Milton Friedman: The Last Conservative by Jennifer Burns

The cover of Jennifer Burns's impressive new biography of Milton Friedman is inviting and, frankly, hilarious. Pictured there is an impish yet slightly serious-looking Milton, holding up a freshly minted uncut sheet of dollar bills, inspecting it like he was reading the evening newspaper or studying the wine list at a favorite restaurant. The photo is in black and white but the book-jacket color is, appropriately, green.

Burns intends her book to be both an accessible introduction to her topic and a contribution to the scholarly literature. Her goals are to tell Friedman's many stories (as husband, colleague, scholar, policy adviser, public intellectual, debater), to place him in the context of his times, and to explain the development of his ideas. In telling those stories, she walks the reader through the changes that took place in the economics profession in the twentieth century, explaining the contending schools and providing sketches of the many personalities, capturing well the ebb and flow of our profession's history. While she writes for a general reader who might have little to no background in economics, she manages to convey all the essential ideas clearly yet without oversimplification. It is rare to find a historian who actually “gets” economics. Burns is one of these, and she also writes beautifully. Each chapter has an informative epigraph, and there are numerous set pieces to illuminate themes or capture a revealing viewpoint. In short, the book is a complete, well-crafted whole, carefully thought out with a story engagingly told. It is a model for anyone who aspires to write an intellectual biography.

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