L&A Book Talk: “Milton Friedman: The Last Conservative” By Jennifer Burns

>> Eric Wakin: Hi. Good afternoon, everyone. I'm Eric Waken, the Director of the Library and Archives and the Deputy Director of the Hoover Institution. It's my great pleasure to welcome you to today's talk by Professor Jennifer Burns, who will be speaking on Milton Friedman. More on that in a moment.

Let me welcome you to the Hoover Institution and offer some thanks to the people who make this event and all the others like it possible. Our director, Condoleezza Rice, for her unstinting support for the library and archives and our programming. Our board of overseers, those are our donors who, our board of directors and all our other donors who make our programming possible.

Hoover is entirely funded by our donors and endowments raised by donors. I also want to thank my colleagues, Samira Bazorgi, Sharon Nantuna, Hannah Johnson, and Marshall Robbins for helping to make this event possible online and personally in this room. We're here because of the vision of one man, Herbert Hoover, who had an idea in 1919 that we should collect material on war.

And in 1919, he gave $50,000 to Stanford to do that before the founding of the National Archives. And his entire deed of gift was a telegram, collect material on war, full stop. A few other words. And from that organization, we've grown into the largest public policy organization in America, now, with an operating budget of over $100 million.

We, as a library and archives, which is one of my favorite parts of the institution, have about a million volumes, a million books, 6500 archival collections, one of which is, of course, the Milton Friedman Collection, which Professor Burns has mined extensively for her book. Mister Hoover said this about our mission.

The institution is not and must not be a mere library. And this talk is just one manifestation of his vision. Let me introduce Jennifer Burns properly, and then she will do the talk. Jennifer Burns is a fellow at the Hoover Institution. She's a professor at the Stanford History department, and she's also directed, for almost the past ten years, our workshop on political economy at the Hoover Institution.

Although today's talk is on her new intellectual biography of Milton Friedman, I do want to draw your attention to her superb biography of Ayn Rand, Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right. I don't have time to quote from all the superb reviews of the Ayn Rand book because the ones on the Milton Friedman book are so over the top.

But Jennifer's going to cover her ears for a moment. But if you've been reading the book, as I have, you've been listening to the reviews, the book's gotten amazing reviews, and that's a testament to what a great book it is. It's been called intriguing, excellent, marvelous, robust, definitive, graceful, elegantly crafted.

And I could go on and on, a tremendous scholarly accomplishment. A brilliant book. And let me just close with one long quote to give you a sense of the totality of the research that's gone into this book. To call this book merely a biography of Milton Friedman is a disservice.

It would be difficult to imagine a more comprehensive portrait of the influences, hard economics and personal struggles and triumphs that shaped his life. Burns is even-handed throughout and unafraid to critique. Sharp and illuminating, a masterful profile of a most consequential American. Like that really says what the book is.

My colleague Dan was telling me he heard Milton Friedman in this room once before. So let me just say one thing about Milton Friedman. At the start of his tenure as director of the Hoover institution, John Raisian, whose pictures on the wall there, second from the left, asked all the fellows, what should Hoover's guiding vision be for research in the early nineties?

And Milton Friedman said, John said, Milton Friedman's reply was, freedom, freedom, freedom. Political, economic, and social freedom. So I want to say how grateful I am that Jennifer spent so much time using our archives to produce her new book, and just so grateful she's here. So please give her a warm Hoover welcome.

 

>> Jennifer Burns: Hello, everybody. Thank you, Eric, so much for that kind introduction. It's really such an honor to be here today and to speak with you all to celebrate the publication of my book, Milton, the last conservative. This book absolutely could not have happened without the Hoover Library and archives.

And as a historian who has been to many archives in many places in the United States and beyond, I just have to stress the Hoover institution library and archives is a place like no other. It really sets the standard, it sets the bar for archives and research from its committed and dedicated archivists and staff who are ready to dig out material you saw once, but you don't remember quite where.

To its visionary director, Eric Waken, to the strong support of Hoover director Condoleezza Rice. It's really a place like no other. So I'm immensely grateful for every day I have spent here in the reading room, which I'm looking at right across there. It's my home away from home.

So, okay. As Eric noted, I'm an associate professor of history here at Stanford and also a research fellow at the Hoover Institution. I specialize in intellectual history or the history of ideas, and I've ended up having a particular focus on neglected figures of political conservatism. So my first book, as Eric mentioned, was a biography of Ayn Rand, for which I also use the archives here.

And my new book is on Milton Friedman. And you may not think Friedman is a neglected figure, particularly around here, but this will be the first full-length biography of Friedman that takes the story of his life from his days as a boy scout- here he is in Rahway, New Jersey, and wearing a rather fetching cap- to the pinnacle of fame in the United States.

Here he is on the COVID of Time magazine at a moment when really reaching the COVID of Time magazine was sort of the zenith of cultural power and influence. So what I'd like to do today is give you an overview of the book, casing some of the research I did here in the archive.

And I'm going to read a few excerpts to whet your appetite. I realize this is a brainy crew, but I also realize that a 500-plus page book on the history of economics and economic history can be daunting. So I want to give you some reasons to dive right in.

Okay, so first, who is Milton Friedman? Well, at the end of his career, he was a Hoover fellow. And actually his arrival here at Hoover was one of the things that helped catapult the institution to prominence. You may know him as a Nobel Prize-winning economist, as the founder of the School of Monetarism, which has many dimensions but could be summarized in the saying of Friedman that's equally famous, quote, inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon.

You may also know him as the great champion of free markets, as the author of books like this one, capitalism and freedom, published in 1962. Or you may know him as the star of the series free to choose, which has had this remarkable second life out there on YouTube.

A lot of the young people I meet today have found Friedman through some algorithmic rabbit hole that served him up and are like, who is this guy? What is this? This is amazing. You may also know him as a policy innovator. And the list of proposals that Friedman made, most of them in his book that seemed just completely wild at the time, yet have become part of our World.

It astonishes me every time I go over this. So let me list a few examples. The idea that income tax. Taxes are withheld from your paycheck. Source that in armed forces that relies primarily on paid volunteers instead of a compulsory draft, state supplied educational vouchers that cover the cost of education.

The school choice movement in general, the earned income tax credit or tax rebates more generally, also known as universal basic income. A world where international currencies float one against another rather than being defined by governments and set ratios. So all of these and more are the achievements of Friedman.

