David glasner milton friedman biography

“David Glasner has been making a series of posts on the legacy of Milton Friedman, some of them in response to Scott Sumner; they’re interesting if you want to delve into the intellectual history. I’m not personally big on such things — in general, what people thought Keynes or Friedman meant ends up being more important than what they turn out, on close reading, to (maybe, possibly) actually have meant.”

– Paul Krugman, “Milton Friedman, Unperson,” August 8, 2013.

I’m generally fascinated by the way members of various academic fields view their own fields’ intellectual history.  In recent weeks, there have been a spate of interesting conversations among blogging economists about the history of economic thought, which have led me to think, more specifically about the way economists think about such things.

Of course, historians of the 20 century have recently been showing an increasing interest in the history of economic thought, especially conservative economic thought, both because such ideas have had important political and policy consequences and because, much more broadly, economic ideas have found their way into American thought and culture.  “In an age when words took on magical properties,” writes Dan Rodgers at the start of Chapter 2 of Age of Fracture, “no word flew higher or assumed a greater aura of enchantment than ‘market'” (p. 41).

How then are economists’ ideas about the history of economic thought like, and unlike, historians’ ideas about the history of economic thought?

I should note, off the bat, that my observations about this question are extremely tentative. I don’t have a deep academic knowledge of the role the history of economic thought within the economics profession. And, in a way as importantly, I don’t even have much anecdotal / experiential sense of it.  Since entering gr

David Glasner has been making a series of posts on the legacy of Milton Friedman, some of them in response to Scott Sumner; they’re interesting if you want to delve into the intellectual history. I’m not personally big on such things — in general, what people thought Keynes or Friedman meant ends up being more important than what they turn out, on close reading, to (maybe, possibly) actually have meant. For what it’s worth, I think Glasner makes a good case that Friedman was indeed more or less a Keynesian, or maybe Hicksian — certainly that was the message everyone took from his Monetary Framework, which was disappointingly conventional. And Friedman’s attempts to claim that Keynes added little that wasn’t already in a Chicago oral tradition don’t hold up well either.

But never mind. What I think is really interesting is the way Friedman has virtually vanished from policy discourse. Keynes is very much back, even if that fact drives some economists crazy; Hayek is back in some sense, even if one has the suspicion that many self-proclaimed Austrians bring little to the table but the notion that fiat money is the root of all evil — a deeply anti-Friedmanian position. But Friedman is pretty much absent.

This is hardly what you would have expected not that long ago, when Friedman’s reputation bestrode the economic world like a colossus, when Greg Mankiw declared Friedman, not Keynes, the greatest economist of the 20th century, when Ben Bernanke concluded a speech praising Friedman with the famous line,

Let me end my talk by abusing slightly my status as an official representative of the Federal Reserve. I would like to say to Milton and Anna: Regarding the Great Depression. You’re right, we did it. We’re very sorry. But thanks to you, we won’t do it again.

Best wishes for your next ninety years.

So what happened to Milton Friedman?

Part of the answer is that at this p

What’s at stake: What started as a series of post by David Glasner on the legacy of Milton Friedman turned into a major dispute after Paul Krugman wrote that “historians of economic thought will regard him as little more than an extended footnote”. Although it quickly appeared that the statement did not apply to Friedman, the economist, but to Friedman, the guiding light for conservative economic policies (see for example his influential Free to Choose TV series), the discussion continued as to whether the Great Recession had given a serious hit to Friedman’s economic analysis.

The disappearance of Friedman’s role in conservative economic discourse

Paul Krugman writes that one way to think about Friedman is that he was the man who tried to save free-market ideology from itself, by offering an answer to the obvious question: “If free markets are so great, how come we have depressions?” Until he came along, the answer of most conservative economists was basically that depressions served a necessary function and should simply be endured. Hayek, for example, argued that “we may perhaps prevent a crisis by checking expansion in time,” but “we can do nothing to get out of it before its natural end, once it has come.” But if markets can go so wrong that they cause Great Depressions, how can you be a free-market true believer on everything except macro?

Noah Smith writes that Friedman hasn't disappeared from policy discourse; he's disappeared from right-wing policy discourse. Friedman's ideas are pretty close to the mainstream New Keynesian idea of the macroeconomy - the kind of thing promoted by Mike Woodford, Smets and Wouters, Greg Mankiw, and Miles Kimball. New Keynesian models use consumption smoothing, monetary policy rules, and a NAIRU with a downward-sloping short-run Phillips curve - all Friedman ideas. And in New Keynesian models, monetary policy reigns supreme; only at the zero lower bound is monetary policy possi