside, producing these theories with schwartz and others, but he had a personal relationship with many fed chairman. one of the parts of your book that i found the most emotionally effective was his relationship with arthur burns, who had become a sort of, as you tell it, a sort of father figure to friedman in several ways. can you talk about his relationship with burns, how

that sort of got friedman intensely involved with the fed and how that started this long- running correspondence with later fed chairs, but also just start with his relationship with burns and why that was so emotionally affecting? >> it's a really fascinating story. he met burns when he was a young man, probably his late teens, early 20s, when he was an undergraduate at rutgers, and burns was an instructor for his economics classes, and burns was actually not that much older than friedman, but because they met as student and teacher, they had this kind of mentor/mentee bond. friedman lost his father at a young age, right towards the end of high school. you imagine he arrives, it's the great depression, he's getting excited about economics as a field that can offer explanations for this social crisis he's seen around him. he's also a young jewish man at

a moment when opportunity is opening up, but is still quite limited by the fact of being jewish, and here he gets to college and he sees another young jewish man who has been very successful as an economist and is now a professional economist. the two of them really hit it off and have this relationship that friedman would describe as he was my surrogate father and that he looked up to him. as i wrote my book, what i found were these incredible letters that friedman would send to burns at sort of every state of his life. so what i wanted to know, what is friedman thinking and what is freed and feeling. i would often go to what is he writing to arthur burns, because these letters were kind of like a dear diary. very reflective hopes and fears. so that relationship continues. they are always helping each other out where they can. burns is trying to hire friedman. friedman is trying to hire burns. but for most of their life it's a letterwriting or visit a couple of times a year relationship. they also do end up spending

time and summers together near the new hampshire/vermont border, so they connected with each other personally and on a friendship level. time goes on and arthur burns's career advances, and he eventually selected by richard nixon to the head of the federal reserve. so immediately the newspaper is filled with articles saying he had a monetarist in the federal reserve or the federal reserve will now be friedman night or friedman is now in the center of power. so it seems like a great victory for him and i see the first letters. friedman is so happy that burns is there and then comes the bombshell. he opens a newspaper and finds that arthur burns is supporting what's called incomes policy. now incomes policy is a democratic party idea. it's not associated with republicans and is basically an effort to use guidelines and political persuasion to convince labor unions not to raise their wages and convince businesses not to raise their

prices. it's a way to inhibit inflation, and inflation is starting to run in the early 70s in part because the johnson administration is both pursuing an ambitious social agenda and a war in vietnam, and as a consequence has been pushing for looser monetary policy. so that burns comes in as chair of the federal reserve and instead of saying something like friedman might expect, like the fed will do its best to make sure this inflation doesn't get out of hand, he comes up with a completely different proposal. it's not about monetary policy, and to friedman, he is convind that this incomes policy is a first step to wage and price controls. so he reads this in the newspaper and then apparently he goes to sleep and he wakes up in the middle of the night and he writes this letter that i described in the book, and he basically says arthur, how could you do this? i am profoundly shocked and betrayed and what really

interested me was that friedman took this intellectual difference as a real personal difference, and it really threw into question the entire relationship he had, and arthur burns was very offended at this criticism and kind of pushed back, and they had a couple letters back and forth, and then friedman kind of realizes, waits, i'm a critic of the federal reserve. my entire public identity is built on a scholar and a critic of the federal reserve, and if i disagree with what arthur burns is doing, i have to speak up. i can't just say he's my friend and therefore it's fine. so it becomes a question a sort of friedman's own intellectual integrity. and as it turns out, before long, burns is advocating wage and price controls, just like friedman predicted, which to him is just a complete backwards way to approach inflation. it won't work in addressing the fundamentals. so there's a series of these really fraught letters and then they just kind of fizzle out,

and friedman and burns to find a way to connect based on their long history, but the relationship is really profoundly changed. so it was so interesting that he has this moment that you might think is a moment of triumph for him, but it's on a personal level rather tragic. >> it is, and one of the points that i think really brought it home is he wrote this first letter that you described and then i think it was either the next day or shortly thereafter, before burns had even responded, he sends off another letter. which is a little bit more personal land nicer in trying to paper over some of the harshness of his original criticisms, because i think friedman realized what you described very well in the book is the depth of this relationship and perhaps what friedman wrote in his first letter, being negative to that. one of the -- this brings me a bit, i think to friedman's personal life, his family, his background. why was burns such a surrogate father figure?