You probably have a few others you're thinking of, but you might not have known until today he was also once a boy scout. So this is the biographer's task, how to bring to life this monumental intellect, show how he was shaped by his times and how he in turn shaped those times.

So what I want to do today is just highlight a few episodes that I discovered in the archive in the course of writing this book. And I want to use these to underscore Friedman's ongoing importance for the questions that we face today. So specifically, I want to talk first about Friedman as a classical liberal and within context, how he worked to develop a new method of policy design that he believed was compatible with classical liberal principles.

I then wanna talk about him as a founder of monetarism, a new school of economic thought that continues to leave its imprint on economic thinking and monetary policy. And then I want to talk about him as a critic and analyst of the Federal Reserve. This lifelong mantle he took up to be sort of public enemy number one of the Federal Reserve, that is more relevant today than ever before.

Okay, so let me kind of talk about Friedman, to begin with, as a classical liberal. And Freeman was born in Rahway, New Jersey. It was an unusual background for immigrant Jewish family. His parents came from eastern Europe. Was a wave of hundreds of thousands of immigrants to the United States seeking a better life.

Most of these immigrants were from eastern Europe. Most of them landed in New York or Chicago, and they had a sort of collective and communal urban experience that was often heavily linked to working class politics and socialism. Friedman's family, by contrast, ended up in Rahway, New Jersey, small town America, only a handful of jewish families in town.

He was a brilliant student, sort of rocketed his way through Rahway's public schools. And the major shadow on his life was the sudden and unexpected death of his father when he was in his senior year of high school. Nonetheless, he was able to continue on to Rutgers and then to the University of Chicago.

And he arrived at the University of Chicago in the deepest, darkest days of the Great Depression, the fall of 1932. And it was actually this economic crisis that propelled him to graduate school. He was very skilled in mathematical analysis. He considered pursuing a PhD in math. He considered a career as an actuary.

And it was the unfolding crisis of the Great Depression that shifted him to the field of economics, which he thought could provide some answers to what he was seeing all around him. So it was crucially not just a moment of economic crisis, but a moment of political crisis.

Fascism, communism were on the rise in Europe. Governments were falling, and there was a question about what were the political ideas and ideologies of the future that could meet this crisis. Now, Friedman has immediately emerged in these questions, primarily through the influence of the two teachers that he most valued, Henry Simons and Frank Knight.

Now, Knight and Simons considered themselves liberals, we could say classical liberal in today's parlance. They valued individual freedom. They valued limited government. As economists, they were committed to the price system and its ability to allocate scarce resources. Yet they were also aware in these dark days of 1932 that voters were not really buying what they were selling, that this creed of classical liberalism that tended to take a more laissez faire stance towards government action was not meeting the demands of the day.

And so they were really worried, if classical liberalism couldn't meet the demands of the day, what would fill into the breach was communism or fascism. And that was something they wanted to forestall at all costs. So at the same time, though, despite this free market orientation, and despite their appreciation for market exchange and market efficiency, they were not laissez faire.

And that really came from within their own perspectives. And this, for me, was interesting, arriving at the. This was actually my research in Chicago archives and finding just how many proposals Friedman's professors were putting together, stacks and stacks of them, and sending to anyone they knew in the Roosevelt administration or the Hoover administration.

So they were very focused trying to meet the economic crisis. So they were really wrestling with this basic question. How could one safeguard free markets? How could one continue to ensure broadly shared prosperity and create a safety net of sorts that wouldn't choke off innovation, sort of how to find that balance.

And I really think this is like sort of the question we continue to grapple with that sort of faces every generation living in capitalist democracies. But in the 1930s, they have this particular urgency because of this global crisis in democratic capitalism. And so I know that these questions had particularly urgency and meaning for Friedman because of what's in the archive.

I looked through the archive. I know the books he read. I know how important these men were for him. I know what they said on the papers he submitted to them. And so that kind of helped me get a sense of his ideas in this very early stage, before Milton Friedman was Milton Friedman.

Nonetheless, I was very surprised to come across the paper in the archive. It's dated 1939. And I can say this is the first public policy paper that Milton Friedman ever wrote, and I'll say came at an unusual moment in Friedman's career. So he finished his studies at the University of Chicago and went then to Columbia, where he would eventually receive his PhD, because the professors there were specialists in mathematical economics, which he was drawn to at that time.

After that, he took his first job in 1935, working for New Deal agencies. And it's around that time that he married his wife, Rose, who he had met in the graduate economics program. Very unusual for her day for a woman to pursue a PhD in economics. And if you're wondering how they ended up marrying, well, Rose's maiden name was Director, and students in economics classes were seated alphabetically.

So Milton ended up next to Rose Director in pretty much every class, and he was not gonna let that opportunity pass by. And there you go. And they ended up married and had a very long and loving relationship. So at this point, he's working in DC. You can see they're by the cherry trees that And the time immemorial tradition of photographing your.

And he was an associate economist on the National Research Council. He was part of the study of consumer purchases, which was an enormous study of the consumption patterns of american families. And it was designed in order to help the federal government figure out how to address the economic crisis.

And it's kinda the first era of big data. And Friedman's role as a statistician, which he was mainly trained in at that point, was to analyze the data, figure out how to parse it, to organize it. And again, I've seen all the data he collected in the archive.

But then forward to four years later, now he's living in New York. He's working for the National Bureau of Economic Research. And here's where he meets Gunnar Myrdal. Now, Gunnar Myrdal is famous as a man of the left, he's a Swedish socialist. He'll become widely known in the United States for his book An American Dilemma, the study of race relations in America.

He's also somewhat famous for having been jointly awarded with FA Hayek the Nobel Prize in Economics, which was some effort to balance the prize between left and right that really satisfied no one. Nonetheless, did he and Friedman meet? I couldn't figure that out from the archive, but I know that they did meet.

And there was a real meeting of the minds cuz there's this course. And so probably Columbia economists all kind of hung out on the weekend. So probably Friedman ended up somewhere at a party with Gunnar Myrdal, and they just started talking. And the upshot is FrIedman sends him this, I'll go back to the document, this document, which those of you are closer can read it.

The title is A Plan for Guaranteeing a Minimum Income to All. And this is what he calls an objective method of determining a minimum standard of living. So this is a proposal that Friedman sends to Myrdal. And it gives us some insight into how to approach this question and this dilemma of how do we balance markets and use them to address inequality or poverty?

