Milton Friedman dies at 94

[Guy Berger]

This might have to move into politics eventually.

Not surprisingly (and perhaps unfortunately), they emphasize his politics over his scholarly contributions to economics.

Not many of the giants of economics left -- Paul Samuelson, Robert Solow, Ken Arrow, maybe a few others.

link

SAN FRANCISCO - Milton Friedman, the Nobel Prize-winning economist who advocated an unfettered free market and had the ear of Presidents Nixon, Ford and Reagan, died Thursday. He was 94.

Friedman died in San Francisco, said Robert Fanger, a spokesman for the Milton and Rose D. Friedman Foundation in Indianapolis. He did not know the cause of death.

In more than a dozen books and in his column in Newsweek magazine, Friedman championed individual freedom in economics and politics.

His theory of monetarism, adopted in part by the Nixon, Ford and Reagan administrations, opposed the traditional Keynesian economics that had dominated U.S. policy since the New Deal. He was a member of Reagan's Economic Policy Advisory Board.

His theories won him a Nobel Prize in economics in 1976.

Edited November 16, 2006 by Guy

[Guy Berger]

Here is an article from wikipedia about his scholarly contributions.

My summary:

1) The effectiveness of monetary policy: Friedman thought that monetary policy (policy controlling the money supply, as set by the Federal Reserve) was more effective than fiscal policy (government spending and taxation) at affecting the state of the economy. He also argued that bad policy execution by the Federal Reserve turned a minor recession into the Great Depression.

2) The permanent income hypothesis: Friedman argued that consumption/expenditure of a household/individual should not be affected by changes in temporary/current income but rather by expectations of permanent income. (For example, let's say your income varies from year to year; you will smooth consumption out, so that your expenditures depend only on your long-term income -- not on your year-to-year variations.)

3) The short-term nature of the Phillips Curve: many macroeconomists in the 60s believed there was a permanent tradeoff between growth/unemployment and inflation (the Phillips Curve). In other words, as long as policymakers were willing to tolerate higher inflation, they could use policy to permanently reduce unemployment and increase economic growth. Friedman pointed out that agents in the economy would eventually adopt expectations of higher inflation into their decision-making processes and this relationship would break down. In other words, you would need ever-higher inflation in order to reduce unemployment.

4) Inflation as a monetary phenomenon: in the short run, growth of the money supply can increase economic growth. In the long run, however, that growth translates into higher inflation and no change in economic growth.

Guy

Edited November 16, 2006 by Guy

[GA Russell]

Thanks for that summary, Guy. I guess in a nutshell Friedman could be described as an anti-inflationist, bucking the trend of Keynes and his followers.

[Guy Berger]

Thanks for that summary, Guy. I guess in a nutshell Friedman could be described as an anti-inflationist, bucking the trend of Keynes and his followers.

I'd like to draw a line separating Friedman's scholarly contributions from his personal beliefs. The Keynesians weren't "pro-inflation" -- their research merely argued that you could achieve lower unemployment / higher economic growth as long as you were willing to tolerate a higher level of inflation. Friedman pointed out that this was factually untrue. It wasn't a personal judgment on the merits of inflation.

Guy

[7/4]

He grew up here in my little town:

Milton Friedman was born in Brooklyn on July 31, 1912, the last of four children and only son of Jeno S. Friedman and Sarah Landau Friedman. His parents worked briefly in New York sweatshops, then moved their family to Rahway, N.J., where they opened a clothing store.

Mr. Friedman’s father died in his son’s senior year at Rahway High School. Young Milton later waited on tables and clerked in stores to supplement a scholarship he had earned at Rutgers University.

[The Magnificent Goldberg]

Not many of the giants of economics left -- Paul Samuelson, Robert Solow, Ken Arrow, maybe a few others.

Galbraith is still around at about 100, and still writing beautiful, truculent, prose.

MG

[The Magnificent Goldberg]

Friedman wasn't entirely wrong; but he wasn't entirely right, either. Nor was Keynes.

You need to consider the money supply. But you also need to make adjustments to your fiscal policy, too. Doing either without thought to the other is a recipe for some kind of problem. Particularly if you do it for an extended period; if a bit is good, more must be better is the view of fools or those who have a particular financial interest in a specific problem - who expect, therefore, to profit from it.

Friedman fell into the single recipe trap, which Keynes never did; he was always very aware of the need to control money supply in the medium term. (See, "The economic consequences of the peace", in which he foresaw what would happen to Germany under the pressure of reparations.) But he was working against a background in which Britain, as a result of Churchill's failure to understand even the most basic of economic principles, had returned to the gold standard. So the most urgent need, at the time he was writing, was for the Government to borrow and spend (and get off the gold standard).

MG

[Quincy]

Not many of the giants of economics left -- Paul Samuelson, Robert Solow, Ken Arrow, maybe a few others.

