Milton Friedman: The Last Conservative | Hoover Institution

November 8, 2023 Hoover Institution | Stanford University Jennifer Burns, research fellow at the Hoover Institution and associate professor of History at Stanford University, discussed her forthcoming book, Milton Friedman: The Last Conservative. https://www.hoover.org/research/milton-friedman-last-conservative PARTICIPANTS Jennifer Burns, John Taylor, Annelise Anderson, Uschi Backes-Gellner, Michael Boskin, Pedro Carvalho, John Cochrane, Bradley Combest, Steven Davis, Randi Dewitty, Sami Diaf, Christopher Erceg, David Fedor, Jared Franz, Bob Hall, Kevin Hassett, Robert Hetzel, Robert Hodrick, Doug Irwin, Ken Judd, Matthew Kahn, Timothy Kane, Marc Katz, Dan Kessler, Kevin Kliesen, Don Koch, Evan Koenig, David Laidler, Norman Lefton, Ross Levine, Mickey Levy, John Lipsky, Michael Melvin, Axel Merk, Paola Sapienza, Pierre Siklos, Abraham Sofaer, Richard Sousa, Tom Stephenson, George Tavlas, Victor Valcarcel, Mark Wynne ISSUES DISCUSSED Jennifer Burns, research fellow at the Hoover Institution and associate professor of History at Stanford University, discussed her forthcoming book, Milton Friedman: The Last Conservative. John Taylor, the Mary and Robert Raymond Professor of Economics at Stanford University and the George P. Shultz Senior Fellow in Economics at the Hoover Institution, was the moderator. BOOK DETAILS (McMillan Publishers 2023) https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374601140/miltonfriedman The first full biography of America’s most renowned economist. Milton Friedman was, alongside John Maynard Keynes, the most influential economist of the twentieth century. His work was instrumental in the turn toward free markets that defined the 1980s, and his full-throated defenses of capitalism and freedom resonated with audiences around the world. It’s no wonder the last decades of the twentieth century have been called “the Age of Friedman”—or that analysts have sought to hold him responsible for both the rising prosperity and the social ills of recent times. In Milton Friedman, the first full biography to employ archival sources, the historian Jennifer Burns tells Friedman’s extraordinary story with the nuance it deserves. She provides lucid and lively context for his groundbreaking work on everything from why dentists earn less than doctors, to the vital importance of the money supply, to inflation and the limits of government planning and stimulus. She traces Friedman’s longstanding collaborations with women, including the economist Anna Schwartz, as well as his complex relationships with powerful figures such as Fed Chair Arthur Burns and Treasury Secretary George Shultz, and his direct interventions in policymaking at the highest levels. Most of all, Burns explores Friedman’s key role in creating a new economic vision and a modern American conservatism. The result is a revelatory biography of America’s first neoliberal—and perhaps its last great conservative. To read the slides, click the following link https://www.hoover.org/sites/default/files/2023-11/Economic-Policy-Working-Group-slides.pdf