Or how do we create a more fair and equitable system that's still based fundamentally around market exchange? And so his idea is a minimum income, and he's really focused on making it objective. What he says in his paper is that we have a new form of objective criteria in the science of nutrition.

Now, this is also the time when people discover the calorie and start to sort of map out what are the nutritional needs of human bodies and human people. And so Friedman decides, here's what we could do. We have nutrition, we have calories, we can kind of know scientifically how much a human being needs to consume.

And then we can look at all this income and consumption data that he just spent years and years crunching through in DC, and we can determine the cost of an adequate diet. And then we can combine these two pieces and basically set the minimum income so that a family could purchase the food that it needs to meet the nutritional standard.

So it's really interesting, it's a very data-driven, and, as he hoped, objective approach to this more philosophical problem of finding that balance. Now, Myrtle liked the idea. He wasn't quite sure. He maybe wanted it to be bigger. What about these other things? So the letters kinda go back and forth and then they kind of fizzle out.

Nonetheless, this is a truly remarkable moment. You have two thinkers, opposite ends of the ideological spectrum coming together to wrestle with a common problem, and even better, coming close to convergence on a shared solution. Now, the devil is in the details, of course, but it points us to what is powerful about this idea.

This was an effort to reconcile individual choice and liberty with a social safety net. And Friedman's view was that a minimum income would help eliminate the worst poverty. It would set a floor beneath which no one could fall. Yet it would also be compatible with a price system as a more general organizing principle in society.

And it would be compatible with individual choice and liberty, because although the minimum income would be provided to guarantee that people could buy food, no one would be forcing you to buy a specific type of food in a specific way. And Friedman was very clear, people might not use this money in the way that it's intended, but we have to just be okay with that.

We have to nonetheless craft and design the policy and sort of let it play out from there. And additionally, what's important about this idea is this provision does not require a new bureaucracy or a new set of standards. It's not complicated, it's fairly clean, and it's fairly easy.

So what happened to Friedman's proposal? In the short run, sort of nothing, got busy, he moved on to other concerns. But it surfaced in Capitalism and Freedom, and now it was reframed as negative income tax. And Friedman had been, again, working in the federal government. Now, he'd been at the treasury Department working on the tax system, and with world War two came the advent of mass taxation, which hadn't existed prior to the war.

So now, just as that study of consumer data gave him one version of the idea, the study of taxation shifted it. So now he said this should be a negative income tax and that people with a certain amount of income will be paying a share of that in taxation, and another set of people will be receiving a rebate.

And he proposes this Capitalism and Freedom. And then there's this complicated political story, which I tell in the book. It makes its way through the Nixon administration. It appears as the family assistance plan, which would be a guaranteed family income proposed by Richard Nixon for various reasons that it is not successful in getting through Congress.

Then it takes another couple of mutations and comes out as the Earned Income Tax Credit. So here's a slide from the state of Arkansas describing this program, which continues to exist today and follows that basic model of people below a certain income threshold receive a rebate from the government, essentially, in the form of cash.

And this program has been evaluated by analysts from left, right, and center. And it does very well on almost all metrics of lowering, particularly child poverty, but lowering family poverty, just as Friedman had hoped. Ronald Reagan called it the, quote, best anti-poverty, best pro-family, best job creation measure to come out of Congress.

It's also become the sort of basic architecture of a lot of policy. If you think about the child tax credit, if you think about how coronavirus relief programs were structured, a lot of them draw on the same kind of logic of the EITC. And it's one of these surprising ways we can see Friedman's legacy still with us in the world today.

Now, the episode also connects to two other themes I develop in my book. The first is how his ideas reverberate beyond fellow economists and also beyond conservatives. So the EITC has broad bipartisan support. Another version of the EITC and the minimum income is now discussed today as universal basic income.

And this is generally thought of as a sort of progressive idea du jour. And a lot of people don't actually know how pivotal Friedman was to the introduction and the Of this idea. So the second theme, I think this really surfaces, is how the array of policy proposals from international trade to poverty to education is really unified by this kind of single insight or the single method.

And this is what I think of as Friedman's big passive mind, the idea to look at prices themselves as a mechanism of policy. This is very much a revolutionary move in much of the New Deal era. And after policy is designed to regulate prices and set them at a certain way, Friedman kind of flips that and says, let's make price the policy.

In other words, let's use the interactions of buyers and sellers, the allocative powers of the market mechanism, as the actual policy to get us where we wanna go. So in education, let's use the forces of competition and let's give parents the money they need to engage in the economic marketplace, and let's use that to improve education.

Or with poverty, let's give people who are poor the money they need to buy what they need and to make themselves actual participants in market exchange rather than recipients of benefits in kind. And that placing the price mechanism at the center comes, for Friedman instead of building an institution, a program or a plan or regulation.

And in that way, it's an effort to intervene in social life with government resources without growing the overall footprint of the federal government. It's an effort to try to devolve responsibility downward and harness the power of individual choice and incentives. And I know this sounds like a familiar move to us today.

We're like, yeah, of course, that makes sense. It's just one of the tools in the policy toolkit. But it was not in Friedman's time, and he faced enormous opposition pushing this forward. And it's a mark of a great thinker that their ideas, the originality and force of them suddenly becomes lost to us because they just seem like common sense.

Well, yeah, everybody knows that. They didn't in the beginning. Okay, so I wanna move on now to talking about Friedman as a monetaris,t and kind of return to this moment of the Great Depression. The image on the left is a bank run. You see people queuing around the corner to try to get their money out of the bank.

They're not gonna get it out of that bank, it's gone. And probably some of those people are ending up in the other slide, which is, again, having their nutritional needs met by a soup kitchen. So this first set of questions comes to Friedman like, what do we do about this situation?

And that 1939 paper kind of addresses questions. But there's a second set of questions that comes pretty soon after it, which is, why did this happen? What caused this enormous crisis? What caused 25% unemployment persisting at similar levels for nearly a decade? A dominant interpretation which arose mid the 1930s and carried forward was that this was a symptom of a sort of broader failure or broader slowdown or broader flaw in the capitalist system.

And that what Great Depression showed was that the federal government must play an active role in managing demand in the economy, in supporting spending and supporting economic activity. And out of this really grows what we call Keynesian economics. And it's very much a reorientation of the federal government's role and a reorientation of the economics profession, role of the economist.

