Samuelson Friedman: The Battle over the Free Market by Nicholas Wapshott
书评指出该书存在大量事实错误和可疑解读，如混淆人物背景、数据矛盾等，未能准确呈现两位经济学家的思想与关系，对想了解经济学史的读者帮助有限。
Paul A. Samuelson (1915–2009) and Milton Friedman (1912–2006) were almost exact contemporaries. For fifteen years, in the thrice-weekly column that they shared, first with Henry Wallich and later with Lester Thurow, the magazine Newsweek presented them as America's leading liberal and conservative economists, offering contrasting recommendations on economic policy. They frequently found themselves together in other settings: giving testimony to Congress, sharing platforms on college campuses, and recording cassette tapes that were the forerunner of modern podcasts. They disagreed vigorously and yet they remained friendly, sending drafts to each other for criticism and offering support when one of them hit medical or personal problems. It is a relationship that clearly merits careful study. There are good reasons to welcome a book such as the one under review, which draws on published work on the two economists as well as on their own publications and personal papers.Wapshott opens the book with the event he sees as crucial to their public profile: the decision by Osborn Elliott to recruit the two economists as Newsweek columnists, explaining how that was part of an attempt to change the position of the magazine from a staid business weekly into one that was more exciting and relevant. He explains how Samuelson was chosen and his role in recruiting Friedman. The book then backtracks into the two economists’ early years, their education, and their careers before 1966, including a year when they overlapped at the University of Chicago in 1932, the beginning of a connection that was to last until Friedman's death. There is then a chapter, “Dueling Columnists,” covering the way they approached their columns and the positions they took. There are chapters on their disagreements—on intervention to improve economic performance, on money, and on the doctrine of monetarism. There then follow chapters on the Nixon administration, the military coup in Chile (with which Friedman came to be associated), Paul Volcker and disinflation, and Reagan and supply-side economics. This takes the story to the end of Samuelson's period with Newsweek. Friedman continued to write for the magazine until early 1984, but the period of alternating with Samuelson was over.Monetarism, Wapshott argues, was dead in the United States by 1982, but its story continued in Britain, where Margaret Thatcher was interested in Friedman's ideas; Wapshott then takes the story back to the United States in a chapter titled “Beating bin Laden with Cheap Money” on Bush, Greenspan, and Clinton. The next chapter covers the attitudes of Friedman and Samuelson toward Ben Bernanke, discussing Friedman's death and Samuelson's reaction, both his public praise for Friedman and some more-critical private remarks made to Lawrence Summers. This chapter, titled “All Going Swimmingly,” is the prelude to the final chapter on the financial crisis of 2008 and reflections on the legacies left by the two economists.The book is written in a confident style, the arguments between Friedman and Samuelson are placed in the context of world events, and many readers will be impressed by the apparently rich documentation provided in its forty-three pages of footnotes. Given the importance of the topic, the excitement of a debate between two titans of the profession, each eloquent in a different way, what is there not to like in the book? Unfortunately, rather a lot.The book contains a disconcertingly large number of factual errors. For example, Wassily Leontief and Alvin Hansen, two of Samuelson's teachers, are included in a list of “German and Austrian intellectuals escaping the tyranny of Nazism” (15); but Leontief was of Russian origin, and Hansen was born in South Dakota. Samuelson's troubles with members of the MIT Corporation are presented as happening after the 1951 publication of William F. Buckley's God and Man at Yale (19), whereas they started several years earlier. Friedman's father is described as a manual laborer (25), whereas a “jobber” (his true profession) is a middleman living from the profits of buying and selling. Samuelson was not “a year above Friedman at Chicago” (27); in 1932–33 he was still an undergraduate, a sophomore who had not even committed to majoring in economics, whereas Friedman was a graduate student. Friedman and Schwartz's A Monetary History of the United States was not published in 1960 (34), and the two economists “first set out on their columns” in 1966 and not, as it is stated, in 1968 (73). Errors such as these arguably have no bearing on the narrative and could be corrected, but how did they get into the book and why were they not removed in the editorial process? They do not inspire confidence. The reassurance given by the seemingly voluminous footnotes is false because many of them merely give basic information on people who are mentioned, and many contentious points are undocumented.Statements more directly relevant to the book's subject matter are the claim that Friedman believed “inflation was caused solely by the velocity of money” (94), a statement that is, not surprisingly, contradicted by correct statements elsewhere in the book; and that Keynesians believed “that there was a stable, measurable, inverse link between inflation and unemployment” (111), a statement contradicted a few pages later where it is conceded that Samuelson and Solow, at this time two of the leading Keynesians, added an important proviso (114). There is also an abundance of doubtful interpretations for which no supporting arguments are provided. What reason have we to assume that there was any connection between Samuelson’s decision not to become CEA chair and his promotion to Institute Professor at MIT (24)? His colleague, Robert Solow, worked at the CEA in a more junior position and still became an Institute Professor. It is suggested that economics played a relatively small part in Friedman's thinking after Capitalism and Freedom, but evidence is required for such a claim; it is hard to see Friedman losing interest in economics (48). Indeed, many of Friedman's landmark contributions came after the 1962 publication of that book. It may well be true that, by 1981, “writing for Newsweek