YouSaid · the spoken record

Jennifer Burns

lines on the record: 240
first: 2025-01-19
most recent: 2025-01-19
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Well, the Nixon administration is an interesting case because, so I've been talking about inflation and the different consequences it had. One consequence it had is that it began to undermine the Bretton Woods currency system that was established in the wake of World War II. Bretton Woods, what it did basically, it ended up inadvertently putting the US dollar at the center of the world economic system. But under Bretton Woods, countries of the industrialized West agreed to trade their currency in set ratios that government sent. So a franc was worth so many dollars or German Mark was worth so many francs. And then also under this system, countries could come to the United States and they could trade the dollars that they held for gold because the US was on a sort of modified gold standard. There was a ratio of gold to paper money.”
2025-01-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #457 – Jennifer Burns: Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, Economics, Capitalism, Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To ensure that, say, education, right, people prosper when they're well educated. That's when economies do better. Education is generally state funded. And you need some way to support that and provide for those institutions that structure society that make competition possible. So I think it's just a really broad statement. But again, Malay is coming from a really different context. You know, he's coming from the South American context, from such upheaval, such economic devastation in pursuit of the goal of equality that I think trying to rebalance with that emphasis on freedom. I definitely see where he's coming from.”
2025-01-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #457 – Jennifer Burns: Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, Economics, Capitalism, Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think in the macro for sure. I mean, we've seen if you really put equality as your goal, it's such a seductive ideal and people believe in it so much that they can carry out horrible crimes in the name of equality. But then focusing on freedom, these words are too big. They're so hard to define. And so I think you have to ask sort of like, what is the freedom you're talking about, right? If you're talking about the freedom of ordinary people to be entrepreneurial, to make their own way, to start new things, to continue what they're doing, to keep what they've earned for sure, I think that can increase the equality overall if you're talking about lower taxes, if freedom is just a code for lower taxes, there has to be, I mean, lower taxes in general, great. But if you're one of the top generators of wealth, there has to be some way.”
2025-01-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #457 – Jennifer Burns: Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, Economics, Capitalism, Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sometimes they value that more than they value freedom. And so I think the balance, I think there has to be more of a balance. And it's just, it's hard to make such global statements. I think you have to break them down into what actually do you mean. But again, Malays coming from a very different context, a very different country that has seen so much upheaval, so much government intervention, so much inflation, so much political turmoil, he's probably thinking about it differently than Friedman was thinking about it.”
2025-01-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #457 – Jennifer Burns: Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, Economics, Capitalism, Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Know, I think on the big picture, definitely. I mean, we've seen focusing too much on equality. Because equality is such an alluring word Can lead you to downgrade all kinds of other things that are really important, but I really think it depends on how you're defining freedom. I mean, this statement is too big and too broad, right? So, you know, if you're talking about freedom, if by freedom you mean not having to pay taxes if you're successful, you know, I think that can have all kinds of knock-on effects, right? The idea that people are able to prosper when they're educated, whereas education going to come from. How is that going to be paid for and supported? And again, to go back to night, if you're generating too much inequality or people are feeling that you're generating too much inequality.”
2025-01-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #457 – Jennifer Burns: Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, Economics, Capitalism, Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think he would appreciate it. I mean, I think Malay is much more of an Austrian-inspired thinker, but I think he definitely appreciates Friedman. And on the macro level, Friedman always understood it's really painful to treat inflation. But the more you put it off, the harder it is. So I think he would be trying to get him, as he's doing, to just message that short-term pain, long-term gain. I think he'd be very supportive. I think he'd be thrilled to see also that Malay is very good at explaining these abstract ideas and putting his policies in the framework of the bigger picture. That was really meaningful to Friedman. I don't know how politically persuasive it is overall. You know, Malay is very intense. He doesn't have the same sort of gifts of salesmanship and setting people at ease that say someone like Ronald Reagan had, but it seems to be.”
2025-01-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #457 – Jennifer Burns: Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, Economics, Capitalism, Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is going to be a lot of pain. I don't know what the solution is. I think that's also part of why Friedman favored a minimum income. He talked about it being sort of counter-cyclical. In other words, when things were really bad, the spending level on it would naturally go up. This is what economists today call an automatic stabilizer. And then when it's not needed, the cost of it goes down. I mean, maybe there's a way to make it sweeten it with honey and have people take buyouts or things like that. That would certainly be a way better way to go.”
