Jennifer Burns: evaluation

Transcript context

…How do you think about all the work Milton did with women? Anna Schwartz most of all, but his ideas on consumption, he drew from several women researchers. That was unusual back then. Obviously, the work with Rose. Is he, in your mind, a protofeminist? Or this is coincidence, or what was it for him? Sort of neither. I think you wouldn’t have Milton Friedman without these women. Sometimes I give a talk called “Milton Friedman Was a Woman” because I think if you pulled all the women out of his life, you’d have a good economist, but I don’t know that you’d have a great economist. I don’t think you would because they did several things. What they really did was provide a counterpoint to his natural inclinations. Take A Monetary History. This would not really have been a narrative or a history. It would’ve been a bunch of charts and graphs about the money supply. It would’ve been closer to, say, Kuznets’ studies of national income. It’s really Schwartz that has a love for history, that puts it into a narrative that convinces him to make it a much longer story. That’s why that book resonates — because it’s not just data. It’s a narrative. It’s a story. When it comes to the 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 the field, but because of this professional process, which also was driven by men, there was this machismo to it. A lot of men had turned away from consumption economics. Since Friedman had not, he had an advantage. He was zigging where everyone was zagging. Now, why was Friedman able to do this? Was he more enlightened than other economists of his day? I would say both yes and no. I had some anecdotes and stories that he was not feminist in his behavior. On the other hand, compared to economists of his day, he very much was. I didn’t find any letter that mentioned anything negative about any of his collaborators as women. That’s not true for other economists. Some cases — I think it’s Samuelson who will write letters supposedly in support of his female students that turn out to actually be very negative and very sexist in tone. I tend to think that Friedman had a way of missing some social cues and social norms in ways that could be detrimental. When it came to the women working with him, he had an ability that maybe others didn’t, to see the person before he saw the woman. If it was a very smart woman, he would recognize, first and foremost, that this was a smart woman. Secondly, register that this was a woman, and then maybe that would come with some of the supposed limitations. But he really was generous and supportive of the women in his life as intellectuals. I think that’s his secret sauce because no one else is really doing it at the time. It gives him new perspectives. When you look at the work he was cited for in the Nobel Prize, most of it has a major woman collaborator: A Monetary History, A Theory of the Consumption Function. There’s a third, which isn’t coming to mind, but those two would not have been done without a female collaborator. I knew nothing about this when I started, and I was like, “This is strange.” I also think it’s why he wrote books. He wouldn’t have written books without these collaborators. ut a female collaborator. I knew nothing about this when I started, and I was like, “This is strange.” I also think it’s why he wrote books. He wouldn’t have written books without these collaborators. I think books still are very, very powerful. Even in a field that’s moving toward papers, books retain their power.…

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