Samuelson Friedman: The Battle Over the Free Market

Summary

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.