Samuelson Friedman, Nicholas Wapshott
Samuelson Friedman, Nicholas Wapshott
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Samuelson Friedman
The Battle Over the Free Market

Author: Nicholas Wapshott

Narrator: Chris MacDonnell

Unabridged: 11 hr 13 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 09/28/2021


Synopsis

In 1966 two columnists joined Newsweek magazine. Their assignment: debate the world of business and economics. Paul Samuelson was a towering figure in Keynesian economics. Milton Friedman championed "monetarism" and insisted the Federal Reserve maintain tight control over the amount of money circulating in the economy.

In Samuelson Friedman, author and journalist Nicholas Wapshott brings narrative verve and puckish charm to the story of these two giants of modern economics, their braided lives, and colossal intellectual battles.

Samuelson, a forbidding technical genius, grew up a child of relative privilege and went on to revolutionize macroeconomics. He wrote the best-selling economics textbook of all time. His friend and adversary for decades, Milton Friedman, studied the Great Depression and with Anna Schwartz wrote the seminal books The Great Contraction and A Monetary History of the United States. Friedman found fortune writing a treatise, Capitalism and Freedom.

In Wapshott's nimble hands, Samuelson and Friedman's decades-long argument over how—or whether—to manage the economy becomes a window onto one of the longest periods of economic turmoil in the United States.

About Nicholas Wapshott

Nicholas Wapshott is an editor at the New York Sun and the former New York bureau chief for the Times of London. He has also served as editor of the Saturday Times of London and was founding editor of the Times magazine. As political editor of the Observer, Wapshott covered Margaret Thatcher's final years in office.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Jason on December 19, 2021

I listened to this as an audiobook which is about the right way to read it—if you read it at all. There was a lot that was interesting but even more that did not work for me and may not work for anyone. I liked Nicholas Wapshott’s Keynes Hayek: The Clash that Defined Modern Economics somewhat more b......more

Goodreads review by Rhys on October 04, 2021

Having adored Keynes Hayek upon first reading in 2017, I couldn’t wait to get my hands on this. Although neither Samuelson nor Friedman have the allure of Keynes especially, the rich debate and correspondence between the two should have filled the void in this iteration. Disappointingly, I have a nu......more

Goodreads review by Venky on July 09, 2022

Beginning 1966 and extending well into the early 1980s, two veritable titans nursing tangentially different ideologies in the domain of economics, pitted their wares against each other by penning alternating columns for the Newsweek magazine. Such a marvelous exercise or experiment even, has not bee......more

Goodreads review by Leello on February 16, 2023

Excellent follow-up to Wapshott's Keynes Hayek book. As in the previous book, some of the sketched economic ideas went over my head, but the text gives a very nice overview of Friedman's monetarism - cleverly recounted through the personal histories of two economists. I wish the chapter on the Thatch......more

Goodreads review by Laura on May 27, 2023

I learned a lot about Samuelson and Friedman but the author blames the January 6th Capitol invasion on Friedman????? Because supposedly those guys are anarchists and it was an anarchist protest? And Friedman isn’t an anarchist but as a libertarian it’s his fault?......more