Now, Friedman never embraced this set of ideas. He was skeptical. And one of the reasons he was skeptical is that he had an alternative explanation in mind. I'd learned at the University of Chicago to think about the Great Depression really in that left image as a crisis of the banking system, as a financial and monetary crisis.

And so he had this hunch that the Keynesian story wasn't quite right, but he didn't have evidence. He would make testing this hunch the sort of major goal of his career. He had a remarkable partner, Anna Jacobson Schwartz. Now, when Friedman and Schwartz came together, they partnered on a project to the National Bureau of Economic Research.

And Schwartz came to this project as an expert on British monetary history. She had authored a huge multivolume work on British monetary history with two other economists. And so Friedman and Schwartz started piecing together what had happened during the Great Depression, and more broadly, what had happened to money in the United States.

And the idea was inspired by the quantity theory of money, idea Friedman had learned at Chicago, which pointed to the literal quantity of money in the economy as a very important metric. And so Friedman and Schwartz, mostly Schwartz literally set about measuring how much money there was in the United States economy at various points in time.

There's stacks and stacks. This is legal size paper. Imagine just folder and folder and box and box upon these. They're all right and it's labeled Vault Crash on the top. And each of these columns, it's member banks, nonmember banks, postal savings banks. And Schwartz is literally adding up how much money was on deposit at these various times.

To do sometimes travel to the banks and ask. And then she had to pull out all these different figures, sometimes for gaps in the data, extrapolate. Sometimes data was collected months to months. Today, if we were doing this, if you were an economist who wanted to do this, you just sit keyboard and hit a few strokes and you'd have all the information.

Schwartz literally has to create it herself, dig it up herself. And the result is that Friedman and Schwartz have this enormous dataset nobody else has, because they have created it themselves. So they worked together for more than a decade, have to say, gives me hope. It gave me hope when I was writing this book.

They ended up with this book, which is longer than mine. So this is A Monetary History of the United States, and it tells the story of the United States through money. It's truly remarkable, as a US historian, to read this and see all the familiar things I know in this kind of strange protagonist at the center, which is the US dollar.

But this real centerpiece of this book is the Great Depression. And they document in the Great Depression a 30% drop in the stock of money available in the United States. So all of those long columns of figures eventually reduce down to charts like this. And you can see that real drop.

And this is those bank failures. The banks go under, the money disappears. It seems like, again, obvious, of course, when the banks fail, the money went away, and that had a problem. But really drawing this to people's attention was critical. So Friedman and Schwartz called the Great Depression the Great Contraction.

The money supply contracted. And they really argued for the Great Depression, its length and severity, as primarily a monetary phenomenon. And again, this is in contradistinction to the idea that capitalism had entered some slow growth phase from which it would not exit without economic stimulus. And so they called it a monetary phenomenon.

I think At the same time, they also clearly understood the Great Depression as an institutional and political phenomena because they went on to argue that the Federal Reserve system could have and should have prevented this deflation. So the Federal Reserve was the so called lender of last resort.

It should have helped all those failing banks. It should have pushed as much money as it could into the system. It should have tried to sort of keep things circulating, keep the economy on life support. Now, what's interesting is what Friedman and Schwartz said the Fed should have done but didn't do.

What it should have done became the basic playbook of economic policy in a crisis ever since, and can truly credit Friedman and Schwartz with helping the United States and the globe avoid a similar calamity. Here's how Federal Reserve Chair Ben Bernanke put it. This was a banquet, and he was talking to Friedman and Schwartz, he said, regarding the Great Depression, you're right, we did it.

We're very sorry, but thanks to you, we won't do it again. So here's an interesting backstory, though. The whole time she's working on this book, Anna Schwartz's status is technically that of a graduate student. And her Columbia professors keep saying, you really haven't done enough work for a doctorate.

She keeps coming to them and saying, I'd like my doctorate. And they're like, no. And she's telling Friedman about this. So I find this series of letters. So I'm now gonna drop us into the manuscript and describe the resolution of this. Schwartz deserved much of the credit for the book success, particularly its reverberation beyond academic economics.

Left to his own devices, Friedman would have created a compendium of charts and graphs. It was Schwartz who dug into confederate money, anchoring the narrative in the Civil War era. And it was Schwartz who dove into the archives and pulled out the compelling human stories that brought the book to life.

Yet still she got no respect. As their book neared publication, the campaign to keep her from becoming doctor Schwartz reached absurd heights. The newest wrinkle, she reported in a letter to Friedman, was that because her, quote, dissertation was now in bound galleys, this is the last step before a book is published.

She could not incorporate feedback from her committee members, and therefore she could not qualify for a degree. It was ludicrous enough to break through Friedman's naivete. Finally, he grasped that she was up against something more insidious than academic bureaucracy. Friedman had reached the mountaintop. To his credit, he wanted Schwartz there, too.

He roared as much in a phone call to the chair of Columbia's Economics Department, which was trying to hire him away from Chicago. A sharp letter followed, quote, the one thing I am clear about is that by any standards whatsoever, she has demonstrated her qualifications for the PhD degree, that her getting a degree at this stage has no great advantage for her and will honor Columbia more than it will help her, Friedman wrote.

Schwartz finally had what apparently every woman in economics needed, a powerful male patron. Within a year, she had her doctorate, too. Now, Columbia, as well as Chicago, could claim some connection to a book that would reverberate into economic thinking and global monetary policy. Now, besides Anna Schwartz, one thing I discovered, and I did not expect to find this at all when I began the research, was many other women working behind the scenes in all of the most important research that Friedman published.

And so, unfortunately, that would be a topic of another talk, which maybe I can do some other time. But I just suffice it to say women played a critical role in his career. A few of them are here, Rose Friedman, his wife, Dorothy Brady, who was Rose's best friend.

Unfortunately, I don't have a good picture of her. And Margaret Reed, who went on to be a tenured professor in the Chicago economics department and was Friedman's colleague for many years. And so tracing out the influence of these women and the way they interacted with Friedman and their contribution to his economics is another major theme in the book.

So now I want to fast forward us to the 1970s, to the era that most closely resembles our own. And here's where Milton Friedman really emerges as a policymaker, a public intellectual, and it's really around the issue of inflation. And so throughout the 1950s and the 1960s, while Friedman and Schwartz were laboring on their study of money, really worried about inflation.

Hadn't been a significant inflationary episode for years. And it was even thought inflation was sort of good because inflation rose as prices went up, often unemployment went down. As there was more action and activity in the economy, you could sort of trade them off one another. Sure, you had a little inflation, prices going up, but great.

