Narrator: In the world of 20th-century economics, few names conjure as much admiration and animosity as Milton Friedman. For many, he was a devil figure. Larry Summers, a prominent economist who would later serve as Treasury Secretary, was raised in a household of devout Keynesians. To them, Friedman’s free-market gospel was heresy. Yet, as Summers engaged with Friedman's arguments over the years, his view shifted from disdain to what he called "enormous respect." He saw that Friedman’s ideas, whether one agreed with them or not, possessed a formidable power and logic that could not be easily dismissed. This journey from devil to respected intellectual adversary captures the essence of Friedman's polarizing legacy.

In her comprehensive biography, Milton Friedman: The Last Conservative, author Jennifer Burns unravels the life and mind of the man who fundamentally reshaped modern economics and conservatism. The book explores how a child of Jewish immigrants, forged in the crucible of the Great Depression, rose to become a Nobel laureate whose ideas would topple the dominant Keynesian consensus and influence presidents and prime ministers from Washington to London to Santiago.

Narrator: Milton Friedman’s worldview was profoundly shaped by his early life as the son of Jewish immigrants in Rahway, New Jersey. His father, Sol Friedman, was an entrepreneur who ran a dry goods store, embodying the spirit of small-scale capitalism and the promise of the American dream. This upbringing instilled in Friedman a deep-seated belief in individual opportunity. However, his youth was also marked by the rise of the Ku Klux Klan in his own town and the stark economic devastation of the Great Depression, which challenged his optimistic outlook and drove him to seek solutions.

His intellectual journey began in earnest at Rutgers University and was later solidified at the University of Chicago in the 1930s. The Chicago economics department was a sink-or-swim environment, dominated by towering figures like Frank Knight and Jacob Viner. Viner’s introductory course, Economics 301, was legendary for its brutality. He would mercilessly grill students, even pelting one with chalk. It was in this intimidating class that Friedman, a new graduate student, dared to correct a mistake Viner had made on the blackboard. While Viner initially dismissed him, he later admitted his error in private. This act of intellectual courage caught the eye of a fellow student, Rose Director, who would become his wife and lifelong intellectual partner. This environment, which prized rigorous price theory and skepticism toward government planning, laid the foundation for the "Chicago School" of economics that Friedman would one day lead.

Narrator: Upon his return to the University of Chicago as a professor after World War II, Friedman faced a formidable intellectual rival: the Cowles Commission. This group of economists, many of whom were European émigrés, championed a highly mathematical and econometric approach to economics. They believed complex models could map and predict market activity, an idea that gained traction in the post-war era as governments sought to manage their economies. Friedman, however, was deeply skeptical.

His skepticism was born from experience. During the war, while working for the Statistical Research Group (SRG), he had tried to use complex regression analysis to predict the strength of new metal alloys for military airplanes. He designed two new alloys, F-1 and F-2, based on his sophisticated equations. When tested, however, both alloys failed within hours, a mediocre result that shattered his faith in the predictive power of elaborate models. This failure convinced him that a theory’s value lay not in its mathematical elegance, but in its ability to predict real-world outcomes. This became the central front in his war with the Cowles Commission. He argued their models were "imaginary worlds" disconnected from reality. The conflict culminated in 1954, when the Cowles Commission, feeling intellectually besieged, left Chicago for Yale, a decisive victory that cemented Friedman's control and the dominance of his empirically-driven approach.

Narrator: Friedman’s most significant intellectual achievements were not solo efforts; they were the product of deep collaboration with a group of brilliant women whose contributions have often been overlooked. His wife, Rose Director Friedman, was his most crucial partner. It was Rose who took his scattered lectures and notes from the 1950s and painstakingly wove them into the coherent, powerful argument that became his seminal 1962 book, Capitalism and Freedom. She transformed his academic ideas into a compelling manifesto for a popular audience.

Equally important was Anna Schwartz, his co-author on the monumental A Monetary History of the United States, 1867–1960. When the project began, Friedman envisioned a more limited analysis. It was Schwartz, with her deep passion for historical detail and rigorous data work, who pushed for a more ambitious scope. She sent Friedman an outline arguing that they must tackle the "basic economic issues" to justify their work. Convinced, Friedman embraced her vision. The resulting book, which argued that the Federal Reserve’s failure to prevent the money supply from contracting was the primary cause of the Great Depression, was a landmark achievement that fundamentally changed the field. Without the intellectual drive and meticulous research of women like Rose Friedman and Anna Schwartz, Friedman's legacy would be unrecognizable.

