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January 29, 2007
Milton Friedman Day
Today is Milton Friedman Day. I urge everyone to watch the documentary The Power of Choice on PBS tonight (check your local listings). If you want to see the old Free to Choose series, go to IdeaChannel.tv.
Many economists credit Friedman in some way with inspiring them--either directly as his students (we should all have been so fortunate) or indirectly through reading his books and articles or watching Free to Choose. As a beginning student, I found Friedman's popular articles extremely compelling and fun to read. Capitalism and Freedom was an early favorite of mine. His essay arguing that the social responsibility was to increase profits also caught my attention as a college sophomore. At that time, most college macro texts had not fully embraced rational expectations. In the macro texts at the time, there was still a lot of discussion of Keynesianism vs. Monetarism. I found all that to be very interesting, and I sided with Friedman for a lot of it. But to try to be fair, I also read a lot of Keynes's work. This I did on my own on a number of evenings in the library--especially when working on my senior honors thesis. It was worth it.
While my graduate school years were filled with rational expectations and dynamic programming, I never forgot those early days of hanging out in the library clandestinely reading those Friedman articles that we were never assigned in class. I even managed to eke out some time for those readings in grad school. Some of them were even assigned readings.
On this day dedicated to remembering Milton Friedman, I would like to encourage today's students to take a little time to browse the library for the works of the masters--Friedman in particular. You don't have to become a scholar of the history of thought, but you should be familiar with some of the ideas that changed the discipline. You might even get hooked on some of those ideas. I firmly believe that students should find something in their discipline that inspires them, and many people would tell you that Milton Friedman's work is fertile ground for those ideas.
Posted by William Polley at January 29, 2007 01:05 AM
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Comments
I too "found Friedman's popular articles extremely compelling and fun to read" when in graduate school. "Capitalism and Freedom was an early favorite of mine" too.
But eventually I came more to admire the works of those dabbling in "asymmetric information", "non-cooperative and cooperative game theory", institutionalist framing", "complexity theory", and "post-Keynesian thought" (I'm particularly fascinated with Minsky these days).
I find that too many people believe too literally in the "free to choose" line, forgetting that we are constantly plagued with both goverment failure AND market failure. The best we can do, I suspect, is to find ways to live with constantly changing institutions in both government and non-government arenas. In order to find such we must better understand both the institutions and the change mechanisms.
Posted by: Dave Iverson at January 30, 2007 09:25 AM