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.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Feb 2026 with 1.
Appearances
That's right.
Yeah, so the other piece of the puzzle, when he goes to Rutgers, he thinks he'll be an actuary. So Milton Friedman's family, his parents are immigrants, Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe.
They're pretty atypical in that they don't stay in New York, you know, and they move to Rahway, New Jersey, and they put together a fairly middle-class life as kind of, they have a shop, they do some wholesale buying and selling, and then his father dies when he's 16. His life becomes more precarious, but it's never as precarious as he makes it out to be. He's got three older sisters.
They earn a good living. Incidentally, they all have better grades in high school than he does, but he's the one that goes to college. But it's actually really important that he loses his father figure because he's then looking for other father figures, and he meets two at Rutgers. One is Arthur Burns, who will go on to have— a huge influence in his career. No relation to me, by the way.
But Arthur Burns is like him, a fellow Jewish immigrant boy on the make. He's older. And he's making a career as an economist. And then there's Homer Jones, who has gone to the University of Chicago and is studying with Frank Knight at Chicago and says, you have to go to Chicago. So he has these two mentors. And Burns in particular suggests, oh... I could be an economist.
That could be my career path. You know, the idea to be an actuary for an insurance company, I'm not sure where he got that idea, but he just thought that was something he could do as someone who was good at math. And so the college really opens the perspective, opens the door. And then I think it's really key that, again, he doesn't get an explanation that he buys for the Great Depression.
So then he's looking for one. And the math part is a really interesting aspect of his career. Now, he actually comes to Chicago to study with a mathematical economist, Henry Schultz. But he gets there, and he thinks Schultz is kind of dumb. He really does. He's incredibly arrogant, and he just thinks this guy's not that smart.
And it seems that, I mean, Schultz did some really important work in the early stages of mathematical economics, but a lot of the oral histories about him are like, yeah, he wasn't that bright. Yeah. So Friedman's maybe onto something. So he falls into the set of students who are really enthralled with his other professor, Frank Knight. And Frank Knight is against math and economics.
Frank Knight is like a neoclassical economist, but not a mathematical economist. He's an old school liberal. He's really concerned about economics. liberal democracy, economic liberalism. And Friedman is very deeply influenced by Knight. And he continues to pursue mathematical economics.
So he'll go, for part of his graduate career, he goes to Columbia University, where he actually gets his PhD from. And he works with a mathematical economist there. And so he comes out trained in what will eventually be econometrics and statistics and economics. His early publications are in statistics, but it's not really where his intellectual heart and soul are.
And eventually he will turn very profoundly against mathematics in economics and become a sort of heterodox strain throughout 20th century economics. It says simple models are better. Um, We need to work on empirical, work off empirical data, not construct elegant models, and becomes really sort of countercultural within economics in that way.
It should predict stuff that happens. It should tie back to what's going on.
Okay, so schools of economics. So we could start with classical economics. Classical economics, we could think of Adam Smith as kind of your classic classical economist, the founder of the discipline. Classical economics is does not really use math, is very close to political economy. It's concerned with, as Smith puts it, the wealth of nations. It's concerned to some degree with distribution.
It's concerned to some degree with what makes a good political system. And what tends to really define classical economics, when you're looking from a great distance, is what's called the labor theory of value. So where does value come from in classical economics? It comes from the labor that a person puts into it. So maybe this in some way is a...
comes from Locke's notion of property, that you kind of mingle your labor with the natural world. We can say labor theory of value. So classical economics, concerned with Smith's arguing against mercantilism for more free trade, often goes by the name of political economy to show it's more capacious. It's thinking of politics and economics. You can still read these books today.
The sentences are long, the words are different, but you can still follow along. So the real big transition from classical economics and political economy to economics, as it's understood today, comes with the marginal revolution. And the marginal revolution is a scientific revolution that happens in a couple of different places simultaneously, right?
This is one of these things that you see in the history of science. Like, you know, there'll be some breakthrough. Like, Darwin has a breakthrough, but, like, somebody else has sort of the same breakthrough at the same time. Totally, you know, differently. So there's a version of marginalism that's continental.
You know, there's a version in the German-speaking lands, in the French-speaking lands, and in Britain. And they all kind of come together. And the shift... is in the theory of value. So the theory of value in marginalism is on the margin. So say you have one apple and you want a second one, how much is going from one apple to two apple worth for you? Probably quite a bit.
If you had 10 apples, maybe going to 11 apples doesn't matter that much. The marginal value is less. So what marginalism does, though, most importantly, is it opens the door to math and economics. Because it means you can graph this now. You can depict this relationship graphically.
And there's some really interesting work in the history of economics that shows a lot of the people who developed marginalism were looking to physics as a model. Physics, the queen of the sciences. And so they were thinking... They imported terms from the natural world to describe the social world through the lens of economics, terms like equilibrium.
Showing 61–80 of 543 · page 4 of 28
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