Nicholas Wapshott’s Samuelson Friedman looks at a feud that continues to define the economic direction of the US.
Author and journalist Wapshott brings narrative verve and puckish charm to the story of Paul Samuelson and Milton Friedman — two giants of modern economics, their braided lives and colossal intellectual battles.
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 US.
Samuelson, a forbidding technical genius, grew up a child of relative privilege and went on to revolutionize macroeconomics.
The influence of Friedman’s monetary ideas peaked around 1980, then went into steep decline.