2025-01-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #457 – Jennifer Burns: Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, Economics, Capitalism, Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But he didn't have then, which we have now, is the technology that we have and the ability to send benefits out via smartphone or just to move so much faster and to handle information on a mass scale so much faster”
2025-01-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #457 – Jennifer Burns: Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, Economics, Capitalism, Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the other thing he would probably be arguing for is again, go back to the design of the minimum income or the negative income tax, that there's a way he ultimately decided to run it through the tax system, right? The government's already collecting this data. They already have your information and they can just send the money out through the system rather than having a social bureaucracy where you have to come in in person, you have to fill out forms, you have to document, do you own a car? What's your income? Who lives in the household? So I think he would sit, and his analysis of that was who that really benefited was the bureaucracy, that process, that paper, you know, that implemented those norms. And then if you could pull that away, you could get help out where it was needed much quicker without having this drag of people doing sort of unproductive work of administering these systems. So I think trying to cut administrative overhead.”
2025-01-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #457 – Jennifer Burns: Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, Economics, Capitalism, Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Does and sometimes it's private entities that do this, is create barriers to entry to protect industries and markets. So he talked about this in the case of the medical profession, which I think is actually not a good example because I think we all have a collective investment in having medical doctors be highly trained. But so, for instance, you could look at, you know, nail technicians or haircutting. There's often these licensing requirements or there's a sort of big kerfuffle. I think it's the DC passed a law that to run a childcare center, you have to have a college degree. Well, what does that do? I mean, that disenfranchises a whole bunch of would-be entrepreneurs. You don't happen to have a college degree, but probably could be really good at this particular business. So I think he would be saying, look out for where private interests have used the state to protect themselves and clear away those types of barriers and let competition through prices”
2025-01-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #457 – Jennifer Burns: Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, Economics, Capitalism, Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, his signature policy move I talk about this is taking the price mechanism and trying to make that into the policy. And that seems sort of obvious to us today, but in the era that he came in, so there would be rent controls. Let's take away rent controls. Let's let housing prices set themselves. Or he was very against national parks. I actually think that national parks are good. So I hope that Doge people don't take this up. But that rather than an allocation to fund the national parks, they should be funded by the revenue that they bring in when people visit them. And so I think he was always looking to, let's let prices make the decisions here. So I think that would be one of the key pieces. The other thing I think you'd really be thinking about, he wrote about this a lot about occupational licensure and barriers to entry. And he felt like one of the worst things that government”
2025-01-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #457 – Jennifer Burns: Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, Economics, Capitalism, Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Thing, but to them that seems like forever. So I really do believe what history teaches you to do is just have a much vaster scope in your vision and then take into account the possibilities of so many things happening that are different than what's happening today. And so I just hope we don't forget about inflation entirely. But here's the thing. It is a quite a strong chance that Trump's policies will initiate even worse inflation and then they will prove to be his undoing. So the ironies of inflation could be continuing.”
2025-01-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #457 – Jennifer Burns: Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, Economics, Capitalism, Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is potentially a deeply transformative moment that will change the size and shape of government, that may change our foreign policy profoundly, that may change our immigration policy, that may change the demographics of our country, all of that in my thesis is that it's all been made possible by inflation. And so the great mistake of the past years was to forget how fundamental inflation was to the rise of the last political order and to profoundly underestimate how much inflation would change the current political order. So I just think it's one of these things. This is why I think you should study history, because I think if you had studied history, you would be aware of this. And it's so easy for people to forget just like the banks forgot that interest rates could ever go up. They got so used to it. And it's only a 10, 15 year old.”
2025-01-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #457 – Jennifer Burns: Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, Economics, Capitalism, Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then everyone turned against all the formulations we had and said, well, these have hollowed out our industrial base. These have, we've got too much immigration. We've got too much economic openness. We need to reshore. We need to focus. We need to turn against all these things. We need to spend more. We've disinvested. The net result of that turning away, I argued, is people forgot about inflation. They really forgot it could ever exist. And you had a whole set of theories on the left, modern monetary theory, that basically said we don't really need to worry about inflation. We can spend what we want. And lo and behold, inflation came back. And so my argument is that has now opened the door to the presidency of Donald Trump, which”
2025-01-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #457 – Jennifer Burns: Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, Economics, Capitalism, Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that completely reorders the banking sector because banks had statutory legal limits on the interest they could charge. And once General market interest rates exceeded that. It was proliferation of new financial forms to take advantage of that. So my point was the era we live in was ushered in by inflation.”
