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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“Yes, yes, exactly right. So this is the situation in the 1920s. But the other piece I should mention is the first generation of progressive economists were very radical. They were closely allied with the socialist movement, with labor radicalism. And many of them lost their jobs at universities. This kind of connects to the early, the dawn of academic freedom. This is before academic freedom. And they became they were chastened. They became much more mainstream. By the time we get to the 1920s, we don't really have radical critiques of society coming from economists. Much smaller profession, much less important than it is today.”
2025-01-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #457 – Jennifer Burns: Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, Economics, Capitalism, Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Thought becomes known as institutional economics in the United States by the 20th century. So it's part of the progressive movement, late 19th century, into the 20th century. It really becomes institutional economics. And it's quite dominant. And the neoclassical economists are still there, but they're very much a minority. And Frank Knight, Milton Friedman's teacher, is one of the minority neoclassical economists and the institutionalists are much more progressive still.”
2025-01-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #457 – Jennifer Burns: Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, Economics, Capitalism, Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“About capitalism. And so more historically minded economists tend to be interested in the progressive movement and which Invested in taming and regulating industrial capitalism and changing its excesses, you know, factory safety laws, wage laws, working conditions laws. Yet in general, American economists all use marginal analysis just in different ways. The ones who are more drawn to marginal analysis become known as neoclassical economists. They're neoclassical, the neo is because they're using marginal analysis. The classical is because they don't think we need to change the way the economy operates or the government operates. They're not progressive. Whereas the progressives are saying things like we need to use social control. The state and the people collectively and democratically need to control the way economics unfolds and make sure things are fair and equal. So that school of”
2025-01-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #457 – Jennifer Burns: Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, Economics, Capitalism, Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“First, people start using really geometry to kind of graph things, but marginalism is also opening up to the possibility of calculus and the possibility of creating models. But at that point in time, late 19th century, a model is something like a physicist does. Like think of like an inclined plane and how fast does the ball roll from one to the other. It's a physical representation of the world. And eventually, economists will start to create mathematical representations of the world. But we're not quite there yet. So we're late 19th century. We have this fissure, we have this introduction of marginal analysis that marks the juncture from classical economics to economics. So let's say now we have economics, but we still have this fissure between historical thinking and, let's call it natural law thinking. That's not quite right, but physical laws versus contingency. And then in the United States, this ends up mapping onto debate.”
2025-01-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #457 – Jennifer Burns: Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, Economics, Capitalism, Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In here, adhere, and become expressed in certain types of societies, or are there universal economic laws that flow through any type of society? So that's kind of a juncture, a break. And so marginalism”
2025-01-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #457 – Jennifer Burns: Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, Economics, Capitalism, Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, yes. This is still out there. This is sort of the basic. Foundation of microeconomics, marginal analysis. And so in the German speaking intellectual tradition, this is the root of Austrian economics. And people picking up the marginal revolution in the German-speaking lands are opposed to the historicist, who are thinking in a more evolutionary way about how societies kind of grow and change. They have a vision of economic ideas as applying differently to different types of social arrangements. Where the marginalists, remember, are inspired by physics. And this is a set of natural laws that applies anywhere to any sort of human society. So that's his first really big fissure that we'll see again and again. Are you historically minded? Do certain traits of economic life”
2025-01-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #457 – Jennifer Burns: Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, Economics, Capitalism, Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The marginal value is less. So what marginalism does, though most importantly, is it opens the door to math and economics because it means you can graph this now, you can depict this relationship graphically. And there's some really interesting work in the history of economics that shows a lot of the people who developed marginalism were looking to physics as a model. physics, the queen of the sciences. And so they were thinking, they imported terms from the natural world to describe the social world through the lens of economics, terms like equilibrium. So the idea being that if you looked at a market, a market would reach equilibrium when everybody is bought and sold, all that they want or the price will settle at an equilibrium price when it's really the demand. Supply or matching up.”
