We Are Live at Salon, with an Obituary for Milton Friedman

J. Bradford DeLong (2006), "A Man Who Hated Government," Salon (November 16, 2006) http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2006/11/17/milton_friedman/

Also see:

Sam Brittan at the Financial Times: Salon (November 16, 2006) http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2006/11/17/milton_friedman/
Greg Ip at the Wall Street Journal: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB116369744597625238.html?mod=hps_us_at_glance_most_pop
Steven Pearlstein at the Washington Post: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/11/16/AR2006111601779_pf.html

---

J. Bradford DeLong (2006), "A Man Who Hated Government," Salon (November 16, 2006) http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2006/11/17/milton_friedman/

"Lord, enlighten thou our enemies," prayed nineteenth-century British economist and moral philosopher John Stuart Mill in his Essay on Coleridge http://olldownload.libertyfund.org/Texts/MillJS0172/Works/Vol10/PDFs/Mill_1277.pdf. "Sharpen their wits, give acuteness to their perceptions, and consecutiveness and clearness to their reasoning powers: we are in danger from their folly, not from their wisdom; their weakness is what fills us with apprehension, not their strength."

For every left-of-center American economist in the second half of the twentieth century, Milton Friedman (1912-2006) was the incarnate answer to John Stuart Mill's prayer. His wits were smart, his perceptions acute, his arguments strong, his reasoning powers clear, coherent, and terrifyingly quick. You tangled with him at your peril. And you left not necessarily convinced, but well aware of the weak points in your own argument.

General William Westmoreland, testifying before President Nixon's Commission on an All-Volunteer [Military] Force, denounced the idea, saying that he did not want to command an army of mercenaries. Milton Friedman interrupted him: "General, would you rather command an army of slaves?" Westmoreland got angry: "I don't like to hear our patriotic draftees referred to as slaves." And Friedman got rolling: "I don't like to hear our patriotic volunteers referred to as mercenaries. If they are mercenaries, then I, sir, am a mercenary professor, and you, sir, are a mercenary general." And he did not stop: "We are served by mercenary physicians, we use a mercenary lawyer, and we get our meat from a mercenary butcher" http://www.davidrhenderson.com/articles/0199_thankyou.html. As George Shultz likes to say: "Everybody loves to argue with Milton, particularly when he isn't there."

Thinking as hard as he could until he got to the root of the issues was his most powerful skill. "Even at 94," Chicago economist and Freakonomics http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/006073132x/ author Steve Levitt wrote on his website yesterday, "he would teach me something about economics whenever we talked" http://www.freakonomics.com/blog/2006/11/16/sad-news-milton-friedman-has-died/. In this morning's New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/17/business/17milton.html?ex=1321419600&en=a0db578046e72e19&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss, Chicago economist Austen Goolsbee quotes from Milton Friedman's Nobel autobiography:

Friedman said that when he arrived [at the University of Chicago] in the 1930s, he encountered a "vibrant intellectual atmosphere of a kind that I had never dreamed existed."

"I have never recovered."

His world-view began with a bedrock faith in people, in their ability to make judgments for themselves, and thus an imperative to maximize individual freedom. On top of that was layered a deep faith and conviction that free markets were almost always the best and most magical way of coordinating every conceivable task. On top of that was layered a powerful conviction that a look at the empirical facts--a marking-to-market of your beliefs to reality--would generate the right conclusions. And on top of that was layered a fear and suspicion of government as an easily-captured tool for the enrichment of cynical and selfish interests that sought to grab whatever they could. Suffusing all was a faith in the power of argument and the utility of reason. He was an optimist: people could be taught the truths of economics, and if they were properly taught then institutions could be built to protect all against the corruption and overreach of the government.

And he did fear the government. He hated government's and society's sticking their nose into people's private business. And he interpreted "people's private business" extremely widely. He hated the War on Drugs, which he saw as a cruel and destructive breeder of crime and violence. He scorned government licensing of professions--especially doctors, who heard over and over again about how their incomes were boosted by restrictions on the number of doctors that made Americans sicker. He feared deficit spending: cynical politicians could pretend that the costs of government were less than they were by pushing the raising of taxes to pay for spending off into the future. He sought to innoculate citizens against such political games of three-card-monte: "Remember," he would say, "to spend is to tax."