A lot of people are working. That's good. In 1967, though, celebrated speech, and he said, this might work in the short run, but it's not going to work in the long run. In the long run, you could have high inflation and high unemployment together. And this had not been seen in the data.

He described it theoretically, how it could happen, and it didn't make a lot of sense at the time. Immediately, people started arguing about it. And almost immediately after that, the very thing he had said would happen started to emerge. It was called stagflation, stagnation and inflation, high unemployment and high inflation at the same time.

This began to emerge across the 1970s. It was a real moment of vindication for Friedman, and it helps catapult him into even higher realms of influence. Here he is with the late George Schultz, his good friend and colleague, there in the Oval Office with Richard Nixon. I have to say that Friedman didn't love Richard Nixon.

He was kind of not so sure about him. But Richard Nixon really wanted to be in Friedman's good graces. He really, really worried and was always trying to kind of bring him into the fold. And he didn't actually want to listen to what Friedman said, but he wanted it to be seen as if he were doing.

So here's another slide I love that I found in the archive. This is Friedman on the COVID of the New York Times Magazine, and sort of Friedman as the Globe head. And you can see the various things he's gripping relate to all that dizzying array of policy proposals, all the different things he has influence upon.

On the one hand, the 1970s or this kind of moment of indication. But they're also a moment of sadness, as I uncovered in the archive, because they lead to the fracturing of his relationship with the economist Arthur Burns. No relation. Now, Friedman had met Arthur Burns at Rutgers when Burns was a professor there and Friedman was a student.

And Friedman venerated Burns like no other. He even called Burns his, quote, surrogate father figure. And so when Nixon appointed Burns to the chair of the Federal Reserve in January 1970, it was widely interpreted as a victory for freedmen that there would now be a sort of friedmanite Fed.

This is not, in fact, what happened. At first, it seemed like things were going well, you know, Burns was kind of making the Fed more efficient and more professional. And then came a bombshell. Freeman opened the newspaper and saw that Arthur Burns had come out in public support what was called incomes policy.

Incomes policy refers to wage and price guidelines. It was a democratic party idea, was surprising for a republican appointee to come out in support of it. But it also meant wage and price guidelines meant that Arthur Burns did not think the Fed was responsible for inflation. And it also meant that Arthur Burns did not buy Milton Friedman's analysis of, analysis of inflation as a monetary phenomenon, if you would suggest wage and price guidelines.

So I'm going to come back into the manuscript and read you another section, far more than a policy disagreement. For Friedman, this speech was a profound rupture in his emotional universe.mm Later that evening, after hours of tossing and turning, Friedman arose from his bed and poured out his anguish.

This speech had left him sleepless, quote, saddened, dismayed, depressed, he wrote to Burns in a passionate letter, quote, though I know this is not fair or right or generous, the word that keeps coming to mind is betrayed, end quote. How could Burns, who had repeated again and again his stance against wage and price controls, make such a reversal?

The letter tacked between incredulity and loss, quote, never in my wildest dreams did I believe that the central bank virus was so potent that it could corrupt even you in so short a time, Friedman mourned. Maybe there was a case to be made for incomes policy, but he simply could not imagine what it was.

Quote, incomes policy in any shape and form is bad economics and the entering wedge for still worse economics, he wrote. And Friedman continued, the proposal, quote, verges in my mind on the dishonest in spreading lies to the public, end quote. It was simply not true that inflation was, quote, produced by unions.

Rather, it was produced, quote, only in Washington, by misguided policy. Even Burns himself had said as much in the past. Although Freeman called only the policy dishonest, the implications extended to Burns's character. Stepping back for a moment, Friedman grasped that his letter was, quote, melodramatic rather than cold and logical.

But his missives to Burns had always resembled diary entries. Never before had he dissembled or masked his feelings. It was obvious to all who knew him that Freedman loved being the smartest guy in the room. It was also clear he loved to smash idols Pigou, Cain, Samuelson, his whole life names others worshipped were his targets.

But underneath all this, imperceptibly running through the years, was a contrapuntal desire for a wise man, a counselor, a superior, someone to admire and esteem. Burns, arriving in the fatherless freedman's life just as he considered his professional future, had played this role for decades. Quote Arthur there remains no one whom I so admire and feel so close to.

Rose only accepted and so hate to hurt, Friedman told him in his closing lines. Phew, I thought economics was kind of dry and boring. No, the passion of ideas lives on. And I'll say that I delve into this relationship more in the book, and I'll say that FriEdman was right to predict that Burns would go from income policy to wage and price controls.

But I want to stress this is not just a private and personal conflict. This is part of the great drama of ideas in the 1970s. And this episode reminds us how out of the mainstream Friedman's ideas were at the time and how in the mainstream they are now.

And now the experience of the 1970s shifted many people towards his perspective. Friedman's vindication ultimately came not really on the technicalities of monetary policy. In fact, as the economic system evolved, his specific ideas often didn't fit. But this basic idea that animated his caReer, that money matters, became deeply influential.

Now, over time, this idea has waxed and waned. Since 2021, it's come roaring back as, here's a picture of Burns. I forgot to put that up, as inflation has once again come up to the levels of the 1970s. And Freeman's watchers have been quick to point out that Freedman's favorite measure of money in the economy, the aggregate m two, which he did much to raise its preeminence, also went through a very high spike in 2021, which in Friedman's analysis would have predicted inflation.

So it's a book of history that I've written, but in this strange twist, it turns out to have a lot of relevancy to our own time. Now, I know you're wondering about the title. Why am I calling FreemAn the last conservative? And I mean this in two ways.

First is Friedman, I see as a conservative, in a sense of somebody who conserves the past, and he really did this as an economist. The methodologies and approaches and research practices that he and Anna Schwartz used were seen as just hopelessly old fashioned, completely out of retrograde. They really zigged while others zagged, and it had enormous intellectual payoff.

Secondly, I mean, with his title gesture to shifts in the contemporary conservative movement with which Freeman was so closely aligned in his lifetime. There is now a new suspicion of markets, a new embrace of nationalism, a new reluctance to engage in the world. And all of these mark a turn away from Milton Friedman.

It's in some ways perhaps inevitable that new issues would engage us. Yet Friedman tackled questions that are universal and perennial. How do we balance capitalism and markets with other social goods? If some inequality is inevitable, how much is too much? What are the basic dynamics of a monetary economy that always need watching?