Galbraith is still around at about 100, and still writing beautiful, truculent, prose.

MG

Sorry to break the news, but John Kenneth Galbraith died last April 29. I was once just a dozen feet away from him but being about 9 years old I didn't know what an economist was.

[Guy Berger]

Friedman fell into the single recipe trap, which Keynes never did; he was always very aware of the need to control money supply in the medium term. (See, "The economic consequences of the peace", in which he foresaw what would happen to Germany under the pressure of reparations.)

I haven't read Keynes. Can you summarize his argument? I'm guessing that he argued that the pressure of reparations would cause Germany to print money and reach hyperinflation.

Guy

Edited November 18, 2006 by Guy

[The Magnificent Goldberg]

Friedman fell into the single recipe trap, which Keynes never did; he was always very aware of the need to control money supply in the medium term. (See, "The economic consequences of the peace", in which he foresaw what would happen to Germany under the pressure of reparations.)

I haven't read Keynes. Can you summarize his argument? I'm guessing that he argued that the pressure of reparations would cause Germany to print money and reach hyperinflation.

Guy

That's about it. Galbraith did a good summary of MK's and MF's positions in "Money: whence it came and where it went" - a very easy read.

MG

[The Magnificent Goldberg]

Not many of the giants of economics left -- Paul Samuelson, Robert Solow, Ken Arrow, maybe a few others.

Galbraith is still around at about 100, and still writing beautiful, truculent, prose.

MG

Sorry to break the news, but John Kenneth Galbraith died last April 29. I was once just a dozen feet away from him but being about 9 years old I didn't know what an economist was.

Missed that. Thanks Q.

This must have been about the last thing he wrote.

Withdrawal Symptoms

Quitting Iraq won't undo the real damage of the war.

James K. Galbraith

March/April 2006 Issue

IN NOVEMBER 2004, Lt. General Ricardo Sanchez came to a luncheon at my professional home, the LBJ School of Public Affairs. I attended and asked some inconvenient questions. It was an inconsequential exchange, but two weeks later I received a surprising invitation: Would I fly to Germany in February and speak to the leadership of the Army V Corps about the operational conditions of Iraq? I have no military experience, and have never been to Iraq, while many in my audience—mostly generals and colonels—had spent over a year there. But of course I went. My unstated assignment was to say some inconvenient things, which may have otherwise gone unsaid.

Inconvenience has since gone public, big time. Back in November, Rep. John Murtha (D-Pa.) gave a breakthrough speech, describing the troops as “stretched thin”: “Recruitment is down, even as our military has lowered its standards. Defense budgets are being cut. Personnel costs are skyrocketing.… Choices will have to be made.” At the same time, Murtha added, success in Iraq is very remote. “Oil production and energy production are below pre-war levels. Our reconstruction efforts have been crippled by the security situation. Only $9 billion of the $18 billion appropriated for reconstruction has been spent. Unemployment remains at about 60 percent. Clean water is scarce.… And most importantly, insurgent incidents have increased from about 150 per week to over 700 in the last year.… Since the revelations at Abu Ghraib, American casualties have doubled.”

For this, Cheney blasted him, but then it emerged that Murtha’s crime was tipping the administration’s own hand. It appears we are beginning a long, slow, painful retreat from Iraq.

But are we drawing the full and correct lessons from this disaster? Some former liberal hawks now take refuge in what Sam Rosenfeld and Matthew Yglesias call “the incompetence dodge”: that things would have turned out okay if only the neocon cabal were not in charge. Such libhawks would withdraw U.S. forces only to use them again, in another (but, of course, more justified and better planned) war. And that would mean a bigger war, with a bigger force on the ground, and a much bigger budget to support it.

But the reality is that the Iraq war could not be won by a force of any size or by an expenditure of any amount. Against determined opposition, occupations in the modern world cannot prevail. They haven’t for more than 60 years. The reason is that the basic economics of warfare have changed. Here are six reasons I gave to the officers in Germany—a pure exercise in stating what they already knew.

Sixty years ago the then-colonial world was mostly rural; today it consists of enormous cities. These urban jungles of concrete provide vast advantages—concealment, fortification, communication, intelligence—to the defender. In cities, troops on patrol are isolated and exposed; their location is always known, while that of the enemy is not. More patrols mean more targets. The superior firepower of the occupiers just means that a lot more innocent people get hurt.

So does the “crude” weaponry of insurgents. Car bombs, booby traps, and suicide belts are cheap and effective. Detonated by radio or wire from within a nearby building, roadside bombs equalize the insurgent and the invader. Detonated by fanatics, suicide bombs are extremely difficult to stop. Shaped explosives, which have started to appear in Iraq, are able to burn right through armor plate. To prevent these attacks means emphasizing force protection; this gets in the way of everything else.