2025-01-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #457 – Jennifer Burns: Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, Economics, Capitalism, Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Every institution was designed around stable prices. And once inflation broke out, prices were no longer stable. So for example, tax rates weren't inflation adjusted. So if your income went up because of inflation, you might bump from a low tax rate to an extremely high tax rate, but you don't actually have more money. On paper, you have more money, but everything costs more, so you don't actually have more money in your taxes have gone up. that kicks off the taxpayer revolt. There's a whole shift of American corporations towards focusing on financial investments because the tax breaks they used to get for depreciation, for building new factories, are not inflation adjusted. So they no longer pay off in an inflationary environment. And then when Paul Volcker comes in in 1980s, early 1980s and starts fighting inflation really pushes up interest rates to bring down inflation.”
2025-01-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #457 – Jennifer Burns: Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, Economics, Capitalism, Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, the main idea is kind of looking back and saying, so today. We have been living in a world where people have been, you know, focused on monetary policy, steady monetary policy, free trade, reducing regulation. This is all called the neoliberal era. And my argument was a lot of that arose, was driven by inflation. So we have Milton Friedman predict inflation in 1967. It starts breaking out in the 1970s, Britain and the United States.”
2025-01-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #457 – Jennifer Burns: Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, Economics, Capitalism, Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Good. Everyone's talking about low interest rates as if they're good, but there should be a price on capital. There should be a price on this. It shouldn't be so low. And so, you know, he had some of still the kind of macro insights that I think are important.”
2025-01-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #457 – Jennifer Burns: Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, Economics, Capitalism, Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, he just had a different style, but I'm guessing he would have come around through the, I think he would just say, okay, we have a chance to reduce the size of government. At the same time Those spending plans of the Trump administration are not fiscally conservative in any way. And that was his concern, was not so much with debt, but with the feeling that there's no mechanism to stop the growth of government, that it just grows and grows and grows. And so he ended up believing like even deficits aren't so bad because they make politicians cautious, he thought, about continuing to spend. But I have to believe he would be concerned about the potential threats to the U.S. currency's position as the world's reserve currency with increased levels of debt and spending. He was concerned about low interest rates, you know, in the, you know, he died, I think it's 2004, 2006, but it was in the beginning. He didn't see the zero low bound, but he saw low interest rates. And he said, this isn't necessarily.”
2025-01-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #457 – Jennifer Burns: Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, Economics, Capitalism, Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think he would love Doge. I think that's, you know. Without saying, I think he would focus on that part because I think he would, I think he would really love it. He would be very alarmed by the idea of tariffs and very alarmed by the return to protectionism. I mean, I think he believed that part of what made the world peaceful in the second half of the 20th century, as opposed to during World War II, was the world was knit together more by trade. And that was the great hope that people traded with each other. They wouldn't fight. He also, you know, a proponent of the free movement of capital. You know, he would absolutely oppose this idea that Nippon Steel wasn't allowed to invest in the United States. I think he would struggle and he wholeheartedly embraced Reagan and he worked to minimize the parts of the Reagan legacy he didn't like. I think he would find it harder to embrace Trump because he's not of that.”
2025-01-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #457 – Jennifer Burns: Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, Economics, Capitalism, Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right, exactly. So if we think of the evolution of conservatism, it was a whole set of ideas that was crafted, refined, the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s. So it really found their emotional standard-bearer, translator, salesperson in Ronald Reagan, who incidentally had been following these ideas as they developed and had been honing his ability to express them and apply them politically. It's a very opposite if we look at Trump as the political definer of the era. You know, there's a set of ideas, but it was more attitudes, impulses, vibes, and the ideas are coming after that, trying to figure out how they patch on. So it's interesting to watch, to see that difference. And I hazard that a lot of it just has to do with the immediacy of the media environment we're in and it's just power of the media messages to get out. So fast”
2025-01-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #457 – Jennifer Burns: Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, Economics, Capitalism, Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If they actually start to work, they lose the benefit. You can created all these perverse incentives. And these ideas were fought out. They were empirical. They were controversial. And they were based on really deep research and really deep argumentation. And so it seems that era has passed. It seems like we're driven much more quickly by moods rather than thought through ideas. Right now it seems like the ideas come after the they follow the political mood and try to put together the underpinning of it where it really was the opposite for much of the 20th century.”