what happened before friedman met burns that sort of set that up and made that possible? >> i begin by kind of examining his family life. so his parents were immigrants from the area that would now be russia, sort of hungary, eastern europe, and they arrive, and this is a great wave of immigration, jewish immigrants from eastern europe. they end up settling in a small town in new jersey, and there's about 10 other families that are jewish in this much larger sort of anglo protestant world, and from the beginning he is absolutely brilliant, and he loves math, and he decides he'll be an actuary. but the family that he grows up in does not have a great deal of education. they don't have a great deal of social connections. his father is sort of a

middleman, arbitrage her, buys low, sells high. his mother runs a shopping there town so he doesn't have a vision of where he can go. so that's why when he meets burns at rutgers and burns has a graduate degree, has professional work as an economist, and he's from a very similar back friedman, he becomes just a vision of what he can be. and at that point friedman has lost his father, so he's really looking for a mentor, a guy, and his family, while the least supportive of his education, his sisters, who all had equally outstanding, if not better academic records, it was just sort of well, you're going to work to support the family and we are going to put the boy through college. so he had emotional support. he had financial support, but he didn't have a kind of model for his life, and burns really comes that, and burns is a safe harbor in this discipline that's only beginning to open up to jewish professionals. so he knows he can always write to burns about job questions,

interpersonal questions, and feel like burns is on his side and on his team. >> you mentioned the family life of friedman, and he had sisters. his mother, his father died when friedman was very young. and what's interesting, too, of course, is beyond that, the other women in his life who he co-authored with, who he worked with, who influenced his ideas greatly and co-authored them, we mentioned anna schwartz already. of course his wife, rose dir. friedman, was a frequent co- author. why don't you tell us about anna schwartz, with whom he co- authored monetary history of the united states? how common was it back in for economists who are overwhelmingly male to work with women? >> it was very uncommon, especially to have women as co- authors. now schwartz was someone at a similar background, immigrant

background to friedman, but she grew up in new york city so she went to barno college and pretty quickly her professors figured out she was brilliant and she actually started working as a co-author with her professors in college, and then afterwards when she went to graduate school. so she then went to the national bureau of economic research, where she was working under arthur burns. and i talked in some detail in the book about the relationship of burns and schwartz, which was not positive, and schwartz had spent a lot of time in columbia, and she had somehow never gotten a doctorate for all her work, and she had co- authored a three volume history on the british economy, but she was still technically a doctoral student, so then when she was working for the national bureau of economic research, burns got the idea to put her in freedom together, and it really was an inspired idea.

they were both willing to investigate questions that other economists weren't interested in. they were incredibly smart but they had different kinds of minds. schwartz was willing to go deep into the empirical research, which friedman was willing to do that, he simply didn't have the time as a tenured professor at chicago. but this was schwartz's full- time job. schwartz also loved history, so as i look at how they put the monetary history together, it really was schwartz who went back in time. she wanted to look at the civil war era and confederate money, because there were all these monetary experiments at the time, and she thought these would be very revealing about the role money plays in economies. and she also was interested in archival research and pulled out all these ories about the different personalities at the federal reserve. so the two of them worked together for more than 10 years. it was about 12 years, and she would be in new york, he would be in chicago, they would write letters back and forth. so they had the sort of paper trail there of their interactions.

it's a story i tell in the book so i won't tell it all here, but eventually friedman figures out that she still doesn't have a doctorate. and he starts saying to her mentors, like why doesn't she have a doctorate, and it's not until a monetary history is on the cusp of publication that columbia finally decides that anna schwartz deserves a doctorate, and of course the next year the book comes out and it's really the talk of the town, and they got her the degree just in the nick of time. so then i talk about her career as it unfolds after that. by the time -- by the end of her life she has nine honorary doctorates. so she really lives through this shift when woman economists, there's not a place for them in the discipline other than as sort of a worker bee, helping a male economist to where they can be recognized finally as scholars in their own right. >> and you talk about some of his other work with female economists. dorothy brady, margaret reed. you recount in the book that friedman even called himself a feminist at one point. why do you think he was sort of

