Happy birthday, with some thoughts from Gail Heriot:
His mother—Sarah Ethel Landau Friedman—emigrated from Carpathian Ruthenia (a flea-bitten part of what was then considered the Kingdom of Hungary) when she was 14. She started out working as a seamstress in a sweatshop—an opportunity she was delighted to have. She later went into business with her husband in a dry goods store and an ice cream parlor (both of which she ran). Contrast that with John Maynard Keynes’s upbringing in a prominent British family. His mother, Florence Ada Keynes, who, like Sarah, was a formidable woman, is most often referred to as a “social reformer” or a “politician.”
Yes, what if?
Let’s not get too deterministic. Like Keynes, David Friedman was the son of a well-connected academic father and a “formidable” mother but he became a libertarian economist anyway.