2025-01-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #457 – Jennifer Burns: Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, Economics, Capitalism, Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, that is the thing that it's hard, especially for the students I teach today to be like, you know, there were arguments about ideas and conservatives want a bunch of them, you know, and that happened in the 70s and late 1960s to 1970s when one set of arguments was about economics. Like, okay, this idea of stimulating the economy by spending more, it has a downside. The downside's called inflation. And the downsides called too much regulation. And you've gone too far in kind of bottling up the actual sources of economic growth and dynamism. And we have to let those free in social policy, there was also a critique, the great society had all these ways of ideas of ending poverty. And, you know, people came and analyzed them and said the programs aren't helping. In some ways, you've actually created engines to trap people in poverty because you've given them a benefit.”
2025-01-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #457 – Jennifer Burns: Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, Economics, Capitalism, Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“As a conservative, if you think of the mode of his thought. And so, I mean, what makes a great conservative is one who takes those older ideas and makes them fresh for a new time period. I think that's exactly what he did.”
2025-01-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #457 – Jennifer Burns: Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, Economics, Capitalism, Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is a conservative, which is that within the field of economics, he went back to this older idea, the quantity theory of money and said this still has value. This can be applied in the modern day. It is something to teach us. And he pushed back against this trend towards mathematization. So he kept writing books. He can still pick up a Friedman book and read it, whereas lots of economics articles and output. It's like unreadable unless you're in the field. And so I think in that way he was trying to conserve methodologically and intellectually the traditions of the field, the work that he, and particularly Anna Schwartz did, that literally accounting of things and deep analysis of data from the field, that was the completely unfashionable in his time. Now we've sort of gone back to it with big data and with computers. But he helped bring that forward and preserve that tradition. So I think of him kind of in election.”
2025-01-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #457 – Jennifer Burns: Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, Economics, Capitalism, Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Were there, but Friedman and the importance of his books, Free to Choose Capitalism and Freedom, the television series he did, all of these were like core components of this American conservative synthesis as it evolved. And I really see that as having broken down. It is scattered into different pieces. We don't know where they're going to come back together again. Friedman's push for open global markets, unfettered free trade that's getting pushback on both the left and the right. That, I think, is just a major sign that both parties have turned away from this vision. I don't know what they've turned to. But the way that Friedman brought these pieces together, I think that political moment is past. So that's what I was trying to talk about with the book title. There's another way, though, in which I think of him also.”
2025-01-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #457 – Jennifer Burns: Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, Economics, Capitalism, Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I was really thinking of that in terms of kind of American political identities and particularly the 20th century conservative movement, which people are always saying this isn't conservatism. And I was like, yes, in America, conservatism is different. It looks different. It feels different. Conservatism in America builds in a big component of what we could call libertarianism, pro-capitalism, anti-government ideas. And critics will say, but conservatism is about conserving institutions and practices and it has a role for the state and organic community. But in the United States, it's always had since the 20th century this also, this anti-statist, let's let the market rip. Let's not worry about what the market does to establish traditions. The market is our tradition. Capitalism is our tradition. So that was really synthesized. You know, many people.”
2025-01-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #457 – Jennifer Burns: Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, Economics, Capitalism, Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Some kind of reason. Yeah, exactly. You could say, okay, but how does this not interfere with the market, right? If you provide people with a minimum income, won't that change their incentives to work, et cetera? I mean, there's a One, it's way better than the current benefits cliff where you have to not work to get your benefits. And any incentive impact on working seems to be much lower than would be expected. But I'll let the economists and the social scientists fight that one out and figure it out empirically. Hopefully we should be able to”
2025-01-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #457 – Jennifer Burns: Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, Economics, Capitalism, Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That does some form of redistribution, or instead of trying to intervene in the market for labor or the market for something else, the market for housing, you provide a cash grant that people spend for themselves. And so interestingly, that's what happened in the emergency situation of COVID, right? That's exactly what people did. They followed that model. We just get money out quick. And there's a lot of discussion still about UBIs is something that should be done. And I think it's always going to be hard to pull off because I think Americans and their elected representatives don't want to provide a universal benefit. They want to provide a targeted benefit because they believe there's like a moral component here. And Friedman advanced a policy that was really abstract and really just kind of was devoid of judgment. It was like pure and beautiful in that way, but like utterly impractical.”