so far ahead of the rest of the profession? was it the ideas about human capital theory from the university of chicago? was it something else? was it his background? what do you think explains that? >> you know i think part of it is that friedman lived a life in ideas, and that almost all of his closest relationships were people who shared his interest in economics and often shared his particular more free- market economic orientation. so what he saw first about a person really was their ideas rather than say their personality or their sense of humor, or also their gender. it kind of washed out for him. of course he knew these women were women but he didn't automatically assume, as many of his peers seemed to, that therefore they had nothing interesting to contribute to economics. so that's one piece of it. the

other piece of it is that he's married to a fellow economist, rose director, who has a lot of other friends, who are also women economists. so he first gets involved in conceptual research because one of them is writing a paper with rose and their corresponding back and forth, and he kind of grabs the letter and says, here's what i think, and it launches them on this really decade-long conversation, much of which happens in their social time. so again, because friedman is so sort of focused on his interests, when rose's friends come to new hampshire, to vermont, where they have their second home, they are all economist and their idea is a good time is to simply talk economics. out of these conversations, what he eventually publishes as his theory of the consumption of function. when i started my research i had no idea about these other women. sure i knew rose friedman, couldn't miss anna schwartz, and then i found these letters where he's really working out some of his biggest ideas in these letters. so one woman is dorothy brady, and she has a very close

personal relationship with a couple. i talk about how they had a very -- a lost pregnancy, actually a stillbirth. it's very difficult for them and dorothy becomes their main support during this time, and then she connects up to margaret reed, who eventually is up for a position in chicago. and as she's potentially becoming friedman's colleague, he decides to take these conversations they've been having and to write them up in a memo to convince his colleagues that they should hire margaret reed. he would also like them to hire dorothy brady. so eventually margaret reed is hired, brady gets a one or two year position and then from there they move -- the project moves forward. so there's one last facet of his interest and his connection with woman economists, and that goes to the way friedman was always interested in approaches

to economic life, approaches to economic analysis that were established, and was much slower than the rest of his colleagues to say, now that economics is becoming more quantitative and mathematical and model driven, we can sort of set aside all the other work that's been done, and typically women economists worked on consumption. they were figuring out who bought and sold what. they were deeply empirical, adding up how many yams did this household by, what do they pay for a funeral, do they have a larger, larger, a border. they were obsessed with this empirical research that most economists of friedmans status had decided was kind of old news. but friedman was like i still think there is something there. so it also came from his sordid intellectual orientation that made him more receptive to the expertise these women had rather than assuming that was kind of yesterday's news and the future of economics was purely model driven or mathematical. >> the theory of the consumption function was essential for him winning the nobel prize, right? it was one of the papers that was cited for most to justify

giving him the price. >> it's true, yes, and it comes before a monetary history. so as i was describing friedman's rise to fame, the monetary history is really what does it for a broader audience. for economists what really helps restore his reputation is his theory of the consumption function, because he ties it to several key concepts in keynesian economics about -- so the consumption function helps you understand how government stimulus spending or the multiplier will affect consumption decisions. so friedman provides an alternate way of thinking about this question. it's really at the heart of the discipline. so unlike money, where he's kind of coming in from left field, with consumption he's stepping into a live

conversation and you know you have economist to really disagree with friedman and actually personally dislike him, saying we have to reckon with this book and everyone is going to have to reckon with this book from now on. so that's an important publication for him within the field of economics. >> we've briefly mentioned his wife so far, rose director friedman, who was an accomplished economist in her own right. she stopped short of her phd, although later she got an honorary phd. but it's really impossible, i think, to tell the story of milton friedman without telling the story of his wife, who was a co-author, but really like a dynamic duo over time. how did friedman -- how did milton and rose meet? >> so they both were at the university of chicago. they both joined the economics department in 1932, and let me