With this book, I tried to provide a way to think through these questions with Milton Friedman. And even if we don't agree, we will be all the smarter for it. Thank you so much for your kind attention. I would be pleased to take any questions from the audience here.

I think there is a mic on the floor. I see a gentleman right in front.

>> Speaker 3: Thank you for the presentation. So actually back in full economy like almost 15 years ago now back in the university, Kaplan's freedom was actually one of the readings we had. So thanks for perspective on that and what would be quite compelling.

And it's still selling to this day given how now we're seeing very rapid backsliding in Hong Kong, especially since 2020, and now you're seeing financial firms exiting the place. Already you can tell it's losing its steinhemism pretty quickly. But if we go back a decade, say, in the postwar years, did you manage to dive into, was there much of an interplay between Friedman and the then first finance minister of Hong Kong, John Cowperthwaite?

Who actually, he literally was well known for channeling plenty of policy measures that, I mean, either if Friedman, if he had observed them and incorporated them into that, or if he was influenced by Friedman writing, or if it went both ways. But he basically said that the person who is trading, the merchant on the street, those at ground level, they would forever be more knowledgeable about the economy than anyone high up.

 

>> Jennifer Burns: There is an episode of free to choose where Friedman goes to Hong Kong and films on site. And definitely in the 80s and 80s, his influence was global. He visited China several times. He had a few supporters in the CCP, eventually didn't get to the top. But he was very interested in Hong Kong.

He was interested in, first, its flourishing economy, and then secondly, he was thinking not just of when Hong Kong was a democracy, and then he was comparing it to the fate of Singapore and the other sort of Asian tigers. And it made him think a little bit about, he had this always this idea of capitalism and freedom and their relationship.

And he started thinking as he looked towards some of the asian economies, that you might need to think of this idea of civic freedom, that you could have a society that had some rights of assembly and speech, but was not fully democratic because you didn't have the voting rights for it.

I would say he was an admirer of Hong Kong, and he also, with regard to China, was a firm believer that eventually China would democratize. So I think we're still waiting for that. But I wouldn't at all be surprised if there's a Friedman input on what you learned and what you're talking about.

I saw Charles Pom had a question.

>> Charles Palm: It's a short question. You probably know that Friedman did not like the word conservative as a label for himself. Do you think he would have accepted your definition of him as the last conservative?

>> Jennifer Burns: Actually, I'm fairly confident he would not like this title because I've heard from both his children and they don't like it.

So my apologies. My apologies. So he might be interested in the idea of having conserved economic ideas, because he really did say, this is what I'm doing. He said a quantity theory of money, a restatement, and he wouldn't have thought of himself as just carrying something from the past forward.

He would have thought of himself as reinterpreting it in important ways. He would have said, I'm not a conservative, and I'm using a very pragmatic and instrumental definition of conservative. When I talk about his kind of political work and his ideas, is that he allied himself and worked most closely with politicians, think tanks, leaders, organizations that call themselves conservative.

And so I feel like I'm on solid ground and saying, yeah, you're part of this. I'm also aware, I mean, I've written an article on this. Conservative United States is unique and different. And one of the reasons it's unique and different is that it incorporates thinkers like Friedman, who are in favor of free market capitalism, which often has a lot of creative destruction embedded in it, is often not friendly to traditions and the way things were.

And American conservatism contains multitudes, it's unique and it's different, it's not what it looks like in other countries. In other countries, Friedman would be a liberal or a neoliberal. But I just wanted to use the words that really define conversation in America rather than try to wedge him into some other set of words.

So, yes, thank you for the question. A few others in the room, and then maybe we'll grab some Zoom. Is there one other? I see a gentleman in the back there with a.

>> Speaker 5: I'm not an economist, so our patience, please. But the Great Depression, the Federal Reserve should have saved the failing banks, would have been Friedman's opinion, or then later with the earned income tax credit, he, but wait, I'm confused.

He didn't support government direction or management or interference. On the other hand, he wanted something that led to earned income tax credits and he wanted the government to save the failing banks, which were part of a monetized capitalism.

>> Jennifer Burns: Yeah. So I think your question is pointing to this distinction between very laissez faire or views on laissez faire capitalism verging towards anarchism.

And Friedman's position, which is not. It gets caricatured as that he definitely believes there is a role for the state. There's a role for the state in monetary provision, in monetary stability. There's a role for the state in addressing social minimums or poverty. There's a role for the state in the rules of the road, structures of law.

So I think what I'm trying to do is bring back some of the more nuanced vision of Friedman that it's not simply an anarchist vision of let's get rid of everything and things will work themselves out. What I really was, as I said, was surprising to see was how in a state of crisis, a time of crisis, he was calling for a very activist federal government and his professors, where some of the reforms they called for, most of them were incorporated in the 1935 Banking act, but they actually went quite beyond that.

There was a reform Friedman often advocated for called 100% money, which basically means there is no fractional reserve banking, and that would just be a radical change to the banking system. And he advocated this into the early 1960s. I think he finally decided, I better start talking about stuff that could actually happen.

I mean, it kind of dropped away, but so there's another side to Friedman that we don't often see that is creating space for the state. It's a specific type of state that's oriented towards supporting competitive frameworks. So thank you. That's a great question. I think we had some on Zoom, so I'm going to take a few and I'll come back to you.

 

>> Samira: Yep, we have a question first. Great talk. And then all caps. Great book. Can you tell us about the relationship between Milton Friedman and William F Buckley?

>> Jennifer Burns: Yeah, that's a good question. So again, I know this from the letters in the archive, and the first interaction is Friedman and Aaron his brother in law, who also ended up as a Hoover fellow, and one other person who I can't remember emailing Buckley and saying, you've characterized the Mont Pelerin Society all wrong, young man, and chastising him.

I think it was Russell Kirk wrote something in National Review that was critical of the Mont Pelerin Society, and they wrote back, kind of, young man. And I feel like a little bit Buckley. Friedman thought of Buckley as kind of a young whippersnapper who just popped up and got all this attention because he'd been working in a lot of the same direction for a while.

What really brought Friedman close to Buckley was when Buckley tried to push the John Birch Society out and did several of the conservative movements, had several very critical articles of the John Birch Society. And Freeman just jumped right in like, thank you so much. This is great, I support you.

And I would say another theme that I cover in the book is, for a lot of his life, Freeman was not just active in the conservative movement as a sort of rank and file member, but someone who was really actively trying to shape it. And he was very concerned with what he called the crackpot conservatives of the radical right.