This did not mean that government had no role to play. Enforcement of property rights, adjudication of contract disputes--the standard powerful rule-of-law underpinnings of the market--plus a host of other government interventions when empirical circumstances made them appropriate: Mayor Ken Livingstone's congestion tax on cars in central London is Milton Friedman's. Friedman's negative income tax is one of the parents of what is now America's largest anti-poverty program: the Earned Income Tax Credit. And, most important, government had a very powerful and necessary role to play in keeping the monetary system working smoothly through proper control of the money stock. If there was always sufficient liquidity in the economy--enough but not too much--then you could trust the market system to do its job. If not, you got the Great Depression, or hyperinflation.

In his belief that the government was required to undertake relatively narrow but crucially important strategic interventions in order to stabilize the macroeconomy--keep production, employment, and prices on an even keel--Milton Friedman was in the same chapter if not on the same page as John Maynard Keynes, the economic giant of the previous generation whose doctrines and influence Friedman worked tirelessly to supplant and minimize. The Great Depression had convinced Keynes that central bankers alone could not rescue and stabilize the market economy. In Keynes's view, stronger and more drastic strategic interventions were needed to boost or curb demand directly. Friedman and his coauthor Anna J. Schwartz argued in their Monetary History of the United States that this was a misreading of the lessons of the Great Depression, which in Friedman's view was caused by monetary mismanagement or perhaps could have been rapidly alleviated by skillful monetary management alone. Over the course of forty years, Friedman's position carried the day. Federal Reserve Chair Ben Bernanke right now holds Milton Friedman's view, not John Maynard Keynes's, of what kind of strategic interventions in the economy are necessary to provide for maximum production, employment, and purchasing power, and stable prices.

Milton Friedman's thought is, I believe, best seen as the fusion of two strongly American currents: libertarianism and pragmatism. Friedman was a pragmatic libertarian. He believed that--as an empirical matter--giving individuals freedom and letting them coordinate their actions by buying and selling on markets would produce the best results. It was not that he thought this was natural law--that markets always worked best. It was, rather, that he believed that places where markets failed were atypical; that where markets did fail there were almost always enormous profit opportunities from entrepreneurial redesign of institutions; that the market system would create now opportunities for trade that would route around market failures; and that government failure was pervasive--that any expansion of government beyond the classical liberal state would be highly likely to cause more trouble than it could solve.

For right-of-center American libertarian economists, Milton Friedman was a powerful leader. For left-of-center American liberal economists, Milton Friedman was an enlightened adversary. We are all the stronger for his work. We will miss him.

Comments

[kharris]

All wonderful stuff, and as richly deserved as any lauditory eulogy. Too bad Goolsbee had to stick his own views of how the world works into it. Friedman right, Keynes wrong? Says Goolsbee. Ask Krugman, in the context of Japan. Keynes passed long ago, Friedman just this week. That is no excuse for calling the game for Friedman.

I'm getting quite tired of this "you're it - I quit" approach to policy debate.

[cb]

Kind, but perhaps too kind?

To spend is to tax, but is that what he said to Reagan...and when GHWB and Clinton tried to pay for what had already been spent, did he really follow that dictum?

[greensmile]

I guess you are right, Brad. I don't know much about economics and write more for the aspects of politcial issues that might be called psychological or spiritual depending on my mood. It took me a bit of thinking to get at where I thought Friedman went astray. He was good for my thinking but I still find he did go astray and helped many a conservative to feel comfortable as they followed him rightward.

[greensmile]

I guess you are right, Brad. I don't know much about economics and write more for the aspects of politcial issues that might be called psychological or spiritual depending on my mood. It took me a bit of thinking to get at where I thought Friedman went astray. He was good for my thinking but I still find he did go astray and helped many a conservative to feel comfortable as they followed him rightward.

[Gray]

Thanks for this obituary, Prof DeLong. I had a very unfavorable view of Friedman, because I saw him basically as paving the path for the supply side economists. Not any longer.
May he rest in peace.

[Ragerz]

It is interesting that Friedman was considered empirical, because he apparently thought he had all the answers.

Does a true scientist "fear" arriving at a particular result, or do they go where the data leads them? (Fear here referring to Friedman's fear of government.) Can we really trust the empirical judgment of someone who "fears" arriving at a particular answer? I would call that religious and ideological, not scientific and empirical.

Overall, Friedman shared a common problem that economists (both left and right) often have. That is a tendency to overgeneralize.