just pause right there, because that's unusual for a woman to be in an economics department in 1932, pursuing her phd. it's quite unusual. one part of it is that chicago was more open to women then maybe other top universities were. a second is that she had an older brother who had gone to chicago and who convinced his parents to let her come to chicago as an undergraduate, and then he was continuing on for the phd and he convinced her to continue on to the phd. so she had an introduction to the department. so friedman arrives and he's kind of brand-new. doesn't know anybody. rose director has technically just begun her phd program and she already knows the professors. she knows the students. she's been around the department. so she's very comfortable there, and her last name is director, and friedman's last name is friedman, and they are seated alphabetically. so it's very prosaic in the beginning. he's seated near her in class and of course you can imagine this is the one woman in the

class surrounded by young men. so getting her attention is not an easy task and it will take a couple years before they go from a friendship to actually becoming a couple. and then the mores of the time really mean that there's only room for one career in a married couple, and specifically most universities have rules where if they hire the husband they cannot hire the wife in any paid position whatsoever, because it would be considered nepotism. so if the husband in the couple is going to be an economist, almost by definition the woman cannot be a professional economist. so there are a lot of structural reasons she doesn't pursue her degree. she also, from what she says, felt that she would rather devote her time to her family than to pursuing her professional path. so it comes to pass that friedman is married to a sort of. equivalent economist. so he always has someone

interested in his work, talking about what he has to do, and also someone who is more interested in how his ideas can be taken to a broader audience. so what is friedman really does is sort of provide the mor behind his emergence as a blic intellectual. she's the one who puts together capitalism and freedom, you know, takes raw material that milton has and kind of sews it all together, makes it something coherent. she convinces him to do the newsweek column that's incredibly influential, and then later she's a coproducer on free to choose, their pbs television series, and with him co-authors the book that comes out. so she's really indispensable to the public milton friedman as well as doing the basic work of keeping the family going while he's immersed in economics in his every waking moment. >> it's certainly becomes obvious reading your book that his most major public works, free to choose, capitalism and freedom, the great series would

not have happened without her work. something else that comes across, though, in the book, is how intensely private they appear to be. i think you mentioned in their that rose burned a lot of their correspondence. that must -- >> the biographer's curse. >> that must have made your job very difficult. >> you know, guess. for sure. on the other hand, it might have been more material than even i could manage. but it was interesting because yes, if you read two lucky people, which is the memoir they wrote, they quote at length from their memoirs. when i started the project i was like, i would love to see these letters, and i was told they'd been destroyed. i asked both their children,

they said it sounds like something she would do. i had to find other ways. that's why these letters to arthur burns are so valuable, because it's actually the letters between rose and milton would really only capture the early courtship years where the letters to burns kind of capture the whole arc of his career. and then in some cases, like i wasn't really able to say exact we how did she influence the writing of capitalism and freedom, because i wasn't able to find any drafts of the book or really any correspondence with the publisher about it, and that was very curious to me. that makes me think that probably rose freedom was worried someone like me would come along and decided to kind of pull that more personal material out of the archive. so i guess i can understand her point of view, and every biography has its challenges, and you never have all of the sources you want. but i did my best to kind of show their family life, although i was restricted in what i could really document. >> how was their family life? >> apparently resembled an economics seminar in many ways. you know, just nonstop arguments and debates. they had a code for saying, for

apologizing. i'm trying to remember what it was. i think it was never too meant i was wrong and you were right, so the fact that they had these kind of numerical symbols i think is really interesting and really telling. so it was a really close family but it was, i think, driven by argument and debate sort of at its core. and i learned that milton was a very laissez-faire parent, as you might imagine. he would say to the kids on halloween, go ahead, eat as much candy as you want. and apparently after a while he was like okay, no, i need to take some of the candy away. but he tended to be more lax and rose tended to be more a bit sort of disciplinarian and enforcer. but they lived in the university of chicago in hyde park. they were in this academic enclave and it wasn't until the children are towards the end of

their childhood and launching that they realized, oh, that is really famous. they didn't shadow over their childhood, which i think was probably a good thing. >> you mentioned there memoir titled two lucky people. now i must it it as somebody who has read a lot of work by friedman, i was sort of baffled by the title of that book, because so much of friedman's work, both the popular work and a lot of the academic work focuses on human behavior affected by incentives, and how a lot of the individual initiative responding to incentives is what guides a lot of achievement and social advancement and economic advancement. but then you have the title of their memoirs and it's luck please a huge role. what do you think explains that? >> it's a great question. i think there's two aspects to it. one is they are looking back at sort of the scope of their life

