 Let's talk about Chile. Why is Milton Friedman tied so tightly with the Pinochet regime, which was a repressive tyrannical regime that ultimately, after that period was over, Chile was for many years the kind of best performing economy in Latin America. But what did Friedman do and is it right to link him to the Pinochet regime? Yeah, it's an interesting question because he didn't spend very much time in Chile. So the kind of story starts with the United States government funding students to come and study from Chile at the University of Chicago, which was part of a broader kind of effort to spread American ideas during the Cold War. And so this group of students, it's eventually about 100, is trained at Chicago. Only one of them is actually Friedman's doctoral student, but they take classes with him and they kind of get the whole Chicago set of economic ideas. And they go back to Chile and they really are a minority to say the least because Chile is following import, substitution, industrialization, ISI, which creates a very large role for the state and it's protectionist in order to nurture domestic industries. And big companies and the state are very much intertwined and they're called the Chicago boys, which is pejorative. And so they wanna do sort of neoclassical economics, foreign policy, free markets, free prices, open trade, they really get nowhere. Eventually it's in, I think it's in 1973 that Salvador Allende, who's a socialist, Marxist is elected. And then three years later, I might be getting my exact date strong. I think it's 70, he's elected 73. He's overthrown by Pinochet in a military coup. It's bloody, it's violent. And there's just a great deal of people during the Allende regime and afterwards. And so when Pinochet comes into power, the inflation rate in Chile is 600% a year. So it's a sort of macroeconomic crisis, and a political crisis wrapped in one. And then a year in, they've gotten the inflation down about 300%, but he's still having a lot of problems. And it's at that point that the Chicago boys really been off stage for most of us are able to come and get into the regime and say, look, we have a wholly different way to do this. We have a different set of approaches, let's do that. And as are getting this policy considered, they basically call Freeman and they say, can you come? And can you talk about what we should do to like how we should manage the economy, how we can address inflation? So Freeman decides to come. He spends six days in the country. He meets a lot of members of the Chilean state. He meets Pinochet. He tells him, you should tackle inflation. You have to do basically a shock treatment. You have such bad inflation, you can't wait, and you can't be a gradualist. He's a gradualist in the United States, but not in this hyperinflation situation. So then, and he also tells Pinochet, if you open the economy the way you will, you want to eventually you're gonna have to liberalize. And from the accounts we have, Pinochet is basically like, isn't this going to cause too much social pain and disruption? And Freeman says, you kind of have no choice. And that's the message he gives to the country more broadly. And so I have, I found a travel log where he writes all his, like he, the few days after he got back from Chile, he wrote all this down. So I have a really good sense of what his impressions were. We can't be exactly sure of what he said because it's a censored press, but most of his talks were like pretty boring, like, you know, monetary policy. At any rate, that is the policy that's put in place. And so Freeman really puts his kind of imprimatur on the market-based reforms. And he doesn't view this as advising, you know, a politician with whom he's aligned. It's not as if he agreed to be on the Council of Economic Advisers of Pinochet because he supports his plan. You know, he's done, it's the context is American economists flying around the world telling socialist countries like become more capitalist, right? It's pretty common, common move. And so men he leaves and a couple, it's not too long after that one of Pinochet's leading opponents who's in exile in the United States is assassinated. By Pinochet. By Pinochet, you know, they have this kind of secret police in a car bomb on the streets of Washington DC. It's completely shocking. And then just a couple of weeks later, Freeman gets awarded the Nobel. And the man who was assassinated was quite critical of Freeman and interpreted Freeman as a supporter of Pinochet and even thought he was part of the kind of architect of the coup. So then he's assassinated, then the Nobel Prize happened. So the result is just this all gets mixed together and it comes to seem as if the Nobel Prize committee and the sort of industrialized West has decided to approve and endorse the Pinochet regime. And so that's really a framing that's put on it. By Chilean exiles and who are very angry with Freeman and feel like he should just have steered clear of the country entirely. So it becomes just a real, it's a real controversy. It's very painful for Freeman. And over time, he'll realize he has to speak out more forcefully about political freedom. His remarks previous to that are really all about economic freedom. And eventually he kind of realizes, I have to talk about political freedom too. So you'll see a shift. One more thing I would say that you and I chatted about briefly offline is that, Freeman doesn't come out in support of the regime but there are some other economist, most notably F.A. Hayek who offer more justifications and defenses of the regime. And I think in the kind of public memory, Freeman gets kind of lumped into that. And so it's all seen as this endorsement of a military government. And Freeman's really horrified. He's like, I didn't ever perceive that going there to give my advice, you know, I'm the world expert on inflation, there's 300% hyperinflation. Like of course I'm gonna go and say, here's what I think should be done that doesn't mean I support Pinochet. So it's a difficult period for him. Why do you think that slag against him has been so long lived though? Some of it I just think is misinformation. You know, there's a belief that the coup was done in the service of this particular set of economic ideas. And I- So that's kind of like Naomi Klein's in her shock doctrine book. Yeah, there's some documentaries where it's seen that like this was all sort of part of a master plan and that it was necessary to, you know, people were so committed to capitalism that they needed an autocratic government to sort of force it on the country. So, I mean, it's sort of an inverse narrative of the connection between socialism and authoritarian regimes. And so I think it has some powers being in version of that. So I guess my hope is that with more information on what happened, we can have sort of like a better understanding of it. And is that kind of that connection? Is that the origin of when Friedman really started to talk about how when you get economic freedom, political freedom comes trailing along? Yeah, I think so what happened was then, so this is like 75, he goes to Chile, 76 is the Nobel Prize and then the Mont Pelerin Society has its meeting, I think it's a regional meeting in like 1981, which again is interpreted as like, this is an endorsement. And Friedman's really worried about that and he actually gets some, there was an economist who was in the government and he gets him disinvited to the meeting because he doesn't want to feel like there's a connection. And at this meeting, Chileans are starting to say, mimic the leftist line that like we only got capitalism because we had a strong government and like we needed that strong government to get capitalism and Friedman's like, no, no, no, no, no. No, no, no, this is not how it works. And he starts kind of pushing back more. I think he's also trying to push back against Hayek and then talk more. And I think, for most of his career, he's in American academia and he's taking political freedom for granted and he's thinking, my peers need to focus more on economic freedom. And then he gets out into the world and it's like, oh, maybe I need to be talking about political freedom first because these two are intertwined.