2025-01-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #457 – Jennifer Burns: Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, Economics, Capitalism, Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And the marginal revolution is a scientific revolution that happens in a couple of different places simultaneously, right? This is one of these things that you see in the history of science, like there'll be some breakthrough. Like Darwin has a breakthrough, but like somebody else has sort of the same breakthrough at the same time, you totally, you know, differently. So there's a version of marginalism that's continental. You know, there's a version in the German-speaking lands, in the French speaking lands and in Britain. And they all kind of come together. And the shift is in the theory of value. So the theory of value in marginalism is on the margin. So say you have one apple and you want a second one. How much is getting going from one apple to two apple worth for you? Probably quite a bit. If you had 10 apples, maybe going to 11 apples doesn't matter that much.”
2025-01-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #457 – Jennifer Burns: Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, Economics, Capitalism, Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Classical economics when you're looking from a great distance is what's called the labor theory of value. So where does value come from in classical economics? It comes from the labor that a person puts into it. So maybe this in some way is a comes from Locke's notion of property that you kind of mingle, you know, your labor with the natural world. We can say labor theory of value. So classical economics concerned with Smith is arguing against mercantilism for more free trade often goes by the name of political economy to show it's more capacious. It's thinking of politics and economics. You can still read these books today. The sentences are long. The words are different, but you can still follow along. So the real big transition from classical economics and political economy to economics, as it's understood today, comes with the marginal revolution.”
2025-01-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #457 – Jennifer Burns: Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, Economics, Capitalism, Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, so schools of economics. So we could start with classical economics. Classical economics, we could think of Adam Smith as kind of your classic classical economist, the founder of the discipline. Classical economics does not really use math, is very close to political economy. It's concerned with, as Smith puts it, the wealth of nations. It's concerned to some degree with distribution. It's concerned to some degree with what makes a good political system. And what tends to really define”
2025-01-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #457 – Jennifer Burns: Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, Economics, Capitalism, Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So he falls into the set of students who are really enthralled with his other professor, Frank Knight. And Frank Knight is against math and economics. Frank Knight is like, you know, a neo- Liberal democracy, economic liberalism. And Friedman is very deeply influenced by Knight. And he continues to pursue mathematical economics. So he'll go for part of his graduate career. He goes to Columbia University, where he actually gets his PhD from, and he works with a mathematical economist there. And so he comes out trained in what will eventually be econometrics, statistics and economics, his early publications or in statistics. It's not really where his intellectual heart and soul are. And eventually he will turn very profoundly against mathematics in economics and become a sort of heterodox strain throughout 20th century economics that says simple models are better. We need to work on empirical work off empirical data, not construct elegant models and becomes really sort of countercultural within economic.”
2025-01-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #457 – Jennifer Burns: Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, Economics, Capitalism, Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Actually, it comes to Chicago to study with the mathematical economist, Henry Schultz. But he gets there, and he thinks Schultz is kind of dumb. He really does. He's incredibly arrogant and he just thinks this guy's not that smart. And it seems that. I mean, Schultz did some really important work in the early stages of mathematical economics, but a lot of the oral histories about him are like, yeah, he wasn't that bright. So Friedman's maybe gone to something.”
2025-01-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #457 – Jennifer Burns: Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, Economics, Capitalism, Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No relation to me, by the way. But Arthur Burns is like him, a fellow Jewish immigrant boy on the make. He's older. And he's making a career as an economist. And then there's Homer Jones, who has gone to the University of Chicago and is studying with Frank Knight at Chicago and says, you have to go to Chicago. So he has these two mentors. And Burns in particular suggests, oh, I could be an economist. That could be my career path. You know, the idea to be an actuary for an insurance company, I'm not sure where he got that idea, but he just thought that was something he could do as someone who was good at math. And so the college really opens the perspective opens the door. And then I think it's really key that, again, he's doesn't get an explanation that he buys for the Great Depression. So then he's looking for one. And the math part is really interesting aspect of his career. Now, he”
2025-01-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #457 – Jennifer Burns: Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, Economics, Capitalism, Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so the other piece of the puzzle when he goes to Rutgers, he thinks he'll be an actuary. So Milton Friedman's family, his parents are immigrants, Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. They're pretty atypical in that they don't stay in New York, you know, and they move to Raway, New Jersey and they put together a fairly middle class life as kind of they have a shop, they do some wholesale buying and selling. And then his father dies when he's 16. His life becomes more precarious. But it's never as precarious as he makes it up to be. He's got three older sisters. They earn a good living. Incidentally, they all have better grades in high school than he does, but he's the one that goes to college. But it's actually really important that he loses his father figure because he's then looking for other father figures and he meets two at Rutgers. One is Arthur Burns, who will go on to have a huge influence in his career.”
