I recommend "Milton Friedman: A
Biography" to all readers, especially to young people who are looking for role models in
economics and life in general. Many an economist found something, agreeable to them or not, that improved their academic lives at least just because they knew it, even if they did not know it well. Before Friedman free lunches were possible after all because economics was operating inside its production possibilities frontier (PPF). By pushing economics onto its PPF Friedman made free lunches disappear; the
good thing is that the
public good in the form of knowledge that Friedman''s research program produced is so huge that economics shall have plenty of leftovers to chew on for some time to come. The prospective economist is better off even if all he/she reads of Friedman is "The Monetary History of the United States" (with Anna Jacobson Schwartz) and "The Methodology of
Positive Economics". As Friedman points out in The Methodology of Economics "the process
must be discussed in psychological, not logical, categories; studied in autobiographies, not treatises on scientific method; and promoted by maxim and example, not syllogism or theorem" (p. 43). Thus, between the two books one learns how to identify problems and how to go about solving them. This biography is a valuable addition.
The evidence of Friedman''s contributions to the general public is not hard to find and document. For example, sensible deregulation led to cheaper airplane tickets, which induced more flights to more places. The efficacy of volunteer armed forces as a component of an effective national defense is now too commonsensical to restate here. Perhaps Arthur Schopenhauer was correct after all that "All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident."
What is very interesting about this book - Milton Friedman: A biography - are insights about the person behind the public good many people around the world come to know just as Friedman. Behind that person were the individual, family, proximate cause, and initial conditions all of which made possible the growth of ideas we associate with Professor Friedman. In the world of Friedmans ideas, both as public and private, are anchored in individual freedom and choice, which only a capitalist nature nurtures. That one individual could have done so much so long (9 decades) is worth volumes in itself; that the intellectual laborer remained sane, rather than vane, about his accomplishments and the fame they conferred is another remarkable quality, and an interesting part of Mr. Ebenstein''s book.
To say Friedman made a significant scholarly contribution to economics is a positive (testable) statement. If even only half of what Lanny Ebenstein writes about Friedman the person is true, then the author/philosopher Jean Paul was surely incorrect in his assertion that " Fine minds are seldom fine souls". In Friedman''s case a good soul and an even better mind were joint-products (complements). I learned all of that and more from this book, so can anyone. A good reading, indeed!
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