and it's been a very successful life, and they are wanting to be modest, and they are wanting to be grateful. and they are recognizing, had they been born in a different place, none of this would've happened. so the villages that they came from turned out to be stops on the way to auschwitz, and they know they would not be alive if they hadn't come to the united states. so part of it is kind of a reflection of that. there is a theme in his, especially in his early work, that i try to pull out, and it's pretty much muted by the time he's famous, although you are pointing out it comes back. it's not just all about incentives and he's aware that a capitalist system it's not a simple matter of you get what you deserve, because he's aware that people have different endowments and people start from different places. so one of his major policy ideas that i talk about throughout his life is he starts

-- his first idea he advocates for is a minimum income, what we talk about today as a universal basic income, and that's because he just recognizes there are some people who, through fate or fortune, or at a moment in time, are not going to be able to compete in this incentive driven market economy. so therefore, what a government should do is provide a basic sustenance, a basic income that people can always rely upon. so he is aware that locke does play a huge role in this, and especially in the early part of his career. he's really setting himself up in opposition to particularly american conservatives, some american business conservatives who are taking much more --

what you call a social darwinist line. we shouldn't provide any support whatsoever, and unemployment support or this or that will ruin incentives, and people should just sort of take what's coming to them. he's always opposed to that from the very beginning, both on i think umana terry and and ethical reasons and also because he believes that is not good economic policy, that you need to have some resilience and some supports, because capitalism is a dynamic, evolving system. >> enough or continuing on the luck theme here, one of the more unlucky moments, partially due to his own actions and others, but also on the was when he went to chile and that that time chile was by the dictator augustine pinochet. friedman went there to give a series of lectures down there and actually met with pinochet. can you talk about that and controversy, and how that sort of put a pall over his nobel prize? >> yeah, i said that was one of the more difficult moments for friedman. so i should just start by saying he believed there was

going to visit a country, going to advise its government, did not mean endorsing that government, and he had gone to many different places, from communist china to yugoslavia to chile, so he saw this as just another thing. if you are an expert in the macroeconomy, particularly you are an expert in inflation, it makes a lot of sense that a country, i think when he came there it was 300% annualized inflation down from 600% under ina. so this is a pervasive inflationary situation and it just agents to him, okay, i'm being asked to come and give my advice on how to correct -- make this inflation go away, basically. the other thing is that -- knowing that, i think it's really important and it's been interpreted as free and went to talk with pinochet because he thought he was a great guy, and that's not really the case at all. so then the other piece that is kind of out there is this idea that friedman's ideas inspired pinochet or inspired the queue, or inspired that. it really actually happens that

the economy is doing so poorly and it's about a year into pinochet's regime that they decide we have such big problems, namely this 300% inflation. we have to do something new. so a new group of economists come to the fore and they invite friedman to sort of explain what they are doing both to the inner structure and are of the regime and to the broader chilean republic. that's the context in which he comes. but what happens next is that pinochet launches an assassination campaign and he actually assassinates a former member of the allende regime on the streets of washington, d.c., so it's a terrible crime. and just a few weeks later the nobel prize committee gives the prize to friedman. so the kind of combination of those two coming together, it looks like this sort of thinking people of the world

are okay with pinochet and have sort of endorsed him by endorsing friedman, and i think that's an over interpretation, but nonetheless, i can see how that happens, given how destructive the pinochet regime is. friedman doesn't see this at all. he really has no idea this is coming and he's sort of dogged by controversy in his public appearances from then on. he can never really understand it, because again, i've been to these other places. i wasn't endorsing the regime when i went there, and what i think is it's this transitional moment where human rights are kind of emerging as of broad popular concern, and friedman has very much the economist, kind of technocratic orientation, like i'm a problem solver and a fixer, and i'll go where i needed. and there is another set of ideas coming out, which is sort of politics of purity, and that any engagement is tantamount to endorsement, and the way to really telegraph your moral standing is to not engage in