[steve jennings]

Let me see now, was that the Milton Friedman whose (utterly wrong) advice to Thatcher in the 80's practrically destroyed the UK economy (remember black Wednesday anyone?)
Or this Milton Friedman
....Friedman defended his relationship with Pinochet by saying that if Allende had been allowed to remain in office Chileans would have suffered "the elimination of thousands and perhaps mass starvation . . . torture and unjust imprisonment." But the elimination of thousands, mass hunger, torture and unjust imprisonment were what was taking place in Chile exactly at the moment the Chicago economist was defending his protégé. Allende's downfall came because he refused to betray Chile's long democratic tradition and invoke martial law, yet Friedman nevertheless insisted that the military junta offered "more room for individual initiative and for a private sphere of life" and thus a greater "chance of a return to a democratic society.".....

Perhaps, Mr. Delong we are eulogosing an entirely different Milton Friedman?

Steve Jennings

[Ottnott]

I've never met (or studied - noneconomist here) Friedman, but I do own a book that was incsribed to him by the author.

I picked it up at some sort of surplus book sale at Stanford decades ago.

I'm confident that Friedman never read it (likely never set eyes on it). There are 3 good reasons for that belief:
--Book in unused condition
--Inscription begins (from memory): "To Milton Friedman. Although I do not agree with all his work, I admire him for". Nice touch on a personally inscribed book -- disagree and refer to recipient in the third person.
--Book is pompously titled "How ALL Economies Work"

[Colin Danby]

Ragerz: On the empirical side see _A Monetary History of the United States, 1867-1960_ (Princeton 1971) and much else. Whatever you want to say about the guy you can't claim he didn't take data seriously.

Steve: I think Brad is being exquisitely careful not to endorse Friedman's politics or policy advice. You're right to hold Friedman accountable for his remarks on Chile; he's certainly not the only prominent intellectual whose ideological commitments at certain points overrode his capacity for moral judgment. The question is whether we can learn from reading his scholarship without buying into his politics, and the answer is quite unequivocally yes.

The larger Brad point is also right: if you're going to have adversaries, you want adversaries who try to beat you with sharper arguments and better evidence.

There's also ... if you go back and start reading his work from the 1950s on, even if you don't like the policy message it's hard not to have a sneaking admiration for someone who stuck to his guns, honed his arguments, and kept at it.

[andres]

Steve: at the time he advised Pinochet's government Friedman didn't know about Colonia Dignidad, the grotesquely misnamed settlement of German ex-Nazis in southern Chile which lent the Pinochet government a helping hand in interrogations. To be fair, later in his life Friedman condemned the Pinochet government, though not for its economic policies.

As I posted earlier, Friedman is to blame for the quality of the advice that he gave the Pinochet government, not for his having chosen to give it.

[Ragerz]

Colin,

You make my point. You describe him as a man who "stuck to his guns." That is, as an ideologue rather than an empiricist.

Merely having knowledge of or acknowledging facts does not an empiricist make. Rather, having a pragmatic appreciation for the set of possibilities suggested by the facts does.

[bluetaco]

Thinking about Friedman's long and unwavering devotion to his theoretical approach, his failure to modify his positions even in the face of contrary evidence, and his general lack of sympathy for the losers in the economic struggle, I am reminded of this passage from Rousseau's Origins of Inequality on the nature of philosophy:

'It is reason that engenders self-respect, and reflection that confirms it: it is reason which turns man's mind back upon itself, and divides him from everything that could disturb or afflict him. It is philosophy that isolates him, and bids him say, at sight of the misfortunes of others: "Perish if you will, I am secure."'

I always feel a little sorry for these true believers like Friedman.

[wcw]

I can't agree.

Friedman had manifold flaws, as we all do, but he was a worthy adversary. He was not only intelligent but also willing to look at the data and change his mind. Our host's cite of the EITC is a case in point.

My wife, who knows I am an unrepentant left-wing anarchist, was surprised to hear that I miss Friedman, too. Would, I told her, that all my ideological opponents were as intelligent and honest.

Recquiscat.

[Colin Danby]

No, Ragerz, those aren't the only two alternatives. wcw has it right. I don't know of any economist who is strictly "empiricist" (Friedman had some interesting views about realism). Calling him an ideologue is in some senses not unfair: his deep and abiding mistrust of government was a moral axiom. But his work on U.S. monetary history is serious scholarship, he was an important theoretician, and he certainly thought that his monetary investigations had discovered a property of the world that had been previously neglected. Plus he was stunningly successful at communicating to a policy and popular audience. A pretty successful life. If you want to make a serious criticism, read his work and take it on.

