Milton Friedman's Song of Myself

by Christopher Pearson

Even before he received the Nobel Prize in economics in 1976, Milton Friedman's professional achievements ranked him with the century's most influential economists and distinguished him as the intellectual progenitor of laissez-faire economics as an academic discipline.

The most interesting chapters of Two Lucky People, his memoirs co-authored with his wife Rose last year, are those that contravene convention.

For example, Milton was rejected for a professorship at the University of Wisconsin early in his career, for some observers a skirmish in an ideological war between the libertarian Chicago school and the collectivist Madison school. As the Friedmans point out, Milton's rejection was largely the product of budget wrangling, not ideological conflict. Milton had not even committed himself to libertarian economics at the time.

Indeed, several years after the debacle at Madison, he would testify before Congress that the way to reduce inflation was through taxation, price controls, rationing, and war bond campaigns. Coming from a man who would make his reputation opposing these kinds of Keynesian prescriptions, such statements are remarkable. Milton himself admits, “I had completely forgotten how thoroughly Keynesian I then was.”

Two Lucky People also succeeds in its attempt to confront the rancor surrounding the awarding of the Nobel Prize to Milton in 1976. After the Nobel Committee announced its decisions to award him the prize, some observers, including several previous Nobel winners, protested. Milton Friedman, they objected, was a liege of fascism because he had served as an economic advisor to General Pinochet after the autocrat's successful 1973 coup.

In response, Friedman contended at the time and continues to maintain in his memoirs that he merely met on a few occasions with Chilean economists attempting to reconfigure the country's economy. He disavows any involvement beyond that with the Pinochet regime.

Though most of the Chilean economists were trained at the University of Chicago, giving them the nickname the “Chicago boys”, Friedman claims he had never had extensive involvement with them, even while they were studying at the University.

Whether he should have had any involvement at all with the Pinochet government is perhaps an open question. But the contention that his advice in Chile should have disqualified him from the Nobel Milton rightly dismisses.

The problem with Two Lucky People is that genuinely engaging passages are sandwiched between unduly thick sections of detail about la vie Friedman.

At nearly 600 pages plus three appendices plus notes and an extensive bibliography, the book is simply too long and too comprehensive for its own good. For some reason (perhaps indulgent editing), the Friedmans feel the need to preserve for posterity such trivialities as descriptions of the men their daughter has dated and her parents' opinion of them, banal life observations (“We had never been so aware of the diversity, not only of nature but also of people in our country”), and the entire text of a page and a half poem their son David wrote in college (Harvard) bemoaning the loss of Barry Goldwater.

The inclusion of such arcana detracts from what could have been a much more informative and enjoyable account. Whatever a book's other merits, one can tolerate only so many sentences like “Unfortunately, thanks to the advances of dietetics, recognition of the ill effects of fat and cholesterol, we rarely have potato pancakes today.”

Despite some of the less than scintillating narrative in Two Lucky People, the memoirs do evince what accounts for part of Milton's success in disseminating his ideas. He is and always has been a clear writer, quite a challenge in a discipline that necessitates the use of jargon like “linear stochastic difference equations.”

In fact, Friedman shares his lucidity with his competition for the unofficial tittle of the century's most influential economist, John Maynard Keynes. Being able to be understood is the first step towards prominence in any field, save perhaps literary criticism.

Also like his intellectual foil Keynes, Friedman attempted to shift economics from an exclusive focus on abstract theory towards problems in the empirical every-day world. Several chapters of Two Lucky People are devoted to Milton's public policy work. Among other policy endeavors, he served as an advisor to Presidents Nixon and Reagan as well as Barry Goldwater, was instrumental in the abolishment of the military draft and he remains a driving force in the school choice movement.

And in contrast to economists who disdain writing for general audiences as mere “journalism,” both Friedman and Keynes attempted to popularize their views directly. By some measures, Friedman was the more successful of the two in that regard. The Friedmans' 1964 treatise Capitalism and Freedom, one of the books they geared towards the general public, has sold over 400,000 copes. Free to Choose, the companion to the PBS television series, is among the best-selling non-fiction books of all time.

The spectacular recent failures of economic planning do not signal the inevitable triumph of laissez-fire. Capitalism must still be persuasively and articulately defended. For their success in that enterprise, Milton and Rose Friedman will continue to exert influence in both the academic community and public policy debates at large. Whether their memoirs will achieve a similarly enduring significance, however, is far less certain.