2025-01-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #457 – Jennifer Burns: Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, Economics, Capitalism, Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Policy typically identifies like this group of people is deserving and will give them benefit. So the classic example is soldiers, veterans. Another example is mothers raising dependent children. These people deserve money. The rest of you, you better go out and work. And so Friedman's proposal, it really caught on in the 60s. It ultimately went nowhere, but it was no litmus test. no income analysis. Just we're going to give you this much. Everyone's going to get this much. And he decided once mass taxation had come in, you could do it through taxes and you could just rebate people who didn't pay income taxes, got a rebate. That actually came to pass. It's the earned income tax credit. And it's considered extremely successful by policy analysts. It does what it's supposed to do. It's not that expensive. And so I see that as a kind of paradigm of his thinking in that instead of creating a bureaucracy,”
2025-01-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #457 – Jennifer Burns: Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, Economics, Capitalism, Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Businesses instead of hiring that higher priced labor would not hire, or like we could think of today, right? They put an electronic checkout, you know, or something like this where you don't actually need the labor. So he really believed the minimum wage had that perverse incentive. Now this is a live debate on what minimum wages do, and there seems to be a level at which you can set them that they can not have that perversive effect and in fact can kind of create people with more spending money that then powers the economy. So he had a very sort of clinical analysis of that rather than an empirical one or a really abstract analysis. But the minimum income is fascinating because it seems very leftist to us. But what it is is it's purely individualistic and it never really happened because it was so purely individualistic because American social”
2025-01-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #457 – Jennifer Burns: Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, Economics, Capitalism, Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Could objectively determine the nutrition and the price of food. And so that for him, it's important, he says, it's keeping with a liberal polity because it's not intervening in the price system. It's not intervening in economic relations. And it does not, in his view, require a bureaucracy to administer. It does not, in his view, require that you qualify for it by virtue of being in a protected class. You just get it as kind of part of your membership in this general citizenship body. And so that to him was really different than a minimum wage because it did not interfere with the work bargain. His belief about minimum wages was specifically that it priced out unskilled labor. That what an unskilled laborer had to offer was a willingness to work for a very low wage. And if you set the minimum wage too high.”
2025-01-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #457 – Jennifer Burns: Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, Economics, Capitalism, Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so this was one of the discoveries I made in my research. I found a paper from 1938. He wrote advocating what we would call today a universal basic income, a minimum income. And he basically sees this as part of the effort to create a new liberalism, right? And he basically says we have advanced societies, we have prosperous societies, we have decided in keeping with our morals and our ethics that people should not be starving in an advanced society like this. The question is how are we going to make that happen? And he ended up believing the best thing to do was to put a floor under everybody. And he said, you get that based on your income. If you have a lot of income, you don't get it. If you have a little income, you might get a little bit of it. If you have no income, you get enough of it. And he believed in the beginning you should base that on, you know, what was required to buy food, right? That would be kind of an objective.”
2025-01-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #457 – Jennifer Burns: Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, Economics, Capitalism, Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I mean, what's interesting is he does talk, especially in his later work, he says we have fiat currency and this is an experiment, you know, and we don't know how it's going to turn out. And it's turning out okay right now, but we've always had a commodity based or backed currency of some form or another. And this is the first time. And so who really knows? So far so good. And he also is very attuned, it's interesting in his later writings when he's thinking about this to sure, I could design a monetary system that would be different. But when I look at history, I see that monetary systems have always say incorporated the role of the state because it's so important to people. And so therefore my theoretical designs really have to be tempered by what I've actually seen happen in history.”
2025-01-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #457 – Jennifer Burns: Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, Economics, Capitalism, Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, this goes back to Keynes' analysis of the Great Depression, right? If people won't invest, if they're spooked, if the investing classes are spooked, you could be in real trouble. And since in some ways this simple analysis of the problem and proposal of a solution was enough to restore eventually the path to economic prosperity, right? That's Franklin Roosevelt, nothing to fear but fear itself, you know, the sense of we know we have a future, we have optimism, then you believe in it. And to go back to like thinking about money, right? Money works because we all believe in it. You know, it's a form of social trust. And it's a form of belief and faith in our society and in the other people in it. And when that breaks down, the money system will break down as well.”
2025-01-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #457 – Jennifer Burns: Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, Economics, Capitalism, Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In this game, if they feel like they're losing. So that goes to all the non rational factors and all the comparative factors that people have when they think about where they are vis- ⁇-vis other people in society. So we're just incredibly social creatures. We're incredibly attuned to our status, to rising and falling to where we sit vis- ⁇-vis others. And so that absolutely has to be attended to. It can't just be an economic analysis.”
