Milton Friedman: The Last Conservative: Summary & Key Insights

Friedman’s early years in Rahway, New Jersey, were modest, shaped by the aspirations of Jewish immigrants who sought education as both refuge and mobility. At Rutgers University, where he studied under Arthur Burns and Homer Jones, economics revealed itself not merely as a study of numbers but as a tool for understanding human decision-making. It was at Rutgers that Friedman first encountered the question that would haunt his career: how much government is enough? These undergraduate experiences instilled in him a belief that rational inquiry and empirical observation could illuminate human welfare and that economic theory, when properly used, was a force for liberation rather than constraint.

Graduate study at the University of Chicago under figures like Henry Simons and Jacob Viner transformed Friedman’s approach. Chicago’s intellectual atmosphere, rigorous, positivist, and often combative, demanded that economic theory be tested against reality. Yet it was Columbia University, and the influence of statisticians like Harold Hotelling, that honed Friedman’s methodological confidence. He learned that economic questions required measurable hypotheses and that policy prescriptions must follow from data, not dogma. This dual apprenticeship instilled a lifelong characteristic tension: Friedman the empiricist would always wrestle with Friedman the ideologue.