In 1966 two columnists joined <I>Newsweek</I> magazine. Their assignment: debate the world of business and economics. Paul Samuelson was a towering figure in Keynesian economics. Milton Friedman championed 'monetarism' and insisted the Federal Reserve maintain tight control over the amount of money circulating in the economy.<br><br><br><br>In <I>Samuelson Friedman</I> author and journalist Nicholas Wapshott brings narrative verve and puckish charm to the story of these two giants of modern economics their braided lives and colossal intellectual battles.<br><br><br><br>Samuelson a forbidding technical genius grew up a child of relative privilege and went on to revolutionize macroeconomics. He wrote the best-selling economics textbook of all time. His friend and adversary for decades Milton Friedman studied the Great Depression and with Anna Schwartz wrote the seminal books <I>The Great Contraction</I> and <I>A Monetary History of the United States</I>. Friedman found fortune writing a treatise <I>Capitalism and Freedom</I>.<br><br><br><br>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 United States.