2025-01-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #457 – Jennifer Burns: Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, Economics, Capitalism, Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I definitely believe in win-win, but with a big asterisk, like you can have win-win, but it can feel like win-lose, which is it's not just are people getting more. It has a lot to do with do people feel they're getting more and do people feel they're getting what's fair and equal. So you could have a situation, you know, for instance, if you look at the history of going back to Chile, it has steady growth steady income growth, steady diminution of inequality, and a high level of discontent within the society and a high level of belief that the society is corrupt and unfair. And that's what matters, how people feel about it, how people perceive it matters. And you can't, you know, we saw this recently. You can't just come out with a bunch of statistics and tell people you're winning.”
2025-01-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #457 – Jennifer Burns: Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, Economics, Capitalism, Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and that was again to go back to the idea of separating new liberalism or neoliberalism from classical liberalism was more of a focus on what are the rules that are needed, what is the competitive order that we want to set out, how do we design in social safeguards, how do we think about it. And so that shift towards monetary policy and focusing on stable monetary growth, that becomes really important in the post-70s era as one of the basic rules of how capitalist economy should function. And it becomes really important because if you see the example of, say, countries most notably in Latin America where monetary rules weren't followed and different governments Played politics with their currencies, and that created huge upheaval and huge social loss, economic loss, just economic disaster.”
2025-01-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #457 – Jennifer Burns: Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, Economics, Capitalism, Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Monetary policy makes use of monetary policy rules. We have not abandoned discretion, but rules are used as a heuristic or a check and those come out of Friedman's thinking. And so it's something that's really profound. And it was always counterposed to discretion, which Friedman worried would be subject to capture or political corruption if you had discretion and policymaking or if you had discretion in these very big areas. Then people would stop competing against each other in a market and they would turn their attention to getting control of the rules.”
2025-01-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #457 – Jennifer Burns: Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, Economics, Capitalism, Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What they're up against, and then going back to monetarism, the core of monetarism is a rule. Friedman called it a monetary growth rule. And so again, what keeps the economic game going is a rule about how much the money grows that everybody knows. Nobody's guessing. Nobody's changing the rules to help their side or to help, you know, the people they're friendly with. We all know it's there. It's clear. It's easy. And so that emphasis on rules, I think, really has a through line. It goes into Hayek's competitive order and then it goes into the monetary growth rule. And then, you know, today.”
2025-01-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #457 – Jennifer Burns: Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, Economics, Capitalism, Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think with the metaphor of the game does it asks you, okay, well, what are the rules then? And let's focus on the rules that keep the game going. So he didn't use the concept of an infinite game, but I think that's an interesting one, you know, a game that all the players are in and keep going again and again and again. And so that helped Knight along with Hayek. Shift from The allocation question Who's getting what are things allocated fairly to the more structural question of like what are the rules of the game that we need to keep this system going? And so for a while, that led to the discussion of monopoly. Well, we need rules against concentration, or we need the rule of law. Everyone needs to be treated equally. People need to know what”
2025-01-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #457 – Jennifer Burns: Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, Economics, Capitalism, Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's what he believed. That's what he believed. Yeah, I think it's more complicated than that, right? The people who gain out of a system of economic freedom could decide to collude in a system where there isn't political freedom. That's certainly a scenario. But that was, again, that's that core idea of freedom, right? And that core belief that people want freedom and that people are drawn to freedom”
2025-01-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #457 – Jennifer Burns: Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, Economics, Capitalism, Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“During the Cold War, he very much believed economic and political freedom, you know, capitalism and freedom, democracy, the United States, capitalism. This all went together. And he starts to see at the end of his life the emergence of different social systems that are using market trading and allocation, but aren't giving people similar freedoms. And he's kind of puzzling over that. Now, he always believes that China will democratize. And he thinks China's on the path to democratization, in part because Chile does democratize. Eventually, Pinochet is voted out and it's become a democratic capitalist and very prosperous country. And he thinks that's exactly what's happening in China. He sees Tiananmen and he doesn't live long enough to get to where we are now, in which it doesn't look like political or civic freedom is coming to China anytime soon.”
