Jennifer Burns on Milton Friedman and Ayn Rand
Conversations with Tyler | 15 November 2023 | 0h 59m | Listen Later | Podcasts | Spotify
Interview with Jennifer Burns about her books Milton Friedman: The Last Conservative and Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right. Discusses how her new portrait of Friedman caused her to reassess him, his lasting impact on statistics, whether he was too dogmatic, his shift from academic to public intellectual, the problem with Two Lucky People, what Friedman’s courtship of Rose Friedman was like, how Milton’s family influenced him, why Friedman opposed Hayek’s courtesy appointment at the University of Chicago, Friedman’s attitudes toward friendship, his relationship to fiction and the arts, and the prospects for his intellectual legacy. Next, discusses her previous work on Ayn Rand, including whether Rand was a good screenwriter, which is the best of her novels, what to make of the sex scenes in Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead, how Rand and Mises got along, and why there are so few successful businesswomen depicted in American fiction. Delves into why fiction seems so much more important for the American left than it is for the right, what’s driving the decline of the American conservative intellectual condition, what she will do next, and more.