Over cigars and brandy in the summer of 1941, with the fate of Britain still very much in doubt, Winston Churchill remarked to American war correspondent Quentin Reynolds, “I like a man who grins when he fights.” Anyone who saw Milton Friedman argue couldn’t help but notice his slight but ever-present grin, making him the emblematic happy warrior, even amidst bitter attacks. Partly this arose from his disposition, character, and humility. Alan Greenspan observed Friedman’s “utter disregard for status.” His University of Chicago colleague Arnold Harberger noted that he had never once known Friedman to have engaged in a personal attack, insinuation, or innuendo.

Though Friedman’s genial composure likely contributed to the sometimes demented hatred his ideological opponents had for him, this is not the whole story. From Jennifer Burns’s new biography, Milton Friedman: The Last Conservative, one learns there was another reason for his grin: an automobile accident as a teen sent young Milton through the front windshield and cut his upper right lip. The resulting scar permanently lifted his lip, “adding to the impish cast of his features.”

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This is one of many illuminating details in Burns’s capacious book, which is a triumph of the biographical art. A professor of history at Stanford and author of the well-received Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right (2009), Burns combines a chronological blend of personal detail and intellectual history with just enough wider political context to deliver a comprehensive portrait of Friedman, his times, and his legacy. Burns debunks or corrects a number of persistent misconceptions of his ideas and concludes with lasting lessons from his story—even if it cuts against the book’s subtitle, The Last Conservative, the defects of which Burns admits at the outset. One suspects the publisher pressed this subtitle on the project to help its marketing appeal. Burns justifies it by the fact that the larger, self-conscious conservative movement in which Friedman was a key figure has receded amidst changes and challenges from its present successors. She skillfully handles the vectors of this scene and the current-day appraisals of Friedman, concluding that he still has much to offer today’s conservative movement.

A book on Milton Friedman cannot help being, as Burns observes, “a partial biography of economics, the master discipline of the twentieth century.” She succeeds spectacularly at this task, keeping Friedman as the central character in a wider drama. Academic readers in particular will profit from the book’s treatment of the kaleidoscopic character of leading economics departments, most especially Chicago, but also MIT, Yale, Columbia, and others. There are some parallels and lessons to be drawn for all disciplines that wrestle with where, how, and, most especially, by whom current conventions should be challenged.

Burns shows that Friedman’s ideas often included careful refinements and caveats beyond the simplistic headlines attached to them. At the center of her evaluation is a proposition that will seem startling to admirers and critics alike: Friedman should be understood as a political economist, whose true anchor was philosophical and ethical rather than quantitative—an irony for someone known as the great champion of the quantity theory of money. (This is not to say that he wasn’t fully competent at precise data measurement and analytical demands. I recall vividly being present at a dinner party with Friedman during which he argued with the president of a regional Federal Reserve Bank the fine points of which monetary aggregate is most important—M1, M2, or M3.)

Burns writes: “He never completed the transition in motion around him, remaining at heart a political economist rather than an economist.” The long tradition of political economy, stretching back through John Stuart Mill to Adam Smith, is held in low regard today, with academic programs in political economy—where they exist at all—inhabiting a ghetto. Political economy, charge its opponents, isn’t and can’t be sufficiently empirical. The “transition in motion around him” that Burns references is largely the turn of academic economics to math-centrism. (The same can be said of contemporary “scientific” political science.)

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Friedman produced substantial empirical work throughout his long career, and thus, writes Burns, “readers may be surprised to learn how vigorously Friedman resisted his discipline’s turn to ever more sophisticated mathematics.” This wasn’t simply a quarrel over methodology; rather, Friedman was primarily “concerned with questions of governance, ethics, and justice.” In another life he could have been a leading political scientist, if not a political philosopher. Here and there the possibility peeks out. In a 1952 letter to the Austrian-school economist Fritz Machlup, Friedman disparaged the fears of both Right and Left that the U.S. could descend into fascism or socialist dictatorship because, he argued, America was unlikely to shed its core principles of individual liberty. Most revealing in the letter is this line: “You need not only a Hindenberg—Hitler—Von Papen; you also need a Hegel.” Hegel may or may not be fairly implicated in the arrival of Nazism in Germany, but this comment shows Friedman’s understanding of the dominance of philosophical ideas over pure material or economic forces.

This aspect of Friedman’s intellectual disposition explains what Burns calls the “sheer scope and scale of his work,” which was “not the product of a pure ideologue.” He changed his mind from time to time, was remarkably prescient about where current trends would lead, and won grudging acknowledgement from adversaries. Friedman’s “ideas and insights proved persuasive to many,” Burns argues, “because they matched experience, offered new ways to tackle old problems, and predicted what would happen next.” Although principally known for refining price theory and monetarism and thus overthrowing the Keynesian consensus that took hold in the mid-20th century, he is also remembered for spearheading the drive to end the draft, as well as the policy ideas of school choice (“vouchers”) and the negative income tax, today rebranded as universal basic income.

