Jennifer Burns: Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, Economics, Capitalism, Freedom | Lex Fridman Podcast #457

The following is a conversation with Jennifer Burns, a historian of ideas, including the evolution of economic, political, and social ideas in the United States in the 20th century to today. She wrote two biographies, one on Milton Friedman and the other on Ayn Rand, both of which I highly recommend. This was a super technical and super fascinating conversation. At the end, I make a few comments about my previous conversation with President Zelenskyy, for those of you who may be interested. This is the Lex Fridman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Jennifer Burns. You have written two biographies, one on Milton Friedman and one on Ayn Rand. So if we can, we will focus on each one separately. But first, let's talk about the ideas the two of them held in common, the value of individual freedom, skepticism of collectivism, and the ethics of capitalism. Can you talk about the big picture ideas they converge on?

Yeah, so Milton Friedman and Ayn Rand, in the biggest picture, they are both individualists, and they're skeptical of collectivities and collectivism. So their 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 can 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. 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.

At a high level, are there interesting differences between them? You already mentioned a few, maybe in terms of who they are personally, maybe in terms of how they approach the justification for capitalism, uh, maybe other ways.

Yeah, for sure. So beyond this idea that, that Milton Friedman takes a while to come to his justification of capitalism, whereas Ayn Rand kind of has it from the start. She really focuses on the core quality of rationalism and rationality, and rationality is the defining feature of human beings. And so she works from there, whereas Friedman, uh, Milton Friedman eventually converges on this idea of freedom. So that's one part of it. The other is their intellectual styles are really, really different, and their 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 Revolution and takes a very big lesson from that, but her style of thinking is really, um, first principles, an axiomatic approach, going from the basic, uh, 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. You know, 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. 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 wanna 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 R- 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, 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. So yeah, they have s- they have a lot of similarities and a lot of differences, and, and it's been really fascinating to kind of dive deep into both of them.