Jennifer Burns: evaluation

Transcript context

…This is Arthur Burns. Arthur Burns wanted to hire Friedman on the National Bureau of Economic Research, and Wesley Mitchell basically said no. He said, “He can’t be trusted, not in that he lacks integrity, but that he’s so committed to what he wants to see that he will selectively interpret the data.” It’s interesting because I see in his letters with him and Schwartz, at one point he says to her, “We didn’t just go and take a bunch of monetary statistics to see what we wanted to see. We had a hypothesis about what we would see. We went in and gathered data to test a hypothesis.” As I was reading this, I was thinking, he doesn’t have a consciousness of what we would call selective reading or bias or selective recognition of facts to fit a preexisting . . . He didn’t see that as a pitfall or a problem. On the other hand, he does say in some of his later work, “Look, everyone has a point of view. Everyone comes from a place.” I wouldn’t say it’s radical perspectivalism, but it’s an awareness that you stand somewhere, and we can’t get away from this. Therefore, we just have to proceed anyhow. I think he truly believed he was testing, to the best of his ability, his priors, and he believed that he was willing to revise them. I think in some cases he was. In other cases, what he found matched his priors. I don’t think that invalidates his whole intellectual project, but I think it’s interesting — his level of confidence in his ability to evaluate his own thinking. At the same time, I also think that is one way to do science. You have a hypothesis; you go in with a hypothesis and you see if it’s true. That was very much how he operated. Putting aside co-authored works, how do you understand Rose Friedman, his wife, to have influenced Milton’s career?…

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