IEA Book Club Event with Jennifer Burns

The IEA Book Club hosted Professor Jennifer Burns to discuss her latest book, Milton Friedman: The Last Conservative,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 ground-breaking 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 long-standing collaborations with women, including the economist, Anna Schwartz; his complex relationships with powerful figures such as the Federal Reserve chairman Arthur Burns and the 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.

Jennifer Burns is an Associate Professor of History at Stanford University and a Research Fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace. She is the author of Milton Friedman: The Last Conservative (November, 2023) and Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right (2009). An expert on this history of conservative ideas and politics, she has written for The New York Times, The Financial Times, Bloomberg, and Dissent, and has discussed her work on The Daily Show, The Colbert Report, and elsewhere.