Tag Archives: Milton Friedman

The Spectator, 13 January 2024 Monetarism, with which his name is associated, has long defined economic policy. But what would Friedman have made of the banking collapse, so soon after his death in 2006? The Keynesian economist Nicholas Kaldor called Milton Friedman one of the two most evil men of the 20th century. (Friedman was in distinguished company.) The ‘scourge’ he inflicted on the world was monetarism, a product of what Kaldor called Friedman’s Big Lie – of which more later....

In 1967, Milton Friedman launched a counterrevolution in economics that overturned the Keynesian theory of inflation. Three years later, economist James Tobin issued a powerful theoretical rebuttal — but in the economics mainstream, it’s been all but forgotten.Read full interview here.

I have found a common misrepresentation from many, including mainstream economists, is that critics of their models do not understand them or the role of the assumptions. Those mainstream economists rely on an incoherent essay from Milton Friedman to dismiss criticism of the realism of assumptions. My favorite criticism, though, is that their conclusions do not follow from their assumptions. I like to show this by constructing numerical examples that contradict their teaching. On the...

 [embedded content] A video conversation with LP Rochon and my co-author Bill McColloch on our chapter for the forthcoming book on the history of ideas. Many topics, including Friedman vs Lucas relevance, the Lucas critique, the empirical turn in the profession, and more. More info on the book soon.

Friedman's adviseesZachary Carter, of Price of Peace fame (a good book that I recommend, btw), wrote an interesting piece on Milton Friedman's legacy, which I think is, as Hyman Minsky said of Joan Robinson's work, wrong in incisive ways. But even before we get to his main point, that the era of Friedmanomics is gone, it is worth thinking a bit about the way he approaches the history of ideas. This is clearly a moral tale for Carter, with good guys and bad guys. Gunfight at high noon. It is...

Slowly, but steadily the Wicksellian concept of a natural, normal or neutral rate of interest is making a come back and becoming more relevant and cited than Friedman's natural rate of unemployment and its awkward twin the Non Accelerating Inflation Rate of Unemployment (NAIRU).Note that up to Friedman's infamous presidential address the normal rate dominated the field. But in all fairness, even thought it has lost space it seems that Friedman's natural rate of unemployment has a lot of...

[embedded content]Neoclassical Political Economy You may have seen the above overly polite video. I have not done this in a while, even before the pandemic. I used to, when I visited an academic bookstore or a college library, skim through textbooks, concentrating on introductory or intermediate microeconomics. Economics is in an extraordinary state, where the textbooks are full of nonsense that has been known to be logically invalid for half a century. Here is an example. David D....

We all know what the – Bandwagon effect – is. There is a lot of research literature in social psychology trying to understand why people who believe one thing one minute, suddenly ditch that belief system and appear to be proponents of a new belief system, often, in total contradiction to their previous views. The effect is related but distinct from the Groupthink phenomenon which I have written about extensively in relation to the way mainstream economics has maintained a hold on the...

Pesky physicists. ?Jason Smith "converses" with Milton Friedman.Short, fun, and not wonkish.Information Transfer EconomicsMilton Friedman's Thermostat, reduxJason Smith

1.0 Introduction By "libertarianism", I mean propertarianism, a right-wing doctrine. In this post, I want to outline some ways of arguing against this set of ideas. (On this topic, Mike Huben has much more extensive resources than I can allude to.) 2.0 On Individual Details I like to use certain policy ideas as a springboard for arguments that they have no coherent justification in economic theory. Unsurprisingly, the outdated nonsense market fundamentalists push does not have empirical...