2025-01-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #457 – Jennifer Burns: Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, Economics, Capitalism, Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How to deal with economic crisis, it's Friedman and Schwartz. And so it's absolutely fundamental. And that is really going to be the place he makes his mark.”
2025-01-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #457 – Jennifer Burns: Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, Economics, Capitalism, Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so this book comes out. It's a blockbuster. And even those economists who have been like, Friedman is a crank. I don't buy it are like Friedman and Schwartz are onto something. Milton Friedman on a Schwartz are onto something. And so that really changes the game. And this is also one of his most influential contributions because Friedman and Schwartz becomes the playbook for the Federal Reserve. And we have lived through this, right? In the financial crisis, the Federal Reserve is ready to loan. COVID. The Federal Reserve is all kinds of new things because no Federal Reserve Chair wants to be in Friedman and Schwartz 2.0 that somebody writes or they're the bad guy who let the economy melt down. So the specifics of what they say to do have obviously evolved as the system has changed, but this is a playbook.”
2025-01-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #457 – Jennifer Burns: Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, Economics, Capitalism, Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“York Fed had the understanding to recognize this is a liquidity crisis. We should be very generous. We should support all the banks. Their influence has diminished for the kind of banks that are more, they don't say like the rubes and the hicks, but it basically is. It's like the people in charge don't know what they're doing. And so the Fed pursues this kind of policy of masterly inactivity. They don't see it as their problem. They don't do much. There's an enormous liquidity crisis. That's their version of what the Great Depression is all about, that it's a financial system meltdown. It's a liquidity crisis. And that it in some ways, well, in many ways, they argue very strong counterfactual argument. The Federal Reserve could have prevented it. And it did not. And so it becomes then an institutional failure and a political failure, not a failure of capitalism as a system.”
2025-01-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #457 – Jennifer Burns: Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, Economics, Capitalism, Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That what really made the Great Depression so bad was this drop in the amount of money, the 30% drop in the money. They called the Great Contraction. And then they go further and they say, well, how did this happen and why? And they pinpoint the Federal Reserve, which is a fairly new institution at that time. And they say, what did the Federal Reserve do, the lender of last resort? What did it do in the face of what they're depicting as a massive unprecedented liquidity crisis? They find it's not really doing much. And they really dig into the details and they find that the Federal Reserve has gone through a sort of personnel change and some of the key leaders in the 1920s, Benjamin Strong is one of them. He's now deceased. And the dominance of the New York Federal Reserve, which in their telling, you know, is global. It's interconnected. It's seen a lot of financial things come and go. And they believe that the New York”
2025-01-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #457 – Jennifer Burns: Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, Economics, Capitalism, Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“By column. How much money is in your vault? How much money is on deposit? How much money is circulating? And so they literally have graphs. You can see them in the book of how much money has been circulating in the US at various different points in time. And when they get to the Great Depression, they find the quantity of money available in the economy goes down by a third. And in some ways, this is completely obvious because so many banks have failed and we don't have any type of bank insurance at that point. So if your bank goes under, your savings are there, the money essentially vanishes. And it's fractional reserve banking, right? So you've put in, they can loan up to 90% on their deposits. And so Friedman and Schwartz present this argument.”
2025-01-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #457 – Jennifer Burns: Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, Economics, Capitalism, Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“She doesn't at this time hold a PhD. She's working for the National Bureau of Economic Research, and they come together to do the study of money in the U.S. economy. And it takes them 12 years to write the book. And they're releasing their ideas and they're arguing, and Friedman is writing papers, giving talks saying money is really important. And nobody's really believing him. He's a crank. He's at Chicago. He's out, you know, Chicago is a well-known university, but he's sort of considered a crank. And then in 63, he and Anna Schwartz published this book, and it's, you know, 800 pages. It's a reinterpretation of the history of the United States through money, like the central character is money, whether it's species, greenback, or the US currency. And they have a whole chapter on the Great Depression. And what they've literally done, Schwartz has done most of this. They've gone, Schwartz has gone to banks and said, show me your books. And then she's added up.”
