Samuelson Friedman

The Battle Over the Free Market

Nicholas Wapshott

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Hardback

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English

Norton
09 July 2021

Biography: general; 20th century history: c 1900 to c 2000; Education; Economics & Business; Economic theory & philosophy; Economic history

In 1966 two columnists joined Newsweek magazine. Their assignment: debate the world of business and economics. Paul Samuelson was a towering figure in Keynesian economics, which supported the management of the economy along lines prescribed by John Maynard Keynes's General Theory. Milton Friedman, little known at that time outside of conservative academic circles, championed ""monetarism"" and insisted the Federal Reserve maintain tight control over the amount of money circulating in the economy.

In Samuelson Friedman, author and journalist Nicholas Wapshott brings narrative verve and puckish charm to the story of these two giants of modern economics, their braided lives and colossal intellectual battles.

Samuelson, a forbidding technical genius, grew up a child of relative privilege and went on to revolutionize macroeconomics. He wrote the best-selling economics textbook of all time, famously remarking ""I don't care who writes a nation's laws-or crafts its advanced treatises-if I can write its economics textbooks."" His friend and adversary for decades, Milton Friedman, studied the Great Depression and with Anna Schwartz wrote the seminal books The Great Contraction and A Monetary History of the United States. Like Friedrich Hayek before him, Friedman found fortune writing a treatise, Capitalism and Freedom, that yoked free markets and libertarian politics in a potent argument that remains a lodestar for economic conservatives today.

In Wapshott's nimble hands, Samuelson and Friedman's decades-long argument over how-or whether-to manage the economy becomes a window onto one of the longest periods of economic turmoil in the United States. As the soaring economy of the 1950s gave way to decades stalked by declining prosperity and ""stagflation,"" it was a time when the theory and practice of economics became the preoccupation of politicians and the focus of national debate. It is an argument that continues today.

By: Nicholas Wapshott
Imprint: Norton
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions: Height: 244mm, Width: 163mm, Spine: 33mm
Weight: 616g
ISBN: 9780393285185
ISBN 10: 0393285189
Pages: 384
Publication Date: 09 July 2021
Audience: General/trade , ELT Advanced
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active

Nicholas Wapshott's many books include biographies of Margaret Thatcher and Carol Reed, Keynes Hayek: The Clash That Defined Modern Economics, and The Sphinx: Franklin Roosevelt, the Isolationists, and the Road to World War II. He lives in New York City.

Reviews for Samuelson Friedman: The Battle Over the Free Market

Summarising the debate between the two most important economists of the second half of the 20th century might seem like a monumental task, best consigned to specialist textbooks. But this brave history of the intellectual duel between Paul Samuelson and Milton Friedman proves that assumption wrong, with its focus as much on their lives as their ideas. -- Zareer Masani - Literary Review