Jennifer Szalai at the NYT:
In 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. Reflecting on how controversial her subject was, she says that one of her goals was “to restore the fullness of Friedman’s thought to his public image.” She depicts Friedman, who died in 2006 at 94, as a victim of a “bipartisan assault,” besieged by radicals on the left and populists on the right who decry the “neoliberalism” that he so ardently promoted. “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. He spent decades fashioning himself into a public celebrity, issuing confident pronouncements on the miracle of markets, whether in his columns for Newsweek or in his 1980 television series, “Free to Choose.”
more here.