anything that might be morally odious. that's just not the perspective that friedman takes, particularly in a situation where he feels like he has something to say about inflation. so it's a difficult aftermath for him and i would say over time he would eventually -- he tells pinochet if you liberalize the economy, eventually you are going to have to liberalize politically, and that is in fact what happens in chile, and i think by the end of his life he views that will trajectory has ultimately ending up in a positive place. >> that is the great irony of this whole episode, is the public speeches, many of them he gave while he was in chile, which is just for less than a week. many of them were about how economic freedom and liberalization will lead to political freedom, and even in his only 45 minute meeting with pinochet he brought that up, as recount, which was quite a gutsy move, i think, to bring

up to a dictator. but if i were to summarize friedman's thoughts about politics, about economics, i think just the phrase capitalism and freedom is probably the simplest explanation. he changed his mind a little bit. he went a little bit back and forth about capitalism and free markets leading to political freedom and social freedom and in different times of his life sort of thought about maybe there is a test between democracy and freedom. can you describe some of his thoughts about this and where he really sort of ended up by the time he got older? >> yeah, i think part of the story is when he wrote capitalism and freedom, he was addressing an american audience and his whole life had been a professor in american academia, and he felt he really needed to

emphasize academic freedom, that in the '60s there was not the economic side of freedom in the united states was not fully appreciated. he really wanted to push that forward. so in the aftermath of chile sort of realizes, it got talking so much about economic freedom, maybe people haven't realized political freedom matters to me. so he starts to recalibrate a little bit and realize that you need both sort of working together. you can't just have economic freedom because if you don't have political freedom eventually the state will take over the economic processes. so that's kind of one modification. the other comes towards the end of his life, as he's observing events in asia. now when it comes to china, he remains convinced that china is somewhere on the trajectory that chile took. he thinks there will be more tnn squares. he thinks there will be more protest and he thinks that eventually the chinese communist government will fall, just as the ussr fell. but what catches his eye are we

might call the asian tiger, asian city states, singapore, hong kong, south korea, that are economically very prosperous but limit political freedom in significant ways. so he ends up deciding that maybe there's something called civic freedom, which to him is the ability to gather. so he's not a totalitarian regime, in other words, you don't have a stasi or a secret police keeping track of you, but you still can't vote so you really don't have a choice of your political system. but you have some limited freedom, civic and economic. so by the end of his life he's realizing it's markup look at it, and i would say this implicitly of capitalism and freedom has a lot to do with this simplicity of the world such that it was, when you had a bipolar world roughly, united states representing capitalism and its allies, soviet russia and its allies representing communism or planned economy. it was easier to kind of make these syllogistic claims. after the cold war you just see

a proliferation of different forms of governance and market economies. so he's trying to sort of ingest what he has to in the closing years of his life. >> one of the interesting things is being ahead of a lot of these intellectual trends we talked about, being ahead of social trends that friedman was, is he was always a fierce critic of communism. but that wasn't unusual. but what was unusual is that so many other folks like john kenneth galbraith, economist paul samuelson, others thought that the soviet union was doing fairly well economically and friedman sort of always maintained that they were a kind of a basket case, a basketcase economy. why do you think friedman was so -- i guess right about that,

ahead of his time about that, while so many of these other well-known economists were wrong? samuelson, in his textbooks, which everybody had to read, the dominant economics textbooks, it talked about soviet economic growth converging with that of the united states over time. like what did friedman see that so many of these other brilliant economists missed? >> i think some of it goes back to his interest in empirical studies. so he had a couple of students who were working on the soviet economy, and so he was being a little bit more attention to sort of what you could measure that was not in the official statistics or what was reported. so i think part of it is not just assuming that you have a model of how economies develop, but actually questioning what's there underneath. and then i think part of it was just his very strong belief that economic growth comes from this aggregate of myriad individual decisions, and that

people have to be free to make individual decisions, have individual initiative, and if that was being snuffed out in the soviet union, that they simply would not be able to compete. now you know part of this analysis is drawing on the work and ideas of fa hayek and ludovic thanasis, who basically said you can't have a price system in a planned economy, and if you don't have a price system, people don't have the information they need in order to make good decisions economically, so you are closing everybody's eyes and there's no way an economy would be able to function in that way. so he's always very ethically opposed to the idea of a planned economy, and he just thinks there isn't really any evidence it will work so he's just very suspicious of the claims that it will. also because he has no reason

to want to believe this, because he does not want more economic planning in the united states. so some of the more credulous economists may be credulous because they think it will strengthen their handing the policy debates within the united states, and that's not meaningful for friedman. >> one of the other things that really struck me in your book is you had a few quotes from modern politicians like president joe biden when he was running. one of them is, quote, he said -- jobiden said this during the 2020 campaign, milt friedman isn't running the show anore, and then in another occasion biden said when di milton frieden friedman diane become king? i thought these quotes were extraordinary, as they were stating over a decade after friedman had passed away. i mean why is friedman just so important nowadays, even still that presidential candidates during campaigns in 2020 are talking about him and his ideas?