The violence in Iraq is horrific, but it’s the media that makes it intolerable. Indeed, the violence is horrific only by modern standards. To truly cow a colonial population (as in British India in 1857, or on the American plains in the late 19th century) requires mass murder on a far larger scale. The presence of the media makes this most inconvenient. As we demonstrated at Fallujah, the sure way to subdue a hostile city is to destroy it. But that’s no way to win a political war back home—or hearts and minds in Iraq.

Jet travel is a military mixed blessing. Today’s army works on rotations; soldiers are deployed for about a year and then (in principle at least) they come home. When that happens, local liaisons and intelligence relationships must be rebuilt. On the other hand, if soldiers are denied the right to rotate home, their morale is going to suffer far more than in the old days when there was no such expectation. Email and blogs make sure that morale problems get home fast when the soldiers do not.

As if that were not enough, war today cannot escape the free market. When we invaded Iraq, the borders collapsed and import restrictions were eliminated. Imports surged, notably of electrical appliances like air conditioners and refrigerators. By the time the electricity supply was rebuilt, demand had skyrocketed, and the power could run for only a few hours a day. Without control over electrical demand, the reconstruction effort was crippled, and the Americans couldn’t win the Iraqi people’s respect and support. They were expecting miracles, after all, and they didn’t get them.

Finally, there has been a fundamental change of expectations: call it the presumption of independence. The British may have believed that their empire would always be the “dread and envy of them all,” but today no one believes the American presence in Iraq can endure over the long term. So unless you are in a safe zone (like Kurdistan) or part of an exiled elite with a posh flat in London, it does not pay to cuddle up to the occupying power. The retribution could be most unpleasant.

These are now the fundamental facts of wars of occupation. They tell us that foreign military power cannot long prevail over the territory of a people—in this case, the Sunnis of central Iraq—who are prepared to resist it to the death. This does not necessarily mean that the new Iraq will collapse when we leave. But if we cannot defeat the insurgency, then the insurgents will have to be accommodated, somehow, politically. Or else we leave the country to fight it out even more brutally in our absence.

We should have known we’d face this situation. In tiny East Timor, a ragtag band of resisters harried the Indonesian army for more than 25 years; that band (splendid people, by the way) now runs the world’s newest independent state. In Afghanistan, U.S.-assisted guerrillas drove out the Red army; their successors now make most of the country ungovernable. In Chechnya, the country has been destroyed but the rebellion hasn’t been subdued. And then there was Vietnam.

During the Cold War, we ringed the world with bases—but always in alliance with existing governments that were legitimate, at least up to a point. One may disapprove of the regimes we supported, but this model for the projection of military power works. It is called “containment.” It works as long as the host regimes remain viable and as long as the military power it projects isn’t tested in actual combat. When these conditions failed—in Iran, in the Philippines, in Vietnam—so did the strategy.

The successful use of military power—as Mao Zedong understood when he called America a “paper tiger”—entails a large element of bluff. Vietnam deflated the image that American power could never be challenged. To some extent, the Gulf War of 1991 restored that image, but the restoration was achieved by the limited aims and quick termination of that war. The Clinton successes in the Balkans came in part because all sides bought this lesson of the Gulf War. (With Serbia, the bluff came close to being called again; the Kosovo bombing campaign took 80 days and Russian diplomacy rescued us in the end.)

But now Iraq has once again exposed what military power cannot achieve, short of nuclear weapons. Iran and North Korea have taken notice. Meanwhile, our friends, the Europeans and the Japanese, must be asking themselves: Exactly what sort of security does the American alliance buy, and at what price?

Bush and Cheney have done more than merely bungle a war and damage the Army. They have destroyed the foundation of the post-Cold War world security system, which was the accepted authority of American military power. That reputation is now gone. It cannot be restored simply by retreating from Iraq. This does not mean that every ongoing alliance will now collapse. But they are all more vulnerable than they were before, and once we leave central Iraq, they will be weaker still. As these paper tigers start to blow in the wind, so too will America’s economic security erode.

From this point of view, the fuss over whether we were misled into war—Is the sky blue? Is the grass green?—stands in the way of a deeper debate that should start quite soon and ask this question: Now that Bush and Cheney have screwed up the only successful known model for world security under our leadership, what the devil do we do?

James K. Galbraith teaches economics at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas-Austin. He previously served in several positions on the staff of the U.S. Congress, including executive director of the Joint Economic Committee.

. . . . . . .

MG

[Guy Berger]

That's not John Galbraith -- it's his son, James Galbraith.

[The Magnificent Goldberg]

That's not John Galbraith -- it's his son, James Galbraith.

Jeez - yer right! I'm getting too old for this myself.

MG

[Brownian Motion]

The Great Liberator

By LAWRENCE H. SUMMERS

Published: November 19, 2006

Brookline, Mass.

