One of the most impressive aspects of the book is Burns’s narrative about Friedman’s early attempts to, as we said in the 1970s and 1980s, “find himself.” Where did he fit in economics? On the one hand, some of the strongest influencers of his thinking were “economic institutionalists” like Wesley Mitchell, who tended to dig into data and refrain from engaging in microeconomic analysis. On the other hand, Friedman was strongly influenced by University of Chicago microeconomist Jacob Viner, whose price theory class in Friedman’s first quarter at Chicago in the fall of 1932 was “unquestionably the greatest experience of [Friedman’s] life.”
His intellectual development didn’t follow a straight line. Although a huge part of his education was at Chicago, Friedman completed his doctorate at Columbia University. Early on, he was torn about which way to proceed in choosing a dissertation topic. He ultimately chose a statistical comparison of doctors’ and dentists’ salaries, which he worked on with Simon Kuznets, his mentor at the New York–based National Bureau of Economic Research. Friedman’s insistence that the difference between the two salaries reflected the American Medical Association’s lobbying to restrict the number of slots in medical schools created a lot of controversy. Some economists disputed the idea that the correct comparison was with dentists’ incomes. It took years and some heavy hitting by Kuznets to get Columbia to approve Friedman’s dissertation and grant him a Ph.D.
In his and Rose’s autobiography, Two Lucky People, Milton wrote that early in World War II, when he was an economist at the US Treasury, he wrote an analysis that was “thoroughly Keynesian.” In my review of that book, I noted my disappointment that he didn’t tell the reader how and why his views changed. When I spoke to him a few months later, he told me that many people had expressed the same disappointment but that his shift in thinking was so gradual that he couldn’t point to a “Saul on the road to Damascus” conversion. One of Burns’s major accomplishments is to help the reader understand how his views evolved. One gets the impression that she did more thorough research on his early work than Friedman himself did when writing Two Lucky People.
This is from my review of Jennifers Burns’s book on Milton Friedman. It’s very good and I recommend the book. If you want to get a feel for the content, read my whole review, published in the Summer issue of Regulation.