Jennifer Burns: belief

Transcript context

…What’s the when and how of Friedman starting to become some glimmer of, say, the Milton Friedman of the ’70s and ’80s? What leads him to make the shift and decide, “Well, I’m going to be some version of America’s leading public intellectual and take on this heroic role, change the world and everything else”? I think he had opportunities to do that throughout his life, some of which he took and some of which he passed on. But I would say he had a model of that very young in his life when he was a graduate student, in the figure of Henry Simons, who is one of these forgotten figures in the history of economics, who I became absolutely fascinated by. Henry Simons had a book that was a big deal in the 1930s. It was called A Positive Program for Laissez Faire. It was an effort to talk about principles of liberalism — what we would call classical liberalism — and apply them in the New Deal context and use them to critique the New Deal. Then Simons became very actively involved in promoting what was called the Chicago Plan, which was a monetary solution to the Great Depression. It actually would’ve been a radical reformulation of the banking sector. Simons had friends in high places, was pushing this through the political system. I think that was an early model for Friedman. At the same time — it was about the 1950s — at one point, he was offered a berth on Eisenhower’s Council of Economic Advisers, and he said no. He basically wanted to do his work at the University of Chicago. At that point, it didn’t feel done. He didn’t want to step into the public realm. I think he was always paying attention, always thinking about it. It’s really with his connection to Barry Goldwater that he has the first phase of being a public intellectual. That also comes after he’s completed, with Anna Schwartz, his magnum opus, A Monetary History of the United States. I think he was both strategic and deliberate in that he wanted to do his major scientific work before he stepped into the public realm. There are two phases of him as a public intellectual. There’s the ’60s to the ’70s, and then there’s the post-Nobel Prize, when he’s retired and when he is still out there, but that’s when he’s on Donahue and has more of a presence in the Republican establishment. There’s a letter you cite from Wesley Clair Mitchell — maybe it’s from 1947 — where Mitchell basically says, “Friedman is too dogmatic. He did this study of incomes of the medical profession, and we can’t really trust it because he’s looking for a particular conclusion.” What do you make of that account for Mitchell? Was Mitchell himself biased? Friedman was just flat-out right, Friedman was too dogmatic — what do you think?…

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