Tyler Cowen: evaluation

Transcript context

…[laughs] I wasn’t sure, well, they did this because they wanted to manicure the story, which is super upright to begin with, to be clear, as I think you would agree. Or, is it actually how they approach things? When I read Quine’s memoir, I was super bored, and I concluded tentatively, well, maybe Quine was just boring. How do you think about this? Yes. Many people, even those who love Milton Friedman, find this not a very compelling read. It’s more of a travelogue. I read it as a book that’s fundamentally generous in that everybody was someone they enjoyed, the conversations were spirited, the arguments were friendly, which is simply not very accurate to how their life was lived. I’ll provide an anecdote about that. Though, as I think of it, this is a couple in their 90s that’s had a good life. They’re looking back, they’re reflecting; they’re not trying to settle scores. They’re trying to put the most positive spin on anything possible. I think it’s generous in that spirit, but it’s not very accurate. After a while, I realized the biggest person that I was writing against in my biography was not another biographer, but it was Two Lucky People. [laughs] That was the text that everybody had in mind that was just simply not accurate in many ways. I’ll tell you two ways that I see it as being inaccurate. One is, Friedman recounts an episode of him testifying to Congress. He says — and this is in the early 1940s — “I had no idea how Keynesian I was.” There’s been maybe 5 to 10 books and articles that have jumped off that to say, “Well, Milton Friedman was once a Keynesian, and then he had some type of conversion.” I do not see that in any of the records I’ve looked at. I go into some detail, both in the text and more detail in the footnotes, about why I don’t think this is accurate. Friedman’s looking at his congressional testimony or reads it in five minutes and says, “Oh, this sounds Keynesian,” from his vantage point in the ’90s. It’s not an accurate depiction of his views or of his location in American economics in the 1940s, but it’s taken as gospel because he said it. The other thing I would say — I talk about this in some detail as well — in the 1950s, there was a large conflict at the University of Chicago between Friedman and a group associated with the economics department, the Cowles Commission. That was actually a group of mathematical economists, many leftist in nature, and Friedman didn’t like their economics, and he didn’t like their politics. It was basically an extended turf war. They mentioned this briefly, but when you dig down a little bit more, they mentioned Tjalling Koopmans, who’s the leader of Cowles at that point. It’s along the lines of “spirited discussion, some conflict.” In reality, there are accounts that indicate Koopmans went through a mental breakdown as part of his conflict with Friedman and had to take time away from the university, had to go to a music camp to rest his mind. Friedman was successful in getting their Rockefeller grant canceled, basically cutting off their funding sources. You would know there was conflict, but you wouldn’t know that it was very intense and dark conflict. You don’t see that in the memoir — which, again, may be to his credit. He’s trying not to exhume all the negative things he did, but he’s glossing over how intense . . .…

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