Fringe. In the 1950s, by that he meant McCarthy and also Robert McCormick, who was the editor of the Chicago Tribune. And he saw them as isolationist, anti-semitic, very dangerous. In the 1960s, it was the John Birch Society, which was very conspiratorial, sort of populist conspiracies. And he really wanted, as did Buckley, to push that to the side of the conservative movement.

He and Buckley saw themselves as sort of in common cause. Then they spent time together in New York, and by the 1980s, they were going on an annual ski trip together, and they were very, very friendly. Yes.

>> Speaker 7: Question is, what would Friedman say about our economy today?

Are we doing the right thing or the wrong thing from what you know about him?

>> Jennifer Burns: So it's a big question. I'll take two pieces of it. One, I do think, based on how he responded to the Great Depression and also how he responded to World War Two, if there was a crisis situation, he would kind of set aside some of his economic priors and say, let's deal with the crisis.

So I do think he would have supported the tranches of relief funding that came during coronavirus. I think he would have said, we're setting up inflation, which we sort of need to do because the economy's been cratered, but nonetheless, we're setting up inflation, and we might not get it right.

And so I think we didn't quite get it right. And he would see that. I think he would not favor the kind of return to industrial policy we're seeing right now and the skepticism about free trade. I mean, those were two things he was very clear about. He did, towards the end of his life, express some misgivings on how globalization was unfolding.

He was worried about the impact on low skilled workers in the United States. I don't know that the worry went deep enough to support tariffs or protectionism. So I think he'd be worried about those two aspects. I think he would say it's very difficult to foster an industry.

You might get too far out ahead of the actual demand for it, even if you think it's the industry we need to grow into the future. So I think he'd be skeptical of that. I see probably more questions on Zoom, so go back to Samira.

>> Samira: So I think there's one more.

Could you tell us what you may have learned about Homer Jones, one of Friedman's teachers at Rutgers?

>> Jennifer Burns: Yeah, Homer Jones. So Homer Jones was, along with Arthur Burns, his professor at Rutgers. And so a couple things, Jones was the one who said, you have to go to the University of Chicago.

And Jones was a devotee of Frank Knight, whose picture I showed. And so he and Jones probably helped Friedman get in. I don't know how competitive admissions were. Chicago tended to admit a lot of people and then try to kick most of them out. But so Jones really set him on the path to going to graduate school, to studying with Frank Knight, then Jones kind of stalled out.

So Frank Knight had a terrible track record of graduating students. Like, it was pretty much the end of your career if Frank Knight was your graduate advisor. George Stigler is the one exception. And so at some point, when Friedman was back in Chicago as a professor, realized that Homer Jones did not have his degree and reconstituted a dissertation committee, put himself at the head of it and graduated Homer Jones.

Who then went on to a research role at the Federal Reserve bank of St. Louis and sort of created a sort of friendly zone where people were working with freedmen in the Federal Reserve system. And Jones, I believe, was also instrumental in bringing a research focus to the Fed.

So today the Fed produces a lot of the data that Friedman and Schwartz were producing. And so Friedman and Schwartz would show up with all this data and say to the Fed, you're doing it all wrong. And they would really not have any response because they didn't have any.

They didn't really know actually what they were doing. They weren't measuring in the same way that Friedman was. So today, the Fed is just like apparatus of research. I mean, actually, I use their website all the time. It's really helpful. It's really great. And so I think Jones was one of the people who kind of started the institution on that path.

 

>> Speaker 8: Was there anything in your research that surprised you, either about him, his work or his ideas, or perhaps added more context or complexity to him, his work or his ideas?

>> Jennifer Burns: Yeah, I mean, I mentioned two of them. One was the kind of great depression, the way that was so formative, and that he was really willing in a period of crisis to sort of think differently.

The other one really was the role of women in his career. And so obviously, I knew about Anna Schwartz. Rose Friedman was out there. There's a whole set of these other women, so Dorothy Brady and Margaret Reid. And I didn't realize how instrumental they were in his theory of the consumption function, which is a more technical work, but one that's aged very well among economists.

So Dorothy Brady and Rose Friedman wrote one of the first papers ever dealing with this topic. And this led to a correspondence, and Friedman grabbed the letters and jumped into the correspondence and started writing. And so then they would come to the summer house in New Hampshire and then in Vermont, and they would just stay up late and talk about all these ideas.

Then what I discovered was that they were actually looking to hire an economist, a woman economist at Chicago. They had, like, one. They had a slot, and the one was retiring. And so Friedman was trying to bring in economists he thought were doing great work. And so he actually wrote up these conversations as a memo to try to get Margaret Reid and Dorothy Brady hired at the University of Chicago.

He had this whole game plan, and he did succeed in getting Margaret Reid hired. But it was that effort that led these conversations to crystallize into a paper that then ran into a book. So it was just fascinating to see kind of how these collaborations came. And I think that's one of the reasons for Friedman's success, is that he drew on these kind of untapped pools of talent.

And then, because of the way the discipline was organized, he was really the public representative of these ideas. So that was surprising to me to find that out. And I see another question right back there, too. Thank you.

>> Speaker 9: Thank you. How would Friedman respond to the potential objection that universal basic income could lead to a corporateocracy of some sorts, where you have fewer companies dominating more market share in markets, and perhaps an expanding welfare state?

That's the first part of the question. The second part is, how would he view as a classical liberal, the neoliberal version of universal basic income, such as that popularized by the Andrew Yang campaign in 2020?

>> Jennifer Burns: So, yeah, I think considering the proposal, you have to put it kind of in the context of what the alternatives were.

And so one of the things that happened in the Nixon administration was he didn't actually know Arthur Burns was in the fight, but it was Arthur Burns versus George Schultz. And it was Friedman's version of sort of a UBI and Burns's version. And Burns's version was means tested and said, let's do in state run child care centers, so that we can say, you have to put your child in this childcare center and go into the labor force.

And for Freeman, that was like the worst of all possible worlds. So you have to kind of evaluate it in the context. What really is different about Friedman's proposal, and it was one of the reasons why it didn't succeed, it was very libertarian, and it was also very economistic.

If people are poor, let's give them money. Let's not inquire any further. Let's not figure out what they're gonna spend it on. Let's not worry about this, let's not worry about that. And this is, again, in the context that they used to have in the 1960s, a man in the house rule.