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Burns highlights the importance of Friedman’s key mentors when he was a student and young academic, and later his peer collaborators and his own best students. Many of those in his orbit also won the Nobel Prize in economics, such as George Stigler, Friedrich Hayek, Gary Becker, James Buchanan, and Ronald Coase. One person in particular stands out for influencing Friedman’s strong moral outlook: Frank H. Knight. Knight is nearly forgotten today, but in the mid-20th century he cut an impressive swath at Chicago and can in some ways be considered one of the founders of the “Chicago School” of economics.

Knight wrote significant works challenging the current orthodoxy about entrepreneurship and market dynamics—especially Risk, Uncertainty, and Profit (1921)—but he is better understood as a social philosopher. He had a serious interest in philosophy and theology, and although he professed to be an atheist his regard for religion prompted the quip, “There is no God, and Frank Knight is His prophet.” At root he rejected the “gear-drive” view popular among many economists that human behavior and choices can be explained fully by rational self-interest. Among his many essays on non-economic topics, for example, is a long treatment of natural law in the work of the Catholic theologian Jacques Maritain. Burns tells us that Max Weber was “one of the few thinkers he did not scorn.” “Philosophy came first, I think, for Frank Knight,” Allan Bloom wrote in 1988. (Knight and Bloom were so well acquainted that Knight attended Bloom’s doctoral exam, where he challenged what he thought was Bloom’s hidden moral absolutism!)

At Chicago, Friedman fell in with “the Room Seven Gang,” which Burns says “revolved primarily around Knight.” Room Seven was the venue for semi-formal workshops where vigorous arguments ensued over the fertile flood of ideas from the group’s formal classes, especially Knight’s “Economics 301: Price and Distribution Theory.” In addition to Knight, several other Chicago figures loom large in influencing the evolution of Friedman’s thought, especially Henry Simons and Jacob Viner, but also Lloyd Mints, who, even more than Knight, is a forgotten figure today. Fellow graduate students or faculty participants in the Room Seven Gang included Stigler, Allen Wallis, Aaron Director (Friedman’s brother-in-law), and the precocious Paul Samuelson, destined to become Friedman’s greatest intellectual adversary. Room Seven is where Friedman and the circle refined price theory, Chicago’s most notable contribution to mid-century economics, and an important precursor to Friedman’s monetary insights.

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Burns carefully debunks the view that the emerging Chicago School economists were free-market absolutists, opposed to government economic intervention of any kind. At the outset of the Great Depression the Chicago Economics Department called for substantial government intervention, which Friedman embraced. But Burns is equally careful in debunking the popular view that the Friedman of the 1930s was a New Dealer. Although he cast his first vote for Franklin Roosevelt in 1936 and went to work on the periphery of the New Deal with the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), there is considerable evidence that Friedman never was caught up in the newfangled Keynesian doctrines, mostly because he had his head down in detailed statistical work at the NBER. The outlines of many of his later major works, especially Monetary History of the United States (1963, co-authored with Anna Schwartz) can be seen in this period, as Friedman perceived defects in the conventional wisdom about the causes and course of the Depression.

A key event with lasting relevance occurred in World War II, when Friedman worked for the Statistical Research Group in the Treasury Department. Friedman was assigned to work on statistical analysis of test results of new metal alloys the defense industry was developing for the war. The process was slow and time-consuming, and Friedman thought of a shortcut, proposing an integrated model that would extrapolate from previous test results to predict how new alloys would perform. If the model worked, it would significantly speed up the development of new weapons systems. He tested his model on an early IBM mainframe computer at Harvard: “The equation checked out: it matched all the data Friedman had collected from the field.”

As a test Friedman proposed two new alloys his model predicted would work. As Burns recounts:

The results were sobering: both failed within hours…. His extensive calculations had not mapped onto the physical world. The episode left a deep mark on Friedman. And its lessons were readily transferable to economics. The simultaneous equations he had used for his alloys were the very same ones economists were beginning to use in constructing general equilibrium models.

This kind of modeling, Friedman came to believe, was best understood as an exercise in tautology. (Climate modelers and political science regression model fanatics should take note.) Friedman arrived early to the related view that “observation could never be truly neutral; the investigator had always a selection bias of some sort.”

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And yet Friedman produced the most significant empirically based innovation in economics in the second half of the 20th century: the quantity theory of money. Once again Burns’s narrative offers important qualifications and distinctions. Although Friedman’s monetarism recommended a steady rate of money growth and had some predictive ability, it was not a model offering precise outcomes or time frames, nor was it easy for central banks to implement consistently. He frequently noted the uncertainties of both data and economic responses, admitting when he was wrong about an expected outcome in growth or inflation rates. But his framework proved more rigorous than the competing economic policy premises such as the Phillips Curve (the supposed inflation-unemployment tradeoff beloved of Keynesians).

