Happy 99th Milton Friedman, famous economist

[billc]

Here is an article celebrating the birthday of Milton Friedman:

http://biggovernment.com/reasontv/2...iedman-a-tribute-to-the-late-great-economist/

from the article:

This is the man, after all, who introduced the concept of school vouchers, documented the role of government monopolies on money in creating inflation, provided the intellectual arguments that ended the military draft in America, co-founded the Mont Pelerin Society, and so much more. In popular books such as Capitalism and Freedom and Free to Choose, written with his wife and longtime collaborator Rose, he masterfully drew a through-line between economic freedom and political and cultural freedom.
Yet his ultimate contribution to freedom and liberty is found less in any of the specific argument he made and more in the ways he made them. Friedman provided an all-too-rare example of a public intellectual who was scrupulously honest, forthright, and fair in every debate he entered. Whether he was duking it out with fellow Nobel Prize winners and other high-profile economists or making the case for the morality of capitalism with TV hosts such as Phil Donahue and angry students, he always argued in good faith, admitted when he was wrong, and enlarged the circle of debate.

 

[Sukerkin]

The economist who repudiated his own work, lest we forget. So he gets plenty of kudos for that.

 

[billc]

One of my favorite clips:

 

[billc]

Here are some Friedman quotes:

http://brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/m/milton_friedman.html

from above:

If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara
Desert, in 5 years there'd be a shortage of sand.
Milton
Friedman

Many people want the government to protect the consumer. A much
more urgent problem is to protect the consumer from the government.

Milton
Friedman

So that the record of history is
absolutely crystal clear. That there is no alternative way, so far discovered,
of improving the lot of the ordinary people that can hold a candle to the
productive activities that are unleashed by a free enterprise system.

Milton
Friedman

The Great Depression, like most other periods of severe
unemployment, was produced by government mismanagement rather than by any
inherent instability of the private economy.
Milton Friedman

The problem of social organization is how to set up an
arrangement under which greed will do the least harm, capitalism is that kind of
a system.
Milton Friedman

 

[Sukerkin]

"It was on the policy battleground, shortly after, that monetarism collapsed. From 1979,
the Federal Reserve formally went over to short-term monetary targets. The results were a
cascading disaster: 20 percent interest rates, a 60 percent revaluation of the dollar, 11 percent
unemployment, recession, deindustrialization throughout the Midwest, and, ultimately, the debt
crisis of the third world. In August 1982, faced with the Mexican default and also a revolt in
Congress—which I engineered from my perch at the Joint Economic Committee—the Federal
Reserve dumped monetary targeting and never returned to it.


By the mid-1980s, the rigorous monetarism Friedman had championed also faded from
academic life. Money growth became high and variable, but inflation never came back. Perhaps
inflation was “always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon,” as he observed in 1963. But
monetary phenomena could happen without inflation. This vitiated the use of monetary
aggregates as an instrument of policy control. At the Bank of England, Charles Goodhart stated
his law: When you try to use an econometric relationship for purposes of policy control, it
changes.

Friedman himself conceded to the Financial Times’ Simon London in 2003: “The use
of quantity of money as a target has not been a success. I’m not sure I would as of today push it
as hard as I once did.”

Taken from: http://www.stat.uchicago.edu/~amit/MFI/CollapseofMonetarism4EP.pdf

 

[Sukerkin]

I never was convinced by Monetarism and, so it turns out, neither was Friedman.

Happy posthumous birthday Milton and congratulations on getting your apology in before it was too late.

 

[Sukerkin]

An interesting read from the Telegraph, showing that the theory of Monetarism might be dead but adherents move still:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/...etarism-is-dead-but-what-about-inflation.html

 

[Sukerkin]

http://www.polyconomics.com/ssu/ssu-030613.htm

 

[Omar B]

Didnt we have some long Friedman/Austrian Model conversation last year Suk?

 

[Sukerkin]

I think we most assuredly did, aye :nods:. Such things never really reach conclusions, not ones that satisfy everybody at least :lol:.

 

[Brian King]

A persons work can often be measured by the quality of their friends, and their enemies. The impact of the work can be measured by the growls of the negative when grace would suffice, especially, when politics color so many agenda's.

99 years, covers so much ground and life lived. Even with those years the accomplishments achieved are remarkable. Happy Birthday