Narrator: The publication of Capitalism and Freedom and A Monetary History transformed Friedman from a respected but controversial academic into a leading public intellectual and a major force in the burgeoning conservative movement. His ideas found a powerful champion in Senator Barry Goldwater, the 1964 Republican presidential nominee. Goldwater saw Friedman’s work as the intellectual ammunition needed to dismantle the Keynesian case for big government. Friedman soon became an informal advisor to the campaign.

This alliance, however, pulled Friedman into the fraught politics of the Civil Rights era. Goldwater’s opposition to the 1964 Civil Rights Act was framed as a defense of states' rights, a position that appealed to Southern segregationists. Friedman’s own libertarian principles led him down a similarly controversial path. He argued that while he personally abhorred racism, the government had no right to force private businesses to integrate, a position he defended as a matter of individual freedom. This stance, combined with his advocacy for school vouchers—an idea quickly co-opted by Southern states to resist desegregation—solidified an uncomfortable alliance between libertarian economics and reactionary populism, a stain that would follow Friedman for the rest of his career.

Narrator: By the late 1960s, the Keynesian consensus was beginning to crack under the pressure of rising inflation. The dominant theory of the time was the Phillips curve, which suggested a stable trade-off between inflation and unemployment. Policymakers believed they could "buy" lower unemployment by accepting a little more inflation. In his 1967 presidential address to the American Economic Association, Friedman delivered a devastating critique of this idea. He introduced the concept of the "natural rate of unemployment," arguing that any trade-off was purely temporary. He predicted that attempts to keep unemployment artificially low would only lead to accelerating inflation without any long-term reduction in joblessness—a phenomenon that would soon be known as "stagflation."

His prediction came true during the Nixon administration. Friedman’s old friend, Arthur Burns, was now the chairman of the Federal Reserve. But instead of following Friedman's monetarist prescription of controlling the money supply, Burns advocated for wage and price controls to fight inflation. Friedman was aghast, writing to Burns that he felt betrayed. The conflict between the two men mirrored the larger battle over economic policy, which culminated in 1971 when President Nixon, against Friedman's advice, imposed a nationwide wage and price freeze and ended the dollar's convertibility to gold, effectively killing the Bretton Woods system and ushering in an era of global economic uncertainty.

Narrator: No episode in Friedman’s life generated more controversy than his 1975 visit to Chile. He was invited by a group of his former Chicago students, known as the "Chicago Boys," who were advising the military dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet. The regime, which had violently overthrown the socialist government of Salvador Allende, was struggling with hyperinflation. Friedman met with Pinochet and recommended a course of "shock therapy"—a rapid and drastic program of spending cuts, deregulation, and trade liberalization.

While the policies eventually tamed inflation, they came at a tremendous social cost and were implemented by a brutal, repressive regime. Protesters followed Friedman for years, accusing him of being an architect of tyranny. The experience forced Friedman to confront the relationship between economic and political freedom. He had long argued that economic freedom was a necessary precondition for political freedom. But in the face of the Chilean reality, he was forced to concede that the reverse was also true: political freedom, he later wrote, is necessary for the long-term maintenance of economic freedom. It was a subtle but profound evolution in his thinking, born from a direct and bitter confrontation with the moral complexities of his own ideas.

Narrator: Jennifer Burns’s biography reveals that Milton Friedman was a man of profound contradictions. He was a champion of freedom who advised a dictator, a brilliant theorist whose most important work depended on collaborators, and a political outsider who became a trusted advisor to presidents. The single most important takeaway from his life is that ideas, once unleashed, take on a life of their own, often with consequences their creators never intended. Friedman built an intellectual system that synthesized free markets, individual liberty, and global cooperation—a system that became the dominant economic paradigm for a generation.

Yet today, that synthesis has fractured. The rise of populism on the right and socialism on the left challenges the very foundations of his worldview. Friedman’s core belief was that controlling the money supply was the key to economic stability. But in a world of near-zero interest rates, massive government debt, and unprecedented central bank interventions, we are left with a challenging question: Are the problems of the 21st century simply too big for Friedman’s solutions?