2025-01-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #457 – Jennifer Burns: Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, Economics, Capitalism, Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Never quite sure about that. He has a hunch that there's something else going on, and he does not buy that capitalism has sort of ground to a halt or the other ideas that capitalism has gone through some sort of phase transition. And it worked great maybe while we had a frontier. This is a very serious argument that people are making. The United States used to have a frontier, a place where, you know, Europeans hadn't fully settled. Of course, they're pushing out the native tribes. That's another story. that this frontier is the engine of economic growth and the frontier is now over it's closed and we're going to stagnate there's a theory of secular stagnation and so to deal with secular stagnation we're just going to have to have a more active state so Friedman is suspicious of all these assumptions and he has this idea that it's something to do with money money is somehow important and so he joins together with Anna Schwartz who is an economist”
2025-01-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #457 – Jennifer Burns: Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, Economics, Capitalism, Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Lot of that, it's adaptation in America particularly, is the idea that capitalism has failed. Capitalism has revealed itself to have a profound flaw in that it's cycles of boom and bust create social instability, chaos. It needs to be tamed. It needs to be regulated. And so that becomes the kind of baseline of politics in the United States, the understanding of the New Deal, the understanding of the Democratic Party, even to some extent the understanding of the Republican Party. And Friedman never quite”
2025-01-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #457 – Jennifer Burns: Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, Economics, Capitalism, Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“His professors are profoundly concerned about the social crisis. They want relief programs. They want them now. They want bank regulation and financial reform. They're very active. This is not laissez-faire by any stretch of the imagination. So Friedman has that imprinting. And then about, so that's, he gets there in 32, 36, 37. The ideas of John Mayard Keynes from Britain, which has a different explanation. Keynes has a different explanation of the Great Depression. We'll kind of make landfall in American economics and be very profoundly influential on most American economists, but Friedman already, it's too late for Friedman. He already has a different perspective. So Keynesianism unfolds. I can say more about that, but it basically leads to more active federal government participation in the economy. And what underlies a lot of”
2025-01-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #457 – Jennifer Burns: Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, Economics, Capitalism, Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“where the institutional economics of the 1920s has failed to predict, which was focused on business cycles. This is the irony. Their big thing was charting and understanding business cycles. And then we have the biggest business cycle of all time, and they haven't seen it coming and they don't have a good explanation for it. And what he will get at Chicago is the remnants of the monetary understanding of the economy. And so his teachers, they don't know exactly what's going on, but they look first to the banking crisis. They look first to the 1933, it's bank runs, failures of maybe it's up to a third of American banks. Thousands of banks are failing per week. So they're focused on that. So that's the first kind of imprint he will have. The Great Depression has something to do with a banking system. The second imprint he will have is that all of”
2025-01-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #457 – Jennifer Burns: Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, Economics, Capitalism, Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Milton Friedman actually lived through the Great Depression. He's in college when it hits and he is, so he's in college. It's 1928 to 1932. And he's aware of the depression and he's deciding, should I study mathematics or should I study economics? And he hasn't, he's had some good economics teachers, but it's really the context. It's looking around at the slow dissolving of economic prosperity. So he decides to go to Chicago. He decides to study economics. And what's really interesting is that the Great Depression is so unexpected, it's unpredicted, it's unprecedented, and economists are really struggling to know how to respond to it. And so he's going to arrive at the University of Chicago when the field is struggling to know what to do. So he's in this kind of really open space.”
2025-01-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #457 – Jennifer Burns: Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, Economics, Capitalism, Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's his generation. There's also a Chicago School of Law and Economics that's really profoundly influential. And then there'll be kind of a third generation that he's somewhat distinct from, but that goes on to really shape economics. But let me go back to these kind of four pieces and let me start with Great Depression.”
