MILTON FRIEDMAN: The Last Conservative, by Jennifer BurnsIn writing her new biography of the Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman, known throughout his long life for his cheerful endorsement of deregulation and free markets, Jennifer Burns certainly had her work cut out for her. “As he increasingly came to symbolize a political movement,” she writes, “the nuance and complexity of his ideas was lost.”But even Burns has to admit that this attention to “nuance and complexity” was something that Friedman did a lot to discourage. The principles underlying such intricate cooperation were “really very simple,” he said. At the University of Chicago, where Friedman spent most of his teaching life, he edged out the leftist scholars clustered in the Cowles Commission for Economic Research, shrewdly getting the Rockefeller Foundation to pull its funding from the commission and finance Friedman’s workshop instead. Charismatic in the classroom, Friedman didn’t just teach students; he created converts.

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Persons: MILTON FRIEDMAN, Jennifer Burns, Milton Friedman, Friedman, ”, Burns, fashioning, baldheaded Friedman, Burns —, Ayn Rand —, shrewdly, Friedman didn’t, “, ” Friedman Organizations: Conservative, Newsweek, Productivity, Stanford, University of Chicago, Commission, Economic Research, Rockefeller Foundation