It’s only two minutes into our interview, and already Milton and Rose Friedman are making trouble.
A seemingly innocent question -- “Do you mind if I use a tape recorder?” -- touches off a lively debate. “He’s saying that some people don’t like it sitting there,” Rose says, pointing to the gray machine on the table between us. “I know,” Milton replies from behind his desk. “I said I’m not one of those people.”
“You said you were,” Rose says. Then she smiles. Milton smiles. They turn and smile at me. The recorder stays. I ask my next question.
Watching and listening to the pair, who continue to argue, smile and finish each other’s sentences, I begin to wonder who is the world-renowned economist and who is the devoted sidekick. The Friedmans, both 86 and married for 60 years, have raised two children, won a Nobel Prize and revolutionized economic thinking. Most of the recognition belongs to Milton, father of the famed “Chicago School” of economics and since 1977 a senior research fellow at the Hoover Institution. But he insists that half the credit belongs to Rose. “We have not lived separate lives,” he says. “We’ve lived a joint life.”
That life is recounted in their joint memoir, Two Lucky People (University of Chicago Press, 1998; $35). The book is not exactly what you might expect from two economists. “It starts as a love story,” Milton says, “and ends as a treatise on social policy.”
The love story begins in Professor Jacob Viner’s Economics 301 class at the University of Chicago, where Milton and Rose met as graduate students in 1932. Friends at first, they eventually found romance and were married six years later. Both were bright young economists, but Rose decided early to focus on raising their son and daughter while contributing to Milton’s work.
Milton went on to lead a free-market uprising in the economic world. After a stint in Washington working on the New Deal’s National Resources Committee, he emerged as one of the leading critics of the growth in centralized government. “Ironically,” he writes, “the New Deal was a lifesaver for us personally. The new government programs created a boom market for economists.”
In 30 years of teaching at Chicago, Milton preached the virtues of individual liberty and the perils of government intervention in the markets. He trained a wave of scholars to question Keynesian economics, and his work on consumption theory won him the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences in 1976. His views, derided in the 1950s and ’60s, paved the path to Reaganomics in the ’80s. “His contributions to economics have been deep and profound,” says Stanford economics professor John Taylor. “Even if [today’s economists] aren’t thinking about his name, they’re thinking about his ideas.”
While scholarship was his vocation, Milton says, public policy was his avocation. He wrote a Newsweek column from 1966 to 1984, served as an adviser to Presidents Nixon and Reagan, and generated controversy with his anti-statist views. That philosophy has, in recent years, made him an outspoken proponent of legalizing drugs. Although Rose remained in the background, she helped with Milton’s scholarly works and was an equal, if uncredited, partner in the Newsweek columns.
Rose finally gets her due in the book, which recounts their accomplishments over 589 pages, often in exhausting detail. Milton and Rose take turns narrating throughout: he describes the business and academic aspects of their lives, she provides everyday detail. Discussing the 1976 Nobel banquet, for example, Rose writes about the dinner toasts and how she and Milton held their own with Swedish students on the dance floor. Milton’s lone paragraph in this section centers on a student’s speech in support of individual liberty.
Neither focuses much on economic theory. “The professional part was already in the press, and there was no point in repeating it,” Rose says. Not all readers agree, Milton notes, producing a letter from a colleague in India. “A different kind of intellectual biography,” he reads, “would have shed light on the question that intrigues many classical economists: what are the differences between Friedman and Hayek?” Rose laughs. Milton smiles.
But a few minutes later, there’s trouble again. I’m asking about the second part of the book, the treatise on social policy, and admitting that Two Lucky People actually made me feel unlucky for not having lived through the Great Depression. By reflecting so fondly on their up-by-the-bootstraps childhoods, the Friedmans seem to disparage postwar America. Is the book an indictment of the world I grew up in?
Yes, they say, the civil character of society has declined. Rose believes the level of crime is frightening. “There was a lot of crime when we were growing up,” Milton replies. “There weren’t the kind of gangs that we have today,” Rose says. Milton leans forward and shoots me an apologetic look. “Don’t underestimate the element of selective recollection when people tell you the world is going to hell,” he says. “It’s not going to hell,” she says, “but it’s headed in the wrong direction.”
Some critics say that it is the ascendancy of the Friedmans’ laissez-faire views that eroded the social contract. In their epilogue the authors reject that notion, arguing that the recent global trend toward open markets makes them optimistic about the future.
As for their own future, Milton and Rose are pragmatic. They acknowledge that this memoir is probably their final literary collaboration -- the summary, they say, of a grand career. “My brain isn’t what it was 50 years ago,” Milton says, adding, “You know darn well that we aren’t going to produce much more.” Rose nods.
So this is a good time for them to take inventory of their lives. There are the 30 or so former University of Chicago students who flew to the Bay Area earlier this year to honor the man their kids call “Uncle Miltie.” And the book reviewers who praise the couple as champions of human freedom. Mostly, there’s an impressive storehouse of ideas -- and the pair’s enduring, endearing partnership. Not bad for a couple of troublemakers.