[Jon Fernquest]

"He was convinced people could be taught the truths of economics, and if people were properly taught, then institutions could be built to protect society as a whole against the corruption and overreach of the government."

Yes, yes. Otherwise politics just becomes a Nixon-Burns pump the economy up for the election or Thaksin vote buying with pork barrel.

Yet, even an investment bank needs the committment of its workers on issues/tasks that straight incentive pay can't buy.

The twisted logic that often results from the over application of the economic model, like people bribing the person next to them in a restaurant not to smoke, or the Russian privatisation "miracle" that resulted in a whole economy's wealth being sucked up by a few oligarchs. There is a time to not listen to people like Friedman.

I'll take Brad De Long's lightly regulated markets or Stiglitz's Scandinavian Model, more human solutions, anyday.

[Ragerz]

Colin,

I am glad that you concede the Friedman is an ideologue. By definition ideologues are unqualified to provide serious conclusions regarding empirical data. Their conclusions will inevitable be the results of them giving undue weight to certain facts, too little weight to others, and ignoring many aspects of the problem all together. However, luckily for ideologues, parts of their empirical analysis might be useful to the extent it is not driven by ideology (i.e. might be considered "serious scholarship"). Of course, one major problem is that it can be difficult to seperate the ideologically driven from the more objective in the works of ideologues. Which in turn makes the intellectual efforts of ideologues less useful and inferior, all other things considered equal. (That is, a non-ideological Friedman would have been superior to the actual Friedman, not that the analysis of all non-ideological individuals is superior to the analysis of all ideological individuals.)

Of course, you are right that Friedman was a successful rhetorician who influenced others and moved them towards his ideology. One cannot deny that. But one might question whether the individual leading all the other lemmings over a cliff should be considered an overall success.

Karl Marx was also a very successful rhetorician who brought to our attention properties of the world that had previously been neglected.

[Jeffrey Kramer]

That exchange with Westmoreland deserves a place alongside Huxley's retort to Wilberforce in any collection of all-time-great squelchings.

[Ragerz]

Kramer,

I agree that it was rhetorically brilliant, but it obviously obscured rather than address the point trying to be made by Westmoreland. Often, obsuring rather than addressing is the primary feature of brilliant rhetoric.

Westmoreland's use of the word mercenary was going to the idea that service was merely a thing exchanged for money alone, instead of being a matter of patriotic duty. An all-volunteer army makes service less a matter of duty, except to the extent that volunteers are motivated by patriotism and an individual self-enforced sense of obligation to the country.

A duty, in contrast to a right, is not something one has discretion to exercise or not exercise.

Whether one thinks that defending the country against enemies should be a duty or not, Friedman's rhetoric obscured rather than shed light on that issue. Westmoreland was concerned that when you make military service something other than an externally enforced duty, what is left is merely a monetary, that is mercenary motivation. He was not saying that service in exchange for money itself is bad. He was saying that service in exchange for money and nothing else (no sense of patriotism and defending one's homeland) is bad. As if the only thing different from an American soldier and one hired from another country is a pay check.

Whatever one thinks of the merits of Friedman's position, I can't help but think that his rhetoric was positively harmful. Instead of enlightening, it obscured. Instead of trying to understand the point of view of Westmoreland as best he could, he was only interested scoring ideological points.

[Ragerz]

wcw,

"[T]hat all my ideological opponents were as intelligent and honest."

I would hope instead that both you and your opponents were less ideological. Maybe then we would have less mass murder in the world (whether from fascists, nazis, communists, or whatever else) and more problem solving.

[Jeffrey Kramer]

"Westmoreland's use of the word mercenary was going to the idea that service was merely a thing exchanged for money alone, instead of being a matter of patriotic duty." [Ragerz]

Westmoreland may have had any number of reasonable arguments against a volunteer army, but "mercenary!" isn't a reasonable argument, it's a simplistic slur. The slur relies for its force on the unstated assumption that anything people are paid for = something they are doing "just for the money" = something disgracefully cynical and amoral. Friedman was performing a reductio ad absurdum of those assumptions. I don't see how that obscures the issues at stake.

[Ian Maitland]

A beautiful tribute. With a few strokes of your brush, you have caught the essence of the man. I haven't seen another eulogy as exquisitely done. Or as concisely.