2025-01-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #457 – Jennifer Burns: Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, Economics, Capitalism, Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They don't have a KGB. They're not hauling people off for their wrong opinions. So then he says they have something called civic freedom. And so he kind of defines this third sphere, civic freedom of, you know, debate, discussion, interpersonal relations, but you can't be political. This is a late in life edition. I don't think”
2025-01-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #457 – Jennifer Burns: Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, Economics, Capitalism, Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Attacked and vilified for having been a supporter. He's interpreted that he's a supporter of the regime, which he's not, but he realizes he has talked too much about economic freedom and he hasn't talked enough about political freedom. And he's kind of assumed political freedom because he's come from the American context. So then he starts recalibrating them and saying, you know what, if you don't have political freedom, you're never going to be able to hold on to economic freedom. So he sees that they need to go together and they don't naturally go together. And so he starts to become more clear in talking about political freedom. Now let's fast forward to the end of his life and he's witnessing the emergence of what we call the Asian tiger. So capitalist economies that are doing very well, but they don't have political freedom. But then he observes, they don't have political freedom in that you can't vote in a free and fair election, but they also don't have a staze.”
2025-01-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #457 – Jennifer Burns: Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, Economics, Capitalism, Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And speaking to the kind of liberal consensus of the 50s and 60s. He thinks economic freedom has been undervalued in the American context. So he really wants to push that forward. He's really kind of taking political freedom for granted. Now, later in his career, when he becomes famous, he's traveling the world. He spends time in Chile. And this country is now being ruled by a dictator. Goste Pinochet, who starts introducing economic freedom, but there's no political freedom. And Milton Friedman believes eventually these two things are going to go together. He tells Pinochet, you've got economic freedom and eventually it's going to bring, it's going to mean political freedom. Pinochet is like, okay, fine. Not really interested in that. I want to know what I should do about inflation. But then when Milton Freeman leaves Chile, he is.”
2025-01-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #457 – Jennifer Burns: Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, Economics, Capitalism, Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So he really begins focusing on economic freedom. And he says it's really important to focus on economic freedom because in the United States, we don't value it enough. So by economic freedom, he means the ability to keep what you've earned, the ability to make decisions about your business, the ability to make decisions about the work that you do. So this will translate into things like there shouldn't be a minimum wage. He believes the minimum wage has bad social effects, but he also believes you should be free to accept a job at a wage that you yourself have determined is acceptable to you. And there should be very minimal regulation questions around safety and other things because the market will ultimately, if you create an unsafe product, it won't sell and that's sort of your incentive. So he really centers economic freedom because he thinks especially and he's really speaking from his vantage point in the universities.”
2025-01-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #457 – Jennifer Burns: Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, Economics, Capitalism, Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Incomes are actually converging. And it also, if you look historically, if a country goes from, say, a more feudal agrarian society to a more market-based society, incomes will converge. Now then they might start to diverge, but Friedman's in the moment, when he's seeing the convergence. And so that's what he's really focused on. So he believes he can justify capitalism through the ethic of freedom, and he also believes that inequality is a problem that can be addressed through specific policies and it's not a fundamental feature of capitalism. In other words, he doesn't see capitalism as an engine of inequality the way that Frank Knight did and the way that, you know, maybe some critics on the left would.”
2025-01-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #457 – Jennifer Burns: Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, Economics, Capitalism, Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He struggles for a while with like, what do I say? And then he basically says capitalism, it can't be the core discipline of the market can't be the core to your ethics. It has to be something else. So that's when he will decide it's freedom. It's individual freedom. That's really the ethical core. And capitalism makes individual freedom possible because capitalism is dedicated to maximizing that. And so the defense of capitalism comes through freedom. And at his stage in history, he's able to set aside nice worry about inequality and say when I look at the data, and this is true for the macro data at mid-century,”
2025-01-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #457 – Jennifer Burns: Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, Economics, Capitalism, Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In social supports, build in a social minimum, things like this. But there's a moment in his career where he's really struggling to figure out like, how do I make this case for capitalism? And basically the whole sort of conservative movement or people who we later call the conservative movement are struggling to make this case. And he starts thinks about what makes capitalism work is that if you put forth effort, you get a reward. So then you could say, well, people get what they deserve under capitalism. But then he kind of stops and he says, that's not really true because we're born with such different endowments and there's a huge quotient of luck, right? So some people are just in the right position and some people aren't. So if I say capitalism is moral because people get what they deserve, that's not really true. And he also kind of has like an ethical reaction, which he ends up calling like an aesthetic reaction. He's kind of like, it just doesn't feel right to say that. And so.”
2025-01-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #457 – Jennifer Burns: Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, Economics, Capitalism, Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source