Welcome to Econ Talk, Conversations for the Curious, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty.

I'm your host Russ Roberts of Shalem College in Jerusalem and Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Go to Econ Talk. in to today's conversation. You'll also find our archives with every episode we've done

going back to 2006. Our email address is mail at econ talk.org we'd love to hear from you. Today is October 11th, 2023,

my guest is historian Jennifer Burns of Stanford University where she is

Associate Professor of History and a research fellow at the Hoover

Institution. She was first here in October of 2017 talking about Ein Rand, her latest book and the topic of today's

conversation is Milton Friedman, the last conservative. Jennifer, welcome

back to Econ Talk. Yeah, thanks for having me, Russ.

It's great to be here.

This book is really quite an achievement.

It is a deep intellectual biography of a famous person, but you could even argue is under-appreciated.

And I would say it's also an economic history of the 20th century, so

brava, it's an amazing achievement. Thank you.

Thank you.

Let's start with any biases or preconceptions you came to the book with.

Milton Friedman's a controversial figure in many circles.

How did you approach this topic?

So yeah, I think I came mostly with ignorance,

but certainly with some biases and preconceptions.

When I started, I thought I was most interested in Friedman as sort of a pundit,

a public figure, a public intellectual,

someone who had kind of packaged ideas for mass consumption

...