Customer Reviews

Power of Choice:The Life and Ideas of Milton Friedman

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I was a little leery buying this, because when I ordered it (and still) Amazon didn't have much information on what it was, and I feared it was some cheap melange of interviews with Charlie Rose and Larry King, that sort of thing.

Well, don't worry. The thing is fine. It can boast original interviews with Dr. Friedman, and it has high production values. It's about one hour twenty minutes.

The emphasis of this film is on Friedman's life and development, so there is much footage of him with his wife and kids and so forth. The impact of his ideas is discussed by many Nobel economists, such as Gary Becker and Paul Samuelson.

The whole thing has the look and feel of a recent well-known PBS outing, "The Commanding Heights." In fact, I think the narrator is the same.

If I can come up with one gripe about this production, it would be that the series does a poor job of really getting to the core of monetarism, the idea for which Friedman is chiefly known. To understand that, you would have to understand a bit about the Fed, I guess, and certainly about Keynesianism.

Instead, the nuts and bolts of Friedman's monetary ideas are given short shrift in this biopic, perhaps necessarily so, as this can be an abstruse subject. Nevertheless, if you're making a film about the ideas of a famous thinker, I would think it obligatory that it impart at least a layman's understanding of his signature idea.

Instead the deepest articulation we get here is that Friedman went around the world telling political leaders that markets needed to be free and, darn it, there should be less government! An alert viewer might well be forgiven for questioning how anyone could become so famous merely for uttering pronouncements as simple as that, and indeed the filmmakers never give us much more.

It would appear that Friedman died while this film was being edited together: in 2006. There's a lot of material here on the Nixon and Reagan years, but only one quick scene from the Bush years.

Note that this is NOT "Free to Choose," the famous 10-part series that aired on PBS in the early 1980's. As far as I know that series is not available yet on DVD, or even on VHS for that matter. (The entire series is available for free streaming over the internet anyhow.)