Two books for the price of one

By Thomas Sowell

Dr. Thomas Sowell is an economist and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution in Stanford, Calif.

SUITS WITH TWO PAIRS OF PANTS used to be very popular, back in the days when money was a lot harder to come by. Today, if you would like to get two autobiographies for the price of one, try the recently published Two Lucky People by Rose and Milton Friedman.

In addition, they throw in sketches of the social history of a bygone era in which they grew up and many valuable insights on economic issues and the politics that often surround these issues. Finally, there are photographs that include Milton Friedman as a sharp-looking young man with hair and one of Rose as a truly lovely little girl.

You would have to get a two-pants suit with shoes, shirt and tie to match that.

The Friedmans' early years, growing up in what would today be considered poverty, may give pause to some of those who seem to think that conservatives are just affluent people who don't know what it is to be poor. More than that, this book captures the very different mindset of people in that era, before there were so many demagogues painting a gloomy picture of low-income people's prospects, while making them dependents of the welfare state.

Milton Friedman's mother was an immigrant from Eastern Europe who worked in a sweatshop after arriving in America, as did so many Jewish immigrants of that era. Friedman's father was also an immigrant from Eastern Europe. He worked as a peddler before moving up to owning a small store, where Milton and his sisters also worked. In a pattern common around the world, the family lived upstairs, over the store.

As a young man, Milton Friedman went to Rutgers University, where he worked his way through college with a variety of jobs. Among the courses he took was one in economics, taught by the legendary Arthur F. Burns. The rest, as they say, was history.

His wife, born Rose Director, had a similar background. She herself immigrated to the United States from Eastern Europe as a small child, just before the First World War. Her father also progressed from peddler to storekeeper.

Milton and Rose Friedman's early years may give pause to those who seem to think that conservatives are just affluent people who don't know what it is to be poor.

The two of them met -- very appropriately -- as graduate students taking the same class in economics at the University of Chicago. The professor -- the also legendary Jacob Viner -- arranged the seating of his students alphabetically, so Rose Director was seated next to Milton Friedman. Again, the rest was history.

Like so many young people beginning their careers in the 1930s, Milton Friedman was a New Dealer. Indeed, he worked for the government during the Roosevelt administration. Friedman describes himself as "thoroughly Keynesian" at the time, though no one would do more than he to destroy Keynesian economics in later years.

Commenting on this period, Friedman said: "My experience in those years shaped the advice I regularly gave my graduate students in later years: by all means spend a few years in Washington -- but only a few."

Among other things, he learned "the first rule of bureaucracy -- that the only feasible way of doing anything is the way it is being done."

While working as a statistician during World War II, Friedman was given a statistical problem about a device whose exact nature he never knew until much later. It was a detonator to be used to set off the atomic bomb.

Today, when the name "Milton Friedman" conjures up an image of the Nobel Prize-winning economist, or the impressive host of the Free to Choose television series, or the author of weighty scholarly writings and best-selling books for the masses, it is good to know that he was not born as someone likely to be any of those things.

At a number of places, Milton Friedman comments on "the extraordinary role that pure chance plays in most people's lives," often illustrating this with events that marked changes in his career and in his personal life. But there had to be more than pure chance. A lot more.

This book gives us some idea of how much more. Because Rose and Milton write separately in this joint autobiography, she can give us some insights into him that he would not, or perhaps could not, give about himself.

Milton Friedman is not just an extraordinary intellect but also a wonderful human being. As a former student of his, who also knows how tough he can be, let me add -- especially outside the classroom.

Milton and Rose Friendman, Two lucky people, memoirs