Jennifer Burns
speaker
543 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard 2 Feb
Jennifer Burns’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Feb 2026 with 1.
Appearances
We might get a very different picture of 2025 in hindsight, where the job market was actually much slower than we originally thought and thus much closer to stall speed.
It's been the pillar of jobs growth over the last year or two years.
And so any slowdown we see in the health care industry is concerning.
And we are well positioned to wait to see how the economy evolves.
Yeah, so Milton Friedman and Ayn Rand, in the biggest picture, they're both individualists and they're skeptical of collectivities and collectivism. So their unit of analysis is the individual, what's good for the individual, what works for the individual, and their understanding of society kind of flows from that.
They also both use this focus on individualism to justify and to support capitalism as a social and economic system. So we can put them in a similar category. We can call them individualists. We could call them libertarians of a sort. But they're also really different in how they approach capitalism, how they approach thinking.
Ayn Rand developed her own moral and philosophical system to justify individualism and to connect the individual to capitalism and to support capitalism as a social and economic system. Friedman struggles a bit more with how to justify capitalism, and he'll ultimately come down to freedom as his core value, like his God, as he says.
And so freedom does connect back to the individual, but he's not justifying capitalism for his own sake. He's justifying it for its ability to underwrite freedom in a social sense and also in the individual sense.
Yeah, for sure. So beyond this idea that Milton Friedman takes a while to come to his justification of capitalism, Morzine Rand kind of has it from the start. She really focuses on the core quality of rationalism and rationality. Rationality is the defining feature of human beings. And so she works from there, whereas Friedman, Milton Friedman eventually converges on this idea of freedom.
So that's one part of it. The other is their intellectual styles are really, really different. Their interpersonal styles are really different. So Friedman has big ideas, big principles that guide him, but he's also deeply empirical.
He spends most of his career doing historical research, economic research, pulling data from how people actually make economic decisions and live in the world and using them to test and refine his theories. Where Rand, to some degree, we could say she's empirical in that she lives through the Russian Revolution and takes a very big lesson from that.
But her style of thinking is really first principles, an axiomatic approach. going from the basic idea of rationality and then playing that out in different spheres. And so those are just very different intellectual approaches. And then they lead in some ways to really different ways of thinking about how you get things done in the world. Ayn Rand is a purist.
She wants to start with the pure belief. She doesn't want it to be diluted. One of her favorite sayings was, it's earlier than you think. In other words, we're still moving towards a place where we can really hold and express these ideals purely. Friedman, although he didn't use this terminology, was much more half a loaf guy.
You know, like, I'll take what I can get and then I'll try to move to where I really want to be. But he is able to compromise, especially when he moves from being an economist into being more of a political thinker. And so that's a really different intellectual style. And then it also plays out in their lives in that Ayn Rand is incredibly schismatic.
I mean, she wants her friends to believe what she believes and support what she supports. And she's willing to break a relationship if it doesn't match. Milton Friedman, he also does tend to have friends who agree with him. yet he's always willing to debate his opponents and he's willing to do so with a smile on his face.
You know, he's the kind of, he's the happy warrior and he actually will win a lot of debates simply by his emotional affect and his cheerfulness and his confidence where Rand will lose debates because she gets so angry in the face of disagreement. So yeah, they have a lot of similarities and a lot of differences and it's been really fascinating to kind of dive deep into both of them.
Yeah, I mean, people talked about her meeting her and coming to believe in her ideas in a similar way as they did with Marxism in that suddenly everything made sense and that when they came to believe in objectivism, they felt they had this engine for understanding the entire world. Now, after a while, for most people, that then became confining. But yeah, that certainty.
And Friedman had some of that as well. He clothed it differently. He clothed it in happiness, where Rand kind of closed it, as you said, in crankiness or anger. I mean, there's also an arc to Rand. She gets kind of angrier and angrier and crankier and crankier over the course of her life.
What I enjoyed about my research is I was able to get into this early moment when she was different and a little more open. And then I kind of watched... her clothes and her heart in over time.
Yeah, absolutely. Friedman believed in being able to say I was wrong. And there are some things he said he was wrong about. We'll delve more into monetarism and monetary policy. But he was able to talk about the ways his ideas hadn't mapped onto the world the way he thought they would.
Showing 1–20 of 543 · page 1 of 28
Next →