>> i found those quotes fascinating, as well. that's one reason i wanted to write this book, because friedman is one of those few economists that becomes kind of a touchstone after his death and just in politics and our thinking about society more broadly. so i think what that really points to is the way in which friedman's ideas, although he started off very closely allied with a movement that called itself conservative, with conservative politicians, republican politicians, his ideas about the importance of market incentives, about the benefits from reducing the size of government, focusing on monetary policy, these kind of float out where they started and became really pervasive in the general thinking of people on the left, right and center. and it can't all be laid at friedman's feet, and one thing i try to do in the book is show these bigger shifts in economic

structures across the world into the 1970s. inflation has enormous consequences in many different ways. the fall of the soviet union has enormous consequences, so friedman's ideas don't cause these but they help us interpret and understand them. when i look at that biden quote, what that says to me is you might read it at first blush and say this is biden criticizing republican economic policy, but it's also biden criticizing people within the democratic party who might be more friendly to friedman style ideas, and it's really kind of renting a flag of allegiance to a more progressive economic outlook. so that quote tells you how important friedman is to kind of intramural and aquatic party politics as well as being a representative of a sort of consensus republican view that has been very dominant, i would say until recently. that just shows you that friedman has become definitely larger than life and a symbol

of everything that the united states has experienced over the past 50 years, really. >> he definitely had become a symbol. friedman was a scholar, a public intellectual, a policy advisor to pres.s and governments around the world. he was a brilliant communicator. you watches tv appearances on phil donahue on pbs or in the free to choose series, and the ideas are so clear and well communicated, and of course a big supporter of free markets and capitalism. is there anybody like him alive today who has all of those skills wrapped up into one? >> i don't think there is and i think there's sort of two reasons. one is -- there are economists to do great work popularizing economic ideas, who are known outside of their discipline, so there's kind of a lane that

friedman created for public intellectual economist. but few of those also have the connections to policymakers, and few of them have the breadth and depth of economic thinking that friedman had, and i think there's kind of two reasons for this. one is what we talked about earlier in the conversation. friedman is not just friedman. he has a number of women collaborators and because of the mores of their day cannot be independent intellectuals. so they pour their intellectual energy and their gifts and their strengths into milton friedman, and he tremendously benefits from that. so that wouldn't happen today. margaret reed today would be elevated in her own right and given full support of her colleagues, given a workshop and training her own students, and she lives in a world where she has to give her ideas to friedman for them to go anywhere

. and also it's the media landscape. friedman is on youtube. he'd be great on youtube if he were alive. he'd probably have a mean sub stack. >> a tiktok. >> there's nothing like a newsweek column today. it really was the era of big media. we had a few networks, we had a few magazines that educate educated people read. we are just in a much more fragmented media landscape. it's much harder for one person to emerge as a sort of symbolic figure had. the last thing i will say is that friedman became allied with a conservative movement that was sort of growing under the surface for a a while, and first into prominence and it was looking for people who could carry the message broader. so he really stood on the top of other conservatives who saw him as a good spokesperson. and so, we have so much political flux. today i think it's harder for an intelltual to stand on top of a coherent and evolving and

growing political movement, that maybe it will happen. i'll definitely be watching. it could happen in the next coming years. friedman, a conservative. he often described as a conservative. it was surprising to me when i received the book in the mail, frankly, i have never really thought of friedman as a en conservative. he often described himself as aa liberal, a classical liberal. he said he was a small allen libertarian. sort of an ideological libertarian at times but he said he was a republican at different times, he said he was a radical. but i never got the sense conservative. why did you choose that subtitle, the last conservative about the last part and the conservative park? >> you know, there are a couple different reasons i did, and i am ry aware that friedman did not call himself a

