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Hello and welcome to Behind the News. My name is Doug Henwood. The usual two segments today.

The historian Nancy McLean will talk about the relationship between Milton Friedman's work on school vouchers and the South's massive resistance to desegregation.

And the geophysicist, Claus Jacob, will elucidate the complexities of dealing with rising seas and heavier rains.

In our 2017 book Democracy in Chains, Nancy McLean, a professor of history at Duke, explored the connections between libertarian economics, notably the version developed by James Buchanan,

and the South's resistance to school desegregation required by the Supreme Court's decision in the Brown V Board of Education case.

Reduced to a sentence, arguments around freedom were used to keep black kids out of white schools.

The right hates it when this is pointed out and McLean suffered a torrent of abuse from the libertarian corner, with assistance from some oh-so-high-minded liberals.

But truth can be uncomfortable.

Last month, the Institute for New Economic Thinking published a related paper by McLean on Milton Friedman's participation in this line of thought.

Friedman hated the very idea of public education, which in the short term he wanted to replace with a system of vouchers, public funds that parents could use to send their kids to private schools.

In the longer term, he hoped to abolish public education entirely.

His agenda fit nicely with the segregationists, and it provided them with intellectual cover.

They weren't racist, they were freedom lovers. Here's Nancy McLean with more.

Somewhere in Melinda Cooper's book, she quotes someone and saying that Milton Friedman demonstrated an amazing capacity for having this vision-idealistic, if you want to call it that, vision of the world,

combined with a really incredible practical political sense of how to get it.

What's your reaction to that at characterization?

He was very involved in the policy world.

I don't think he was as swift at the strategy to make the really radical long-term transformation.

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