had become a chore for Samuelson,” but no evidence is presented for this bold and unqualified claim (223). If it was such a chore, why did he write literally hundreds of columns for other papers after his resignation from Newsweek?Other errors raise more serious questions. To claim that Nelson Rockefeller was a “scion of the New York construction family” rather than an inheritor of the Standard Oil fortune is more than a slip of the pen (138). It suggests a lack of knowledge about American history. Economists will be taken aback by the claim that the “federal budget deficit was reduced—falling from 47.8 percent of GDP in 1993 to 31.4 percent in 2001; federal spending fell from 20.7 percent of GDP in 1993 to 17.6 percent in 2000” (252). Aside from the sheer implausibility of such large figures for the deficit, the deficit cannot be larger than total spending unless taxes are negative, which they were not. How was this not noticed by the author and anyone who read the manuscript before publication?The book's discussion of the Nixon administration is illustrative. Wapshott claims that Nixon showed little interest in Friedman's idea of a negative income tax (143). If that were true, why did Nixon introduce the Family Assistance Plan, widely seen as embodying the principle of the negative income tax? In contrast, it is correct that Nixon did not accept Friedman's advice that he float the dollar immediately on taking office. However, this is a missed opportunity to explore a point where Friedman's and Samuelson's views converged. The views of Friedman and Samuelson are reported correctly, in that Samuelson's position was more pragmatic than Friedman's, but in practice they reached similar conclusions: that the dollar was overvalued and that the system needed to be more flexible in allowing the exchange rate to change in response to circumstances. Samuelson might be more pragmatic in refusing to rule out intervention completely, but in practice this was a policy on which he was, at least by this date, in substantial agreement with Friedman.A major figure in the story of the Nixon administration is Arthur Burns, appointed Fed chair in 1970.1 Stating simply that Friedman “had met Burns at Rutgers” misses the depth of their connection (144). Friedman considered Burns his closest friend, second only to Rose; in the preface to Two Lucky People, Friedman even called him a “surrogate father.” Accordingly, Friedman was personally devastated by their intellectual differences, as his correspondence shows. Their relationship is relevant to Burns's handling of monetary policy, in that he seemed unwilling to heed Friedman's advice or seriously reckon with his ideas, despite their long association. Also, when Friedman joined the NBER in 1937 it was not to work on money and the business cycle (144) but to work on professional incomes, as is correctly stated elsewhere (29). It was not until 1948 that Friedman began the monetary project with which his name came to be so closely associated. Despite their closeness and Friedman and Schwartz's Monetary History being so infused with NBER methodology, Burns viewed policymaking as more complicated than did Friedman, and he never accepted a simple monetarist position. Burns made many public statements about policy, for example in testimony before congressional committees, as did Friedman and Samuelson. Samuelson frequently discussed Burns's statements, sometimes alongside him in response to congressional questioning. Exploring these discussions would have provided a way to explore with much more precision and subtlety the different positions being taken by these three economists.Perhaps all this is minutiae, unconnected to the book's larger claims. What are the book's larger claims? In the conclusion, we learn that Friedman was the “well spring” of the January 6 riot (294), an interpretation that sets aside nearly all recent political history, including the decline of the Republican establishment with which Friedman was so closely identified. Perhaps this is an unsurprising claim from an author who also appears to believe the federal government controlled COVID shutdowns, which were primarily implemented on the state and local level (288).A dual biography, especially one that spans the disciplines of economics and history, is no easy task. Having written biographies of these two economists (Backhouse 2017; Burns 2023), it gives us no pleasure to point out the inadequacies of a book that covers them both. But the sheer carelessness of the book raises questions about how these mistakes slipped through the editorial process. The location of the history of economics, stranded between the disciplines of history and economics, creates problems. Economists would not condone mistakes such as those found in this book, but they are less likely to have the knowledge to notice them, in the same way that some historians may fail to identify faulty economic analysis. This makes it more difficult, but no less important, to accurately understand the history of economic ideas and economists’ lives.Indeed, there is a public hunger to understand the history of economics, which remains vital to our present and future. Samuelson Friedman: The Battle over the Free Market responds to this hunger but fails to feed it. The publisher clearly shares responsibility with the author in that the manuscript should have been sent to qualified readers so that mistakes could have been corrected before publication. That no reader throughout the editorial process caught the flaws, from the source of the Rockefeller family fortune to the nonsensical statistics and the myriad dates that are wrong, suggests not merely a failure to take the history of economics seriously but a profound disrespect to the scholars and authors working in this area.We live in the era of the hot take, the snarky tweet, the four-hour news cycle. To write a book of history pushes back against today and makes a promise to tomorrow—that there will be a written record of how we got to where we are. What a shame to hold an author to such diminished standards, to release a book of serious nonfiction that so ill serves its readers. This is arguably even more important for books aimed at the general public, most of whom will not be in a position to check that what they are reading is correct. What a missed opportunity.