conservative and probably one not like the title of it, but he didn't go so far as fa hayeke did to write an essay of why i am not a conservative. maybe if he had written that essay, i would say i can't move forward with this title. but when you look at the people he interacted with other people he gave his ideas to within american politics, those who found him most compelling, most of those people call themselves conservatives. and conservatism in the united states is different than conservatism in other countries, in large part because it incorporates what in other countries is called liberalism or neoliberalism, a celebration of the market, and celebrating capitalism is a dynamic economic system, is in some ways intention with being conservative, because it drives a lot of social change. nonetheless, in the united states, you have sort of this highbred political movement of people who are socially or religiously conservative with economists dedicated to the free market, you know, during

the cold war era, people who felt very strongly commodious people come together, they call themselves conservative now called by others conservative, and friedman is part of this movement so, that is sort of empirically a reason to call him back. the other way that is maybe even more substantive is understanding this approach as an economist, which was to look at ideas, traditions, and approaches that had defined the discipline that were really being left behind in the postwar era. and to say, madonna second, es there is something here worth conserving but so, i do see him as someone who kind of concerns the inherited wisdom of his discipline, some monetary and some -- an older idea that most economists in the 'that you said it is not really relevant anymore. likewise, the very practice of doing empirical, historical research was very out of fashion. and so, i think that was his intellectual orientation, i think within american society

was his political orientation. in terms of the last, i mean, that is really gesturing a little bit to the current state of affairs where conservatism is very much in flux and i think contested and up for grabs, and the type of conservatism that friedman represented, that synthesis of free-market capitalism, religious traditionalism, and aggressive foreign policy, and a sort of orientation to global markets and to global influencea that synthesis, and the pieces are all there, but they don't come together in the same coherent way they did when friedman was at the height of his influence. so, i think it is sort of a provocation and sort of an invitation, we don't know if he is the last conservative or not. it may look like that right now. for some people, that will be cause for celebration, for others, cause for loss, but the book is not yet written, so with my book, i want to give

people resources to think about kind of how he got here and to think, wh in our past and we want to carry with us into the future? thank you very much, professor burns, it certainly was a provoking title, frit certainly provoked to me, but the book is really wonderful. it is well-written. it is thorough. it gives insights into his life that i had no idea of. and the book again is milton tran34: the last conservative. so, thank you for writing it and thank you for being here today. >> thank you so much.

>> we are here at a special place that commemorates the importance and the role that she has played and continues to play in identifying eatonville as a literary destination. this week, east kennedy boulevard originally was a part of the road system called the old highway, so during that time of hurston, she was born in 1981, died in 1960, her parents brought her to eatonville when she was basically a toddler. so, in the early 1900s, this roadway now called east kennedy boulevard was actually the old highway. it was the link between northeast orange county, made

the land, and in northwest orange county. and so, the road itself is a historic roadway. now, we are in a space that looks a lot different from modern eatonville or eatonville of the day, in fact, this is a space that really harkens back what we call old florida. and we are standing in a place where hurston is known to have done some of her writings. you know, at a certain point, she came back and forth to eatonville, and at times when she did stay here, we called this tuxedo junction. it is actually located right on the -- on the shore so to speak , of the lake, it is a place, as i say, that she is known to have done some of her writing.

now we are at the matilda motzi house museum, and we are here because matilda mosley, known as tilly, was hurston's best friend as a child. matilda mosley was a direct descendent of the founder of the town of eatonville, joe clark, especially the place like florida and the south. the porch is -- it is a social gathering place for family and friends, and here, we actually are stationed or positioned in the porch. what you see here is -- it really represents the essence of hurston as a folklorist. you know, she was of course the writer of -- [ indescernible ], but she was also folklorist and an anthropologist. what you see in this photograph

if she is actually collecting folklore material, and this home, i think, represents a kind of tying of the bow, because you have a family, a founding family, you have the connection between the childhood friendships of hurston and tilly, and maintained throughout adulthood, so you have that social interaction combined with the establishment of the town as an incorporated municipality, the first incorporated municipality in the united states, and you have the writer -- the genius hurston that makes and establishes eatonville as a literary destination for readers around the globe.