2025-01-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #457 – Jennifer Burns: Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, Economics, Capitalism, Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Ideas or contributions or episodes. One was his work with Anna Schwartz in revising our understanding of the Great Depression. And that's tightly related to the second, which is the school of monetarism that he and Schwartz really become founders of. Then there is the prediction of stagflation and the explanation of that in the 1970s, which really is one of these sort of career-making predictions. And we can dig into that. And then in terms of technical economics, he's known for the permanent income hypothesis, which he develops with a group of female collaborators that I can talk about. So those are kind of four technical pieces. And being really brought together in what becomes the Chicago School of Economics, he's undoubtedly the head and the leader of the Chicago School of Economics. There's an earlier generation that he learns from.”
2025-01-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #457 – Jennifer Burns: Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, Economics, Capitalism, Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, sure. And that's a great summary. You learn fast. So let me start with the economics, and then I can kind of transition to how he used those economic ideas to become a real voice in the American conservative movement, the American political realm. So I'll kind of highlight for.”
2025-01-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #457 – Jennifer Burns: Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, Economics, Capitalism, Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Immigrant, the settler mythology, he pulls on these, but he doesn't create them. And he's more kind of playing a tune he already has. Whereas I think Rand really does something a little bit deeper in her ability to reach into people's psyche and then take that emotional, psychological experience and fuse it to an intellectual world and a political world. And that's really what makes her so powerful. And so I think she comes back in to relevancy in a different way than Friedman does because I think in some way she's tapped into a kind of more universal human longing for independence and autonomy and kind of self-creation and self-discovery.”
2025-01-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #457 – Jennifer Burns: Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, Economics, Capitalism, Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Mill Criminal didn't get such things, or you know, I'll meet someone and they'll say to me, you know, Ayn Rand is the reason I went to medical school, you know, like a woman, a woman said this to me a few years back. I never even occurred to me that I could be a doctor until I read Ayn Rand. And I said, I'm going to go to medical school. And so she has that really intense impact on people. So she thought of herself as rational. She thought of rationality as kind of what she was doing, but she was actually doing a kind of mythopoetic psychological work as well. Whereas Friedman, on the one hand, was much more rational. And there's a whole set of economic thinking and he provides a rational framework for understanding the world. And it's the framework of neoclassical economics. At the same time, he does pull on mythologies of the idea of America in the Gilded Age, the frontier mythology, the individual.”
2025-01-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #457 – Jennifer Burns: Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, Economics, Capitalism, Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and of kind of pushing back against that movement towards communism, social democracy. But one difference that I really should emphasize, Rand is a writer of fiction. She's a philosopher, but she's also a writer of fiction. So she is working almost in the mythic register, much more in the psychological register. She's creating characters that people identify with and people relate to experiences they've had. And that's one of the reasons she hit so deep. And she's also offering people, you know, I read all the fan letters to her. People would say things like, I read the fountain head and now I'm getting a divorce. You know, having just these incredible realizations.”
2025-01-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #457 – Jennifer Burns: Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, Economics, Capitalism, Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He does a really interesting interview at the end of his life where he's beginning to voice some doubts about globalization, which was he was sort of a prophet of globalization, a cheerleader of globalization. He really thought it would lead to a better world in all respects. And towards the end of his life, it's about two years before he dies, there's a note of doubt about how globalization unfolded and what it would mean, particularly for the American worker. And so you can see him still thinking. And that to me I had sort of assumed he became crankier and crankier and more and more set in his ways. And of course, there's a phase where he does become that way, especially as he's in the public eye and there's not room for nuance. But to find in the last years of him life, of his life him being so reflective, that was absolutely not something Rand could do.”
2025-01-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #457 – Jennifer Burns: Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, Economics, Capitalism, Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, absolutely. Friedman believed in being able to say I was wrong. And there are some things he said he was wrong about. We'll delve more into monetarism and monetary policy, but he was able to talk about the ways his ideas hadn't mapped onto the world the way he thought they would.”
