MILTON FRIEDMAN

2026 Spengler Book Prize from History of Economics Society

The History of Economics Society is delighted to announce the winner of this year's Joseph J. Spengler Best Book Prize. The Spengler Award committee – consisting of Steve Meardon (chair), Juan Pablo Couyoumdjian, and Nina Eichacker – decided to give this year’s award to Jennifer Burns for her book Milton Friedman: The Last Conservative (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023).

An anecdote from early in Burns’s book exemplifies its qualities. It was 1935, and Milton Friedman was turning 23, when he decamped to Washington DC after two years of graduate studies in Chicago and an intervening one at Columbia. His statistical prowess with New-Deal funded micro data got him a job within two years back in New York, at the NBER, aiding Simon Kuznets on personal income research. He still lacked his Ph.D., but here was a way to complete it. The NBER and Kuznets were doing kindred work advancing the New Deal, and Friedman already had a feel for the data. He had also Wesley Mitchell’s confidence since taking his course at Columbia four years before. What could go wrong?

There was the New Deal that students of Frank Knight and Henry Simons signed up to serve, and there was the other one. Simons’s A Positive Program for Laissez Faire required a vigorous government, and so did the industrial planning of the National Recovery Administration. But they were not the same, as Mitchell and fellow institutionalists at the NBER knew well. Jennifer Burns shows how Friedman got the raw materials of his dissertation from Kuznets -- and then, as she says, “turned loose on a mess of data, he made it sing” (p. 92). But at the NBER, where the dissertation would have to be published, it seemed an awful din. Friedman found that, even after accounting for the greater investment required for professional training of doctors compared to dentists, nearly half the doctors’ income premium was owing to the restrictions of their guild. So then: was the American Medical Association the upholder of professional standards and training, as guardians of the institution would have it -- or a bigoted cartel, as a Chicago price theorist might? Anyone could see what Friedman’s thesis implied. In private correspondence, Mitchell called it “indefensible” (p. 92). Friedman got the NBER to publish it, but only after a 5-year battle spanning the whole Second World War.

Friedman’s dissertation is one of many parts of his life that Jennifer Burns brings together masterfully. It is far from the most famous, or notorious, depending on how you read the book. Among others there is Friedman as professor, inheriting Jacob Viner’s course in Price Theory, inspiring the likes of Becker with his brilliance while putting off Buchanan with his overbearingness (pp. 212-13); as Rose’s appreciative husband and scholarly collaborator, whose name, even so, may have had disproportionate billing in Capitalism and Freedom (p. 251); as the admiring student of Arthur Burns, pained by his mentor’s disregard of his monetary ideas during the 70’s stagflation (p. 348), and disregarding in turn Paul Volcker’s qualified but substantial embrace of them (p. 426); and Friedman as adviser, at turns enthusiastic and ambivalent, to Henry Morgenthau, Barry Goldwater, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and Augusto Pinochet.

We have heard of these parts of Friedman’s life before, at least in part. But they sound different when composed in complement to each other and to the manifold history of 20th c. economics -- and when presented with such factual detail, analytical skill, and attention to their resonance for different schools of economic thought and social values.

In short, turned loose on a mass of evidence from Milton Friedman’s life, Jennifer Burns makes it sing. We congratulate her for her outstanding achievement and for being the worthy winner of our 2026 Joseph Spengler book prize.

Previous award winners can be found on the HES website at: historyofeconomics.org/awards-and-honors/spengler-book-prize/

Stephen Meardon

Secretary, History of Economics Society Associate Professor

Bowdoin College