[Ragerz]

Jeffrey,

It obscures the issue in the following manner. You become distracted because Friedman is equating mercenary bakers, lawyers, professors, and butchers with mercenary soldiers.

The idea is that someone who is fighting only for money is not committed as much as one who is also fighting for country and as a patriotic duty. They present a risk not only to themselves, but to their fellow soldiers. They are not likely to be as reliably, cannot be trusted, and are demoralizing to the patriotically motivated soldiers who must fight with them. I don't think it can be argued that a baker, lawyer, professor, or butcher who works only for money presents these risks to the lives of their colleagues or the welfare of their country. (Although, I would be suspicious of the quality of someone's work if their were no nonmonetary motivations behind their choice of profession.)

In other words, being a soldier is a different kind of profession than these others. Friedman's rhetoric obscured that point.

Saying that one does not want an army of mercenaries goes much deeper than being merely a "simplistic slur." That you failed to perceive this demonstrates that Friedman's rhetoric does indeed tend to obscure rather than enlighten.

One might reject Westmoreland's argument. Ideally that would be based on a firm understanding rather than due to the power of Friedman's brilliant rhetoric to obscure.

[Rich Berger]

I suppose that in your view, ragerz, conscripted soldier = patriotic soldier. Many of those conscripts were unwilling and were effectively enslaved. I think there are many in our current armed forces who are strongly motivated by patriotism.

Brad - good summary. I never met Milton Friedman, but the impression I get from seeing him on TV and reading his works is one of civility and fair play. Who, in your opinion, has these characteristics on the left?

[Chris]

Steve Jennings, you're an idiot. The British standard of living is vastly higher than it was before 1979. Black Wednesday was caused by politicians trying to manipulate the interest rate for political ends. If you think that's Friedmanite, then I apologise for calling you an idiot. You make idiots look like geniuses. And when will the left stop wanking off over Pinochet?

[Jeffrey Kramer]

Ragerz, you're accepting without question Westmoreland's categorization of volunteer soldiers as "mercenaries", i.e. soldiers fighting "ONLY for money." I would challenge that categorization even if I had never heard Friedman's riposte to it.

[Neil']

Milton Friedman and others' beloved "Laissez-faire economy" was always a fraud anyway for several reasons, aside from whether we should be compassionate per se. Just one basic point: the economy, *before* formal "interference* in the form of explicit regulations, isn't really free or natural anyway. Look at how the Fed manipulates interest rates and the money supply and thus job prospects, the wealth of investors, etc. (That "new money" cannot be made by market trading of a hard currency for goods/services - the governmet/private Fed has to "put it in by hand" in an ulitmately "political" way that must be allocated to "winners" of some stripe....) Then there is the favor of legal personhood and limited liability granted to corporations: that should not be granted with no string attached.

All of the above and more, are reasons why the government owes a social welfare system. (Just consider that those affected by its interest rate policies deserve compensation in some sense just as surely as anyone displaced by the flooding caused by a Federal dam....) But the conservative intellectuals almost always evade this issue and cover up the implications....

Tyrannogenius

[steve jennings]

Hi Rich Berger,
I've been called worse. But I was actually there in the UK in the 80's when succesive Thatcher governments target Friedman's monetary agregates as a means of running the economy, and I lived through the 3 recessions and watched as interest rates HAD TO RISE TO 15% to try to keep the UK in the ERM because the theory (Firedman's model) was wrong.
You will perhaps have notced that once the pound was dumped out of the ERM the UK dropped monetary agregate targeting (as did every other central bank in the known universe).
The Independent summed it upper rather better than I can....

Friedman's ideas of directly targeting the money supply were tried and rejected, and Friedman later backed away from these positions. It is significant that no major central bank now directly targets money-supply data in setting monetary policy - they are far too pragmatic. Even Friedman's great admirer Alan Greenspan never tied himself to the monetarist mast.

The irony for Friedman's fans is that the one piece of public policy he was responsible for that was widely successful and internationally adopted greatly increased the ability of governments to collect tax. In 1942 Friedman worked for the US government and helped to design the payroll tax known in Britain as pay as you earn, which allows governments to take income tax directly from salaries. It was the best thing that Keynesian-style government could have hoped for, and Friedman bitterly regretted it. Years later he wrote: "It never occurred to me ... that I was helping to develop machinery that would make possible a government that I would come to criticise severely as too large, too intrusive, too destructive of freedom."