Beyond Friedman’s direct contributions to economics are his many policy ideas—derived from his philosophical attachment to free markets and free individuals—most of which have now been implemented to a degree. The negative income tax was the cornerstone for the Earned Income Tax Credit, and school choice is now advancing rapidly, with an assist from the COVID lockdowns, after decades of intransigent opposition from the powerful teachers’ unions. His enthusiasm for conservative political leaders starting as early as Robert Taft and Dwight Eisenhower and continuing with Barry Goldwater, Margaret Thatcher, and Ronald Reagan is well covered.

These and other novel policy ideas burst onto the public scene and acquired political momentum through two of Friedman’s departures from purely academic work. Both school vouchers and the negative income tax were centerpieces of his best-selling 1962 book, Capitalism and Freedom, which established him as a public intellectual. Still in print today, the book was translated into 18 languages and sold half a million copies in its first year, proving especially popular with younger readers and the nascent libertarian movement. Then, in 1966, Friedman began writing a regular bi-weekly column (alternating with his nemesis Paul Samuelson) for Newsweek magazine, which brought Friedman and his ideas to millions of general readers. He continued the column until 1984, by which time he had written over 300 columns. His public profile reached its zenith with another best-selling book and hit documentary series on PBS in 1980, Free to Choose. By this point he was arguably the most famous economist of the century, displacing Keynes.

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Burns questions whether the 1980s deserve to be considered the “Age of Friedman,” as Friedman himself spent much of the decade criticizing the Fed’s erratic policy lurches and performance. (“Should We Disown Milton Friedman?” was one of the Claremont Institute’s earliest working papers in 1983. Tom Silver announced a resounding “no,” explaining why the Fed was failing to practice Friedmanite monetary discipline.) By the end of the 1970s, even John Kenneth Galbraith, the patron saint of leftist economics, wrote that “the age of John Maynard Keynes gave way to the age of Milton Friedman.” By the 1990s, historian Gary Gerstle argues, Friedman had conquered even the Democratic Party. Lately, of course, Joe Biden declared that “Milton Friedman isn’t running the show anymore.” This was followed by the largest inflationary spike in 40 years.

Today, Friedman’s critics make him the avatar of “neoliberalism,” though he rejected this label. Burns brings out how most of the criticisms depend on “egregious misreading,” noting that “[l]iberal economists resisted many of Friedman’s ideas simply because they clashed with their own preconceptions.” Almost forgotten is that Friedman disliked the 1992 NAFTA treaty. A true free-trade treaty, he said, only needs to be about three pages long, not the 1,000-page plus NAFTA whose concessions and requirements amounted to managed trade. He was critical of the so-called “Washington Consensus” of the 1990s that is the supposed cornerstone of neoliberalism, and he long called for abolishing the Federal Reserve, a position usually thought associated only with Ron Paul-style libertarians. He opposed the Iraq War at the outset in 2003 (though his wife Rose supported it). Much of the populist Right of the Trump era appears uninterested in Friedman, and rejects what is sometimes called “zombie Reaganism.” As Burns notes, “the great financial crisis [of 2008] triggered a generational shift away from capitalism that was not confined to the left.”

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Friedman died in 2006 before that financial crash, but one can easily imagine that he would have found a compelling and pithy way of attacking the “failure of capitalism” narrative that took hold in its aftermath. Just as he demonstrated that it was government failure more than market failure that had made the Great Depression so severe (by allowing the money supply to contract catastrophically), government distortions were a substantial cause of the crash of 2008, as Thomas Sowell—a Friedman student—Steve Hanke, and Peter Wallison, among others, powerfully contended.

Likewise when the COVID shutdown—the “two weeks to flatten the curve” that somehow stretched over two years—threatened to implode a full-employment economy, Fed chairman Jerome Powell, citing his predecessor Ben Bernanke’s phrase, said the crisis made necessary a “helicopter drop” of money to stave off collapse. It was Friedman who originated the “helicopter drop” phrase in 1969, and Burns makes a persuasive case that the Fed’s “quantitative easing” after both the 2008 financial crisis and COVID followed Friedman’s understanding, including why neither of those vast expansions of money produced inflation—until the Fed let it go on too long, amid Biden’s blowout spending starting in 2021.

There is no economist with Friedman’s clarity and celebrity today (the partial exception being Sowell, who turned 94 this year)—no one combining deep analytical chops with the ability to communicate to a mass audience. Academic economics is more fixed on income inequality than understanding how markets work, but the argument proceeds through advanced models and statistical analysis of doubtful quality, and inaccessible to the public. The wholly positivist discipline neglects any of the moral grounding that Friedman and his Chicago colleagues absorbed from Frank Knight. There are no more Knights in academic economics, which is why it is unlikely we shall ever see someone like Friedman again. But rather than being the “last conservative,” Milton Friedman is better honored as the last political economist.