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Anna Schwartz died yesterday, at the age of 96. Most famous for her collaboration with Milton Friedman [2] on their 1963 A Monetary History of the United States, 1867-1960 [3], she was also a great scholar in her own right.
Praise for Ms. Schwartz is flowing today, and properly so. I’m sure that I’ll link to other accounts of her life and work as I learn of, and read, them. But here now are accolades from Jim Dorn [4], David Henderson [5], Bob Higgs [6], and the Wall Street Journal [7].
….
I didn’t know Anna Schwartz personally. I saw her on only a too-small handful of occasions, but was never introduced to her. I do, however, have an Anna Schwartz story to tell.
In 2008 I was a patient of a podiatrist on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. During the small talk I had with this doctor I learned that he majored in economics as an undergrad at Northwestern, and he learned that I teach economics at GMU. So we naturally chatted about current economic events.
At one point in our chit-chat he asked if I happened to know one of his long-time patients, a woman named Anna Schwartz. I replied that, while I don’t know her personally, I know much of her work and certainly regard her as a giant among economic historians and monetary scholars.
“Well, she’s got a lot of energy for her age!” the doctor told me, smiling admiringly as he spoke about her. He went on to recount a then-recent episode in which he casually asked Schwartz for her opinion of Paul Krugman. Schwartz responded with what I gather was a rather fiery discourse on Krugman’s February 2007 essay, in the New York Review of Books, “Who Was Milton Friedman? [8]” (That’s the essay in which Krugman – just a few months after Friedman died – accused Friedman of being intellectually dishonest when speaking to the general public.)
Schwartz and Edward Nelson responded to Krugman’s misrepresentations and mistakes with this letter to the NYRB [9], and Schwartz went into more depth in this 2008 Cato Journal article [10].
That Krugman essay, btw, in addition to being classless, is an especially careless piece of work, as – in addition to Schwartz – Russ explained here [11], and as Arnold Kling explained here [12].