RIP Milton Friedman, big government's best friend.

----------------
I may be an idiot. but I am quite right in this instance.

Steve

[Tim Worstall]

'But I was actually there in the UK in the 80's when succesive Thatcher governments target Friedman's monetary agregates as a means of running the economy, and I lived through the 3 recessions and watched as interest rates HAD TO RISE TO 15% to try to keep the UK in the ERM because the theory (Firedman's model) was wrong.'

I was there at the time as well: my business went bust in that recession too. However direct targetting of the growth of the money supply was already abandoned by then. We actually had a fixed exchange rate at that time, remember? Can't have that and solely concentrate on hte growth of the money supply: Lawson had been shadowing the D Mark for several years anyway.

[Ragerz]

Rich and Jeffrey,

First, thanks for your polite responses.

Rich,
I am not in favor of an all-volunteer army. Not because I am worried that those who are drafted are "slaves" but because I think they negatively affect morale and reduce professionalism. Anyone who thinks having the privilege and duty of defending one's country is and our freedoms is too burdensome is not deserving of citizenship. I am sure there is some immigrant out their who would gladly switch places.

Jeffrey,
First, it is Friedman who partially bought into Westmoreland's characterization. Rather than denying that an all-volunteer army would consist of some mercenaries, he tried to justify the idea by suggesting that there was nothing wrong with mercenaries. First he denies that any soldiers should be referred to as mercenaries. Then he says that if they are referred to as mercenaries, that this is okay, because we have mercenary lawyers, mercenary phsyicians, and mercenary butchers.

I personally don't buy into the idea that those who currently volunteer for the US Army are mostly mercenaries, since I think they are often and usually motivated by patriotism. We all have to be concerned for our financial situation in life, so I don't consider a volunteer's concern over financial benefits proof of lack of patriotism. However, there is no doubt that some enlistees are motivated for purely economic reasons. That is, are mercenary.

Overall, I support an all-volunteer army. But not because I think that Westmoreland's concerns have absolutely no validity and absolutely no basis in reality, as Friedman suggested. I support it because I think the morale and professionalism problems from having draftees are serious while a draft does nothing to prevent those with mercenary tendencies from volunteering anyway.

The bottom-line is that Friedman obscures. The validity of Westmoreland's concerns are lost. Friedman's rhetoric implies that concerns about mercenaries are entirely illusory.

Why I actually take the same position as Friedman in this debate, I recognize his tactics for what they are: brilliant rhetoric that obscures rather than enlightens. That is not admirable.

Overall, I do not think Friedman is admirable. Really, just another economic ideologue who advanced his ideas through rhetoric.

[steve jennings]

Well stroll on Rich Berger,

"I was there at the time as well: my business went bust in that recession too."

This reminds me of a monty python sketch, a faux-documenetary about the Kray twins (notorious gangland figures in 1950's London) in which the victims of the krays were interviewed. One of the victims (Michael Palin) said of the brothers "they wuz 'ard but fair, nice blokes really, only nailed my head to the floor twice, but I deserved it, they wuz nice to their mum"

Keep drinking the Kool-aid.
Steve

[Joe]

I wonder if those with something bad to say about Milton have any clue whatsoever about what they are talking about. It sure doesent sound like it. There were few arguments that could even weakly counter his reasoning, and Im not seeing them here... Its analogous to a bunch of laymen taking issue with a master aeronautical engineers ideas about jet engine design...

Friedman went astray, but heled you reach your current trancendant thinking... Wow. When do you exect your Nobel... Do you think you would have won an argument with him... Another undiscovered Socialist genuis! How could there be so many!

[derek]

"Friedman was performing a reductio ad absurdum of those assumptions. I don't see how that obscures the issues at stake."

I do. Nor am I surprised; pretty much every attempt that I have ever seen at catching someone out by a reductio ad absurdum, has relied on obscuring what they are actually saying, in favour of "clarifying" a straw man of one's own devising.

"Reductio ad absurdum", the mathematical technique, is a good formal method of proving a conjecture by showing that its converse implies two mutually-exclusive results. "Reductio ad absurdum", the rhetorical trick, is a smoke screen; it obscures and does not clarify.

