Milton Friedman : A Biography

By Alan Ebenstein

A book review by James Faulkner of WatsHot.com

Milton Friedman : A Biography by Alan Ebenstein for GBP 17.99 by clicking here.

"Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon." To most people who are casually familiar with the work of Milton Friedman, this sentence perhaps best encapsulates the thrust of his academic work. However, the scope of Friedman's work and the depth of its impact on all our lives are much greater than most people realise.

Friedman was of that rare breed of economists - Keynes is another good example - who actually make the transition into public life, in the sense that his theorising actually profoundly affected the politics of the day. A Nobel Prize winner, his goal could best be summed up as "the pursuit of freedom", yet his views often provoked controversy, especially amongst the Left of the political spectrum - controversy that was sometimes exacerbated by his fleeting association with dictatorial regimes such as the Chile of Augusto Pinochet. Yet his willingness to get his hands dirty sets him apart from those 'armchair' economists and 'do-gooder' detractors, most of which simply failed to measure up against Friedman's irresistible mix of common sense and an extremely uncommon intelligence. (For those readers who are unfamiliar with Milton Friedman, I suggest you click HERE and watch this short recording.)

This short, accessible biography offers the reader a good introduction to Friedman's ideas and his intellectual and public life, whilst keeping relatively brief when it comes to biographical narrative; for example, there is relatively little commentary on Friedman's analysis of the political issues of the day, and where there is this is usually restricted to where Friedman had a direct interaction with them. The book focuses on Friedman's development as an economist and his relationships with other intellectuals and high-profile figures of day, which is where I suspect most readers' interests lie.

The main thrust of the book is centred around Friedman's work on the monetary theory of inflation and the enormous influence this has had. Friedman argued that the Great Depression was primarily the result of a major contraction in the money supply which was exacerbated by the actions of the Federal Reserve. This theorising has major implications for economic policy to this very day - the quantitative easing (money printing) programmes of the US and UK governments were a direct attempt to stave off another depression on the lines that Friedman espoused: showering the financial system with liquidity to prevent deflation.

Yet Friedman's legacy is also one of an economic individualism that is becoming increasingly repugnant in many political spheres in the wake of the excesses that brought on the recent financial crisis. Notwithstanding the fact that the book was published early in 2007, whilst Ebenstein provides a solid account of Friedman's ideas on liberalism, he fails to do justice to the controversy Friedman provoked or the intellectual critique of his work. Moreover, in this day and age any biographer of Friedman should have a field day with his scepticism of big government, but the book is also lacking in this department.

Despite these shortcomings, Ebenstein's biography provides readers with a good overview of a man whose ideas shape the world we live in today - for better or for worse (you might have guessed that my sympathies rest with the former).

Milton Friedman : A Biography by Alan Ebenstein for GBP 17.99 by clicking here.

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