The Indispensable Milton Friedman

What It Is

An anthology of twenty essays spanning Milton Friedman's career, edited by his biographer Lanny Ebenstein and published by Regnery in 2012. It runs to around 250 pages, split into politics and economics, and includes pieces not reprinted since they first appeared.

Friedman, who died in 2006, was the most influential popular economist of the century and one of its most influential technical ones: Chicago, the Nobel Prize in 1976, a television series watched by millions, and a habit of arguing in public with anyone who would stand up. This book is the public Friedman: school vouchers, the draft, drug legalisation, health care, the ethics of business, what Keynes actually said.

The essays are short and startlingly clear. Whatever you conclude about the man, he is one of the finest expository writers economics has produced.

Why It Matters

Because a great deal of the world you live in is his. The all-volunteer army, floating exchange rates, independent central banks with inflation targets, school choice, and the general assumption that governments should not fix prices are all arguments Friedman made when they were eccentric and won while he was alive to see it. He also helped design wartime tax withholding, and spent the rest of his life saying he regretted it.

One sentence of his is still the most argued-over line in business ethics. Another, on where inflation comes from, was mocked for two decades and then implemented by central banks on three continents.

He also lost. His constant money growth rule proved unworkable once the velocity of money turned unstable in the 1980s, and even his admirers dropped it. His 1975 visit to Chile, and the letter he sent Pinochet afterwards, drew protests that followed him for thirty years; he insisted he gave the same advice in Beijing, which is true and not quite an answer. Read this volume knowing that the man's certainty was his method, and that it was not always warranted.

Before You Read

Five or six hours, and no economic training required. Friedman assumed his audience was intelligent and untrained, and he wrote accordingly.

These are essays. Read them out of order, one an evening, and give the short ones the same attention as the long ones. He could do more damage in four pages than most economists manage in a book.

Read him adversarially. His prose is so clean that agreement can feel like comprehension.

Which Edition to Read

• The Indispensable Milton Friedman, edited by Lanny Ebenstein (Regnery, 2012) — recommended. The only collection that spans his whole career, and the best single volume for a reader who wants the range of him: the polemicist, the policy man and the economist in one place, at readable length. Ebenstein knows the archive better than anyone. The cost: Regnery packaged it for an American election year, and the framing is more partisan than Friedman's own prose, which argued rather than sneered. It also gives you almost nothing of the monetary economics that made his name. View on Amazon →
• Capitalism and Freedom (University of Chicago Press; 40th anniversary edition, 2002). The single most important thing he wrote for a general audience, and the book that changed what governments thought they could do. Denser and more systematic than the essays. The cost: it is 1962, and it shows. Read it as a document as much as an argument.
• Free to Choose, with Rose Friedman (1980). The most persuasive and the most popular, written alongside the television series, and the one to hand someone who thinks they disagree with him. The cost: it is advocacy, and it does not pretend otherwise. The qualifications are thinner than in Capitalism and Freedom.

Start with the Ebenstein collection for the range of him, then go to Capitalism and Freedom for the argument at full strength.

Getting the Most From This Book

Watch him being argued with. The original 1980 Free to Choose broadcasts paired each episode with an unscripted debate against serious opponents, and they are online. Friedman under attack is a different and better experience than Friedman on the page, and it will tell you quickly whether you find him convincing or merely fast.

Read the essays on vouchers and on drug legalisation together. They come from the same principle and land in very different parts of the political spectrum, which is the fastest way to understand what kind of thinker he was.

Then read someone who beat him: a good account of what happened to monetarism after 1982.

The mistake is to read Friedman as a conservative. He was nothing of the kind, and half the pleasure of this book is watching him irritate the people who claim him.