[Brett Dunbar]

Interest rates in the UK didn't actually reached 15%, that rate was announced but was then cancelled without coming into force. There had been two announcements on the 16th September 1992 the first raised rates from 10% to 12% the rate of 15% was promised later the same day, then at 7pm Lamont announced Britain was leaving the ERM and rates would remain at 12%.

[Jeffrey Kramer]

Westmoreland claims that a paid soldier is a "mercenary"; Friedman replies that IF that's the case, a paid surgeon is a mercenary too. Is Friedman really "agreeing" with Westmoreland about volunteer soldiers being mercenaries (as Ragerz says)? or employing a "strawman of his own devising" (as Derek says)? My trying to "prove" the contrary would produce an unacceptably high risk of tedium at an unacceptably low prospect of success, so I'll just say that I certainly don't see it either way.

[Jeffrey Kramer]

(I shouldn't have put "agreeing" in quotes, since Ragerz' actual phrase was "partially bought into". Sorry.)

[Colin Danby]

Ragerz if you want to argue _ex definitione_, you might start by looking up the definition of "rhetoric," which for 2500 years has meant the study of all argumentation, good and bad. Anyone who argues, anyone who tries to persuade, is by definition "using rhetoric." It's like accusing a poet of using language. Your reference to Marx is weird: he strikes me as an overbearing and often clumsy rhetorician, but there's no question of his greatness as a social scientist.

You will have a hard time finding a scholar, or indeed finding anyone, who approaches the world with no axiomatically-held ethical or political priors. Virtue, then, lies in being up-front about those priors and how one's arguments relate to them, something Milton Friedman was particularly good at and for which he merits our gratitude and respect. Re-read Brad's obit: we don't discover truth in social science by looking for the most ethically-gelded, apolitical social scientist we can find. Rather we approach truth via debate and high standards of logic and evidence.

And among those standards is the old-fashioned, conservative idea that before we offer a critique of someone's scholarship, we might want to read some of it.

[Greg Ransom]

By far the best thing written on Milton Friedman marking his passing.

And I've read most all of it, collected
here:

http://gregransom.com/prestopundit/?p=1325

and here:

http://gregransom.com/prestopundit/?p=1322

Congratulations Brad.

[Colin Danby]

What's up, Greg? I was just mentioning a PKT moment on Crooked Timber the other day. One of these days we need a new heterodox forum.

[Ragerz]

Colin,

Obviously, I was attaching a particular meaning to the term rhetoric. That should be clear from context, the way I am using rhetoric is a common way to use the term. I think you know exactly what I mean. But in case you don't, I mean rhetoric in the absence of substance or rhetoric that obscures substance. In contrast to rhetoric designed to enlighten and that is not primarily concerned with ideological indoctrination or attempts at verbal domination.

[wood turtle]

When you evaluate him as an economist, I think you have to consider- what were his successes, his failures, his questionables?

I don't know that much about his economics, but if he was instrumental in developing the EITC, then he deserves a lot of credit for that. This boosts the earning power of low income people ( mainly those with children) without a raise in the minimum wage.

Several people have mentioned his failures, but mostly what I think when I consider a free market failure was the energy crisis that happened out west. It wasn't necessarily his baby, but it was that style of thinking that led to it. Overall, I think free market can do well in consumer goods, but in other areas of the economy it may not be as successful. So much of the economy is regulated, and the western energy crisis was so spectacularly awful, that I think it would be difficult to convince the American public that their lives would be so so wonderful if only every part of the economy were free of regulation.

As far as the questionable, I think it is interesting that you posted the Westmoreland-Friedman interchange. Perhaps the volunteer military has been a success in the past, but we see now how a protracted military conflict can test it to its limits.

[Juan de la O]

Joe, imposition of 'free market' theories at the point of a dictator's gun, and the real consequences of such imposition, should tell you all you need to know about Friedman, Harberger, and other Chicago Boys - unless, that is, the fatal contradiction in this isn't evident as it was to millions of Chileans, many who still recall what you have yet to, and may never, learn.

Beyond the 'experiment' in Chile, we can say with confidence that Friedman was very helpful in providing justification for the whole neo-liberal, become Washington Consensus, program that's had such negative results over so many decades.

Those who appreciate his empirical work might want to examine some of it a bit more closely to determine whether he may have performed, can we say, data fitting.

The man was an amoral scoundrel who indirectly contributed to suffering and death through much of the 'third world' and, as previously noted, Britain and the U.S. as well. That his theories are questionable is secondary to the results which flowed from their practice.