A Tale of Two Economists

Author Nicholas Wapshott tells the story of two of the greatest economic storytellers in Samuelson Friedman: The Battle Over the Free Market.

If asked to name the two economists who dominated the last half of the 20th century, the most obvious are Paul Samuelson and Milton Friedman.

Libertarian economist Russ Roberts sums up the feeling in his article "The Economist as Scapegoat," when he writes of the odd phenomenon of left-wing commentators blaming Milton Friedman for everything that goes wrong in the economy even though Friedman's ideas have rarely been enacted.

Samuelson Friedman functions as an introductory history to American macroeconomics from roughly 1960-2010, and professors could do worse than assigning it to undergraduates for that purpose.

Wapshott has chapters on how Samuelson and Friedman influenced and reacted to Paul Volcker, Alan Greenspan, and Ben Bernanke.

Clearly Friedman would object to Biden's big government proposals, but you won't find a justification in Samuelson's textbook for spending $6 trillion during an expansion with unemployment around 6 percent.

In telling the story of the storytellers, Wapshott reminds us how good we had it when Samuelson and Friedman were at the tops of their games.
 

https://freebeacon.com/policy/a-tale-of-two-economists/