Free Market Icon
19th November 2023
“Milton Friedman isn’t running the show anymore.” The sentiments underlying Joe Biden’s mid-2020 statement would be affirmed today not only by center-left American opinion but also those significant segments of American conservatism that have fallen seriously out of love with free markets.
Friedman died on November 16, 2006. His influence at that point upon economics and economic policy remained considerable. Friedman’s ideas on topics ranging from school choice to monetary policy were a major reference point for the American right, but also parts of the left. Exemplifying the latter was former Treasury secretary in the Clinton administration Larry Summers. He went from regarding Friedman as a “devil figure” in his youth to seeing him as someone whose ideas on many subjects merited respect.
The awe in which Friedman was held started unraveling after the 2008 financial crisis, and there’s little question that some of his ideas lost traction over the subsequent decade. That is part of the background to a new biography of Friedman. In Milton Friedman: The Last Conservative, Jennifer Burns, a Stanford history professor and research fellow at the Hoover Institution where Friedman spent the last three decades of his career, has authored a comprehensive study of the economist’s life in the world of ideas.