Jennifer Burns: belief

Transcript context

…If we can go back in time, we’ve talked about it a bunch, but it’s still a fascinating time, the Great Depression. University of Chicago, there’s these folks like Jacob Viner, Frank Knight, Henry Simons, all of these influenced the thinking of Milton Friedman. There’s this Room Seven situation at the University of Chicago. Just going back there, even just speaking almost philosophically, what does it take to explore ideas together, deliberate, argue in that space, and maybe there might be interesting stories about that time. It would just be interesting to understand how somebody like Milton Friedman forms. The seed is planted and the flower blooms. Yeah. Yeah. So he gets to University of Chicago, he makes fast friends, and in his third and fourth year, they become what I call them, the Room Seven gang. So Room Seven is they find an old store room in the basement, they take it over, and that’s where they have their jam sessions. And what made this world come together was Frank Knight. There was a charismatic leader and there were a bunch of acolytes who clustered around him. That I think was a key piece of the ingredient. And then there was a sense that they were onto something that the rest of the economics field had forgotten or was rejecting. So there was that sense of mission. So that seems to have been, there was a formal education piece, and then there was a parallel education piece rooted in admiration for a thinker, a shared admiration. And then what that led Friedman to do, what I found, syllabi that he had from non-economics courses, lists of books. And he’d written the prices of different ones he wanted to read. So he had John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, like 50 cents written in the margin. So he began to educate himself. He gave himself a parallel curriculum alongside this very formal economics curriculum. He started reading the traditions of political liberalism and then talking them through with friends and then developing a shared sense of mission. And the incredible thing is, of those friends in the group, they scattered for like 10 years, and then they all came back together. George Stigler, his great friend, was hired at Chicago. Aaron Director, who was his wife’s brother, was at Chicago. So many of these people continued. He became Frank Knight’s colleague. So that was the base. That was what really grew him, that really profound peer group. Now, the other piece I talk about a lot is Friedman was a collaborator, an open-minded collaborator, and he had incredible connections with economists who were women. And he basically found first in the figure of Anna Schwartz, later in the figure of this group of women who were his wife’s friends, this untapped pool of talent. And so he immersed himself in this whole other world of consumption economics and that resulted in his more technical work on a theory of the consumption function, which is the theory of permanent income. So for Friedman, intellectual work and intellectual production was always done in this very social context, in a context that blended friendship and intellectual partnership. And he only had a handful of friends who were not also economists interested in the same questions he was. So he just lived and breathed ideas all day long. Can you speak to the jam sessions? What do we know about the jam sessions? What are we talking about here? You’re sitting in a room, are they analyzing? Are they reading papers and discussing papers> or are they arguing more over beers kind of situation?…

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