Two Lucky People: Memoirs.

• Author: BREIT, WILLIAM
• Position: Review

Two Lucky People: Memoirs By Milton Friedman and Rose D. Friedman Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. Pp. vi, 660. $35.00 cloth.

When interviewing student candidates for prestigious national scholarships, my favorite question runs something like: "If you had unlimited funds for planning the perfect dinner party consisting of any ten people you choose, whom would you invite? And why?" Their responses tell me volumes about the students' range of interests, knowledge, verbal talent, and ability to think on their feet.

Like solitaire, the "ideal dinner party" game can be played alone, and I often play it when I am bored. Although my guest list changes slightly from time to time, depending on my mood and current interests, invariably at the very top of my roster are Milton and Rose Friedman. The Friedmans are my automatic selection not only for my perfect dinner party but as the persons I would most like to accompany on a long journey. Reading their revealing and stimulating memoirs is the next best thing to taking that voyage. They place the reader in the company of two of the most remarkable people of our time.

The memoirs extend from the Friedmans' early years to 1997. The earliest times are recounted in separate voices by Rose and Milton, each telling her or his own story seriatim. For the later years, their narrative voices are presented sometimes jointly and sometimes in tandem. This method adds a great deal to the readability and interest of their story. It allows the reader to get different impressions of the same people and places and brings out the (rare) disagreements between the two authors. It provides more information and presents a more vivid picture than is typically the case in memoirs by a single author.

Rarely and after a long interval there emerges an economist whose name is destined to become associated with a whole epoch of economic thought and policy. In the period since 1930 only two such names have surfaced: John Maynard Keynes is one of them. His ideas about the causes and cures of unemployment dominated the teaching and research of economists during the period roughly from 1936 to 1970.

Milton Friedman is the other name in the pantheon of recent greats for whom epochs are designated. By one empirical measure he is by far the most influential economist in America, as John Huston and I have shown ("Reputation versus Influence: The Evidence from Textbook References," Eastern Economic Journal 23 [Fall 1997]...