2025-01-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #457 – Jennifer Burns: Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, Economics, Capitalism, Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, people talked about her meeting her and coming to believe in her ideas in a similar way as I did with Marxism in that suddenly everything made sense and that when they came to believe in objectivism, they felt they had this engine for understanding the entire world. Now, after a while, for most people that then became confining, but yeah, that certainty and Friedman had some of that as well. He clothed it differently. He clothed it in happiness where Rand kind of closed it, as you said, in crankiness or anger. I mean, there's also an arc to Rand. She gets kind of angrier and angrier and crankier and crankier over the course of her life. I enjoyed about my research is I was able to get into this early moment when she was different and a little more open. And then I kind of watched her clothes and her harden over time.”
2025-01-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #457 – Jennifer Burns: Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, Economics, Capitalism, Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yet he's always willing to debate his opponents and he's willing to do so with a smile on his face. You know, he's the kind of, he's the happy warrior and he actually will win a lot of debates simply by his emotional affect and his cheerfulness and his confidence where Rand will lose debates because she gets so angry in the face of disagreement. Yeah, they have a lot of similarities and a lot of differences and it's been really fascinating to kind of dive deep into both of them.”
2025-01-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #457 – Jennifer Burns: Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, Economics, Capitalism, Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Friedman, although he didn't use this terminology, was much more half a loaf guy. You know, like, I'll take what I can get and then I'll try to move to where I really want to be. But he is able to compromise, especially when he moves from being an economist into being more of a political thinker. And so that's a really different intellectual style. And then it also plays out in their lives in that Ayn Rand is incredibly schismatic. I mean, she wants her friends to believe what she believes and support what she supports. And she's willing to break a relationship if it doesn't match. Milton Friedman, he also does tend to have friends who agree with him.”
2025-01-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #457 – Jennifer Burns: Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, Economics, Capitalism, Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Revolution and takes a very big lesson from that. But her style of thinking is really first principles, an axiomatic approach, going from the basic idea of rationality, and then playing that out in different spheres. And so those are just very different intellectual approaches. And then they lead in some ways to really different ways of thinking about how you get things done in the world. Ayn Rand is a purist. She wants to start with the pure belief. She doesn't want it to be diluted. One of her favorite sayings was, you know, it's earlier than you think. In other words, we're still moving towards a place where we can really hold and express these ideals purely.”
2025-01-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #457 – Jennifer Burns: Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, Economics, Capitalism, Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, for sure. So beyond this idea that Milton Friedman takes a while to come to his justification of capitalism, Morzyn Ran kind of has it from the start. She really focuses on the core quality of rationalism and rationality. Rationality is the defining feature of human beings. And so she works from there, whereas Friedman, Milton Friedman eventually converges on this idea of freedom. So that's one part of it. The other is their intellectual style is really, really different. They're interpersonal styles are really different. So Friedman has big ideas, big principles that guide him, but he's also deeply empirical. He spends most of his career doing historical research, economic research, pulling data from how people actually make economic decisions and live in the world and using them to test and refine his theories. Where Rand, to some degree, we could say she's empirical in that she lives through the Russian”
2025-01-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #457 – Jennifer Burns: Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, Economics, Capitalism, Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Friedman struggles a bit more with how to justify capitalism, and he'll ultimately come down to freedom as his core value, like his God, as he says. And so freedom does connect back to the individual, but he's not justifying capitalism for his own sake. He's justifying it for its ability to underwrite freedom in a social sense and also in the individual sense.”
2025-01-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #457 – Jennifer Burns: Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, Economics, Capitalism, Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so Milton Friedman and Ayn Rand, in the biggest picture, they're both individualists and they're skeptical of collectivities and collectivism. So they're unit of analysis is the individual what's good for the individual, what works for the individual, and their understanding of society kind of flows from that. They also both use this focus on individualism to justify and to support capitalism as a social and economic system. So we can put them in a similar category. We can call them individualists. We could call them libertarians of a sort. But they're also really different in how they approach capitalism, how they approach thinking. You know, Ayn Rand developed her own moral and philosophical system to justify individualism and to connect the individual to capitalism and to support capitalism as a social and economic system.”
2025-01-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #457 – Jennifer Burns: Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, Economics, Capitalism, Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source