So if a woman was on welfare, the inspector would come to her house and if he saw a man's hat, it would be like, aha, you've got a man in the house. I'm gonna cut your welfare benefit, right? So this very. Paternalistic structure is what he was fighting against.

So I think that's an important pushback. I'm not quite sure I'm following your corporatocracy point. I do think there, there are questions about how it would work. There's questions about how it would impact the labor market. There's questions about how it impacts inflation. And I think part of that's why he ended up settling on and supporting a gradated, so it wasn't full of replacement income, 50%.

And also he ended up feeling comfortable with this in the tax system because then you have to file a tax return, you're kind of in the system, there's some record. I would say what he really talked about the importance of this at Mont Pelerin and in some of his other ideas that, again, now seems very obvious, he set it up as like an automatic stabilizer.

He basically said, if you have, so say everyone, nobody can fall below this income floor, you have a recession, a bunch of people are going to get the benefit. It's going to stabilize, and then the economy does well and fewer people are going to get the benefit. So that was another architecture of mine is let's set up a rule that's kind of automatic, rather than being like, there's a recession.

Quick, Congress ought to design a program to address this particular recession. So, yeah, I think it's an interesting idea. I think he didn't flesh out exactly how it would work. See someone in the far back.

>> Speaker 10: Hi, Jennifer. I'm a big fan. I'm also a big fan of Tyler Cohen, who has a great blurb on the back of your book.

He just released a book, he was on Russ Roberts' EconTalk Podcast about the GOAT of economics, basically ranking Milton Friedman.

>> Jennifer Burns: About that, I haven't read it yet.

>> Speaker 10: No, I haven't either. I think it was just released. So if we accept your definition of Milton Friedman as a conservative, where does he rank?

And using Cohen's theme of who is the greatest of all time, kind of putting an ESPN talk version of a conversation, where does Milton Friedman rank compared to the other conservatives in the conservative movement like Buckley and Iran, who he wrote a book on, or even Reagan?

>> Jennifer Burns: Yeah, I mean, they all play such different roles, it's hard to rank.

I guess one of the questions I get a lot, or one of the things it's like, I'll take this in terms of Friedman beat. And I get a lot of people saying, no, Hayek is the more important, and Hayek is, the more influential. And I need someone to make that case to me more substantially, because I think what's important about Friedman is that because of his position in the economics profession, he influences lots of people who go on to influence lots of other people.

You can imagine all his graduate students and their graduate students and universities. And so I think that this rise of the way he approached the world, this kind of crisis policy that becomes very, very widespread because of his position in university. So I think that's part of it.

Buckley is huge and important, but I don't think people are going to read Buckley for more than antiquarian interests anymore. He's very much of his moment. I think Friedman is more transcendent. I think we'll read Friedman like we read Adam Smith, John Maynard Keynes, not necessarily to design our economics, but because they embody a perspective and a response to a historical moment.

So, yeah, thank you for the question. Definitely an interesting one. Do we have time for one more? Are we good? Okay, I saw one in the back.

>> Speaker 11: Thanks. There are a lot of different ways that biographers relate to their subjects, from Robert Carrow, that first volume of the LBJ biographies.

It just resonates with distaste. And then you've got people like Neil Ferguson, who thinks that Henry Kissinger is sort of like the man we should be looking to today. And I wonder if you could talk a little bit about your relationship with Friedman and the family. You mentioned that the kids.

How did you, what kind of biographer subject, relationship did you have?

>> Jennifer Burns: Yeah, that's a great question. It's interesting because I taught a course on biography with Stanford students last spring, and we talked about these types of questions, and we had Steve Kotkin come and that was a good session.

How do you relate to Stalin as a biographer? That's very strange. So I would say, first of all, I'm very grateful to the children. So, Janet, is that when you write a biography and you use unpublished material, you have to seek permission from the rights holder. And I'm just very grateful that Janet is very generous and follows in her father's footsteps in sort of believing there's nothing to hide, anyone should be able to use this material.

And I know David has followed in his father's footsteps and also his uncle and being a professor of law and economics, and he, maybe he's out there. Hi, David. He's come to some of my talks and always has a lot to say. And I appreciate that. I also have really enjoyed getting to know Patri Friedman, who is Milton Friedman's grandson.

He's very, very interesting guy with lots of sort of as many ideas as Friedman, I would say. So how do I relate to FriEdman? I think in the beginning I thought I was approaching Friedman more as like a public intellectual. And then I realized he's really an economist first and foremost.

And so a lot of my work was not necessarily on him as a person, although that's definitely part of the book, but like, the real uphill path was understanding the economics and understanding where he was in relation to other economists. And so, I mean, that was like most of the intellectual labor and for me, the intellectual reward.

Friedman, I mean, I think he wanted to be the smartest guy in the room. I think he wanted to be very dominant. I'm not sure we would have had a ton of positive interactions unless I was willing to cede him that title. But I end up feeling a lot of respect for him.

I don't agree with him in the full picture. And I also don't, you know, yeah, I don't think he has, like, the plan for the world necessarily. But I was very. I was just very impressed by the length and breadth of his career. And I would say the one thing that ended up.

I guess there are two things that I thought about. One was that he had this career where for most of his career, he was heterodox in terms of not following the conventions of his discipline, just really, really different. And that ended up paying huge intellectual rewards and huge, just public good rewards.

And without Friedman, you would have had a very conformist economics profession, and they would have not had a lot of. They would have been caught flat footed by stagflation. And so for me, when I think about american universities today, I think we have a lot of disciplinary conformity, and people in disciplines tend to all think alike.

And so Chicago really stands out for me as, like, there was the economics profession and there was Chicago. And I think that was good for both sides to have that friction and that clash of ideas. The second thing is, I had an idea in my mind that Freeman became kind of dogmatic in his later years.

And I think in some ways, as a public intellectual, he simplified his ideas. He had to. But I found this whole series of interviews towards the last years of his life where he was really like, yeah, I got that wrong. I wouldn't push monetary aggregates so much. I'm not sure my reaction to globalization was right.

He was willing to kind of go in the newspaper saying I was wrong or I'm not sure. And so, again, for me, that felt like that's a quality we need more of, rather than the point scoring. And I'm always right, that kind of, like, model of inquiry, so.

And also, I'm a professor, so I try to take some of that into my own working life. So thank you. Great question. Thank you so much. I believe I'm going to be signing copies, so.