The Hoover Institution Library & Archives invites you to join Research Fellow Jennifer Burns, author of the newly published book Milton Friedman: The Last Conservative, for an engaging talk about one of the most influential economists of the twentieth century. Published this month, Burn's book is the first biography of Milton Friedman to make extensive use of his papers housed at the Hoover Institution Library & Archives.
The talk will be held in the Hoover Institution's Stauffer Auditorium and followed by a reception. Copies of the book will be available for in-person attendees. Those unable to make it to campus may register to attend virtually as the event is hybrid.
WATCH THE RECORDING
About the Speaker
Jennifer Burns is associate professor of history at Stanford University and a research fellow at the Hoover Institution. She is the author of Milton Friedman: The Last Conservative (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023) and Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right (Oxford, 2009). Jennifer has contributed opinion pieces and analysis to The New York Times, The Financial Times, Bloomberg, and Dissent and has discussed her work in terms accessible to a non-specialist audience on interview programs and television shows such as The Daily Show and The Colbert Report.
About The Book
One of The New York Times's 33 Nonfiction Books to Read This Fall
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 groundbreaking 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 longstanding collaborations with women, including the economist Anna Schwartz, as well as his complex relationships with powerful figures such as Fed Chair Arthur Burns and 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.
Publisher: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, an imprint of Macmillan
