Jennifer Burns — A historian of ideas focused on the evolution of economic, political, and social thought in 20th-century America. She wrote biographies of Milton Friedman and Ayn Rand and teaches at Stanford.
The gist
Lex Fridman talks with historian Jennifer Burns about her biographies of Milton Friedman and Ayn Rand, two thinkers who championed individualism and capitalism in very different styles. The conversation traces Friedman's economic contributions—the monetary reinterpretation of the Great Depression, monetarism, his prediction of 1970s stagflation, and the negative income tax—and his rise as a public intellectual and conservative voice. Burns contrasts Friedman's empirical, compromising temperament with Rand's purist, axiomatic philosophy of objectivism, including the cult-like 'collective' around her and her affair with Nathaniel Branden. They also explore schools of economics, the justification of capitalism, how ideas spread top-down versus bottom-up, and how forgetting inflation reshaped modern politics. Fridman closes with an extended personal reflection on his interview with Ukrainian President Zelenskyy and his push for peace.
Big reveals
- Friedman and Anna Schwarz spent 12 years writing 'A Monetary History of the United States,' arguing the Great Depression was driven by a roughly one-third drop in the money supply (the 'Great Contraction') that the Federal Reserve could have prevented—reframing it as an institutional failure, not a failure of capitalism.
- In his December 1967 presidential address to the American Economics Association, Friedman predicted the stagflation of the 1970s—high inflation plus high unemployment—against the prevailing Phillips curve belief, and was later vindicated when even his critics saw it in the data.
- Burns discovered a 1938 paper in which Friedman advocated what we'd now call a universal basic income / negative income tax, an idea that partly came to pass as the Earned Income Tax Credit.
- Ayn Rand and Nathaniel Branden, some 20 years her junior, 'rationally decided' to become lovers and obtained the consent of their respective spouses; the secret affair's eventual exposure caused the 'Objectivist Schism' of 1968.
- Rand built a 'cult of reason' called 'the collective' in New York—including future Fed chair Alan Greenspan—where members came to conform to Rand's views on everything from music to dining tables, since disagreeing with her was deemed irrational.
- Friedman privately fed his floating-exchange-rate ideas to George Shultz, helping let the Bretton Woods system fade away after Nixon closed the gold window—a precursor to globalization.
- Burns argues in her Wall Street Journal essay that inflation ushered in the neoliberal era and that forgetting inflation's power reopened the door to Donald Trump's presidency.
- Paul Volcker tried Friedman's specific monetary-aggregate technique, found it didn't work as predicted, but tamed inflation by pushing interest rates above 20% while Friedman whispered in Reagan's ear to 'stay the course.'
Things worth remembering
- Friedman initially planned to become an actuary; mentors Arthur Burns (no relation to Jennifer) and Homer Jones at Rutgers steered him toward economics and the University of Chicago.
- Chicago economist Henry Simons proposed '100% money'—a law requiring banks to hold 100% of deposits rather than lending them out on the margin—which would have completely overhauled the U.S. banking system.
- Friedman's family used a numbered system to admit error: a number could mean 'you were right and I was wrong,' designed to make admitting fault easier and signal family closeness.
- Rose Friedman said that when she married Milton she lost half her conversations and when son David came along she lost the other half; she removed herself from the archive she assembled, making her hard for Burns to trace.
- In 'The Fountainhead,' when the dean asks Howard Roark 'who will let you' build his way, Roark replies 'that's not the point—the point is who will stop me.'
- Feminist Susan Brownmiller borrowed a library copy of 'The Fountainhead' to denounce its rape scene, and it fell open to that scene because so many readers had turned to it.
- Friedman told Chilean dictator Pinochet that economic freedom would eventually bring political freedom; after leaving Chile he was vilified as a regime supporter and recalibrated to emphasize political freedom.
- Anarchist Murray Rothbard fell into the Rand cult, was put on a 'show trial,' then formed his own splinter cult—one defector mailed him a dollar bill torn in half to mark the break.
- A 1992 Friedman clip is cited as predicting cryptocurrency because he foresaw payments becoming electronic, though Burns thinks he'd reject the stateless-currency ideology since states always step in to provide money.
- In prepping the Zelenskyy interview, Fridman cites Andriy Bohdan's 7.5 hours of interviews offering a different account of the 2019 Putin-Zelenskyy Normandy-format meeting in Paris.
Recommended in this episode
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Milton Friedman: The Last Conservative
Jennifer Burns
“she wrote two biographies one on Milton fredman and the other on iron Rand both of which I highly recommend” — Lex Fridman 00:00:00Find it on Amazon
Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right
Jennifer Burns
“she wrote two biographies one on Milton fredman and the other on iron Rand both of which I highly recommend” — Lex Fridman 00:00:00Find it on Amazon