IF John Maynard Keynes was the most influential economist of the first half of the 20th century, then Milton Friedman was the most influential economist of the second half.

Not so long ago, we were all Keynesians. (“I am a Keynesian,” Richard Nixon famously said in 1971.) Equally, any honest Democrat will admit that we are now all Friedmanites. Mr. Friedman, who died last week at 94, never held elected office but he has had more influence on economic policy as it is practiced around the world today than any other modern figure.

I grew up in a family of progressive economists, and Milton Friedman was a devil figure. But over time, as I studied economics myself and as the world evolved, I came to have grudging respect and then great admiration for him and for his ideas. No contemporary economist anywhere on the political spectrum combined Mr. Friedman’s commitment to clarity of thought and argument, to scientifically examining evidence and to identifying policies that will make societies function better.

Mr. Friedman is perhaps best known for his views on money and monetary policy. Fierce debates continue on how the Federal Reserve and other central banks should set monetary policy. But the debates take place within the context of nearly total agreement on some basics: Monetary policy can shape an economy more than budgetary policy can; extended high inflation will not lead to prosperity and can lead to lower living standards; policy makers cannot fine-tune their economies as they fluctuate.

These insights may seem self-evident — but they were won through a combination of Mr. Friedman’s powerful argument and painful experience. I know. As an undergraduate in the early 1970s, I was taught that everyone other than Milton Friedman and a few other dissidents knew that fiscal policy was of primary importance for stabilizing economies, that the Phillips curve could be exploited to increase employment if only society would tolerate some increase in inflation and that economists would soon be able to tame economic fluctuations through finely calibrated policies. When I started teaching undergraduates a decade later, Mr. Friedman’s heresies had become the orthodoxy.

While much of his academic work was directed at monetary policy, Mr. Friedman’s great popular contribution lay elsewhere: in convincing people of the importance of allowing free markets to operate.

From what I’ve heard, Milton Friedman’s participation on a government commission on the volunteer military in the late 1960s was a kind of intellectual version of the play “Twelve Angry Men.” Gradually, through force of persistent argument and marshaling of evidence, he brought his fellow commission members around to the previously unthinkable view that both our national security and our broader interest would be best served by a volunteer military.

Another example of Mr. Friedman’s influence is the structure of modern financial markets. Today we take it as given that free financial markets shape finance. The dollar fluctuates unhindered against other currencies and there is an entire industry of trading futures and options on interest rates and currencies. At the time Mr. Friedman first proposed flexible exchange rates and open financial markets, it was thought that they would be inherently destabilizing and that governments needed to control the movement of capital across international borders.

There are other areas like vouchers for school choice, drug legalization and the abolition of certification requirements for lawyers, doctors and other professionals where Mr. Friedman has not yet and may never carry the day. But even in these areas, the climate of opinion and the nature of policy have shifted because of his powerful arguments.

This all would be enough to mark Milton Friedman as a great man. But beyond Milton Friedman the economist, there was Milton Friedman the public philosopher. Ask reformers in any one of the countries behind what we used to call the Iron Curtain where they learned to contemplate alternatives to communism during the closed era before the Berlin Wall fell and they will often tell you about reading Milton Friedman and realizing how different their world could be.

Milton Friedman and I probably never voted the same way in any election. To my mind, his thinking gave too little weight to considerations of social justice and was far too cynical about the capacity of collective action to make people better off. I believe that some of the great challenges we face today, like rising inequality and global climate change, require that the free market be tempered instead of venerated. And like any economist, I have my list of areas where I believe Mr. Friedman oversimplified or was simply wrong.

Nonetheless, like many others I feel that I have lost a hero — a man whose success demonstrates that great ideas convincingly advanced can change the lives of people around the world.

Lawrence H. Summers, a university professor of economics at Harvard, was Treasury secretary in the Clinton administration.

[Brownian Motion]

With all the blather being shoveled in behalf of Friedman, it's important to recognize that his extremely rigid ideology of unfettered markets will hinder and then frustrate attempts to deal with world environmental concerns. Summers mentions global warming, but that concern is but the most immediate; there are plenty of other concerns where a free market outcome will reduce the survival odds of the human race, in some cases dramatically.

[Guy Berger]

Very interesting: Posner on Friedman.

Guy

[Chuck Nessa]

Good night Milt.

[Guy Berger]

Good night Milt.

How come Nessa never released a spoken word album by the guy, given his affiliation with Chicago?

Guy

[Brownian Motion]

Click here to return to the browser-optimized version of this page.

This article can be found on the web at

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20061211/greider

Friedman's Cruel Legacy

by WILLIAM GREIDER

[from the December 11, 2006 issue]

Now that the economists and their camp followers have mourned and celebrated the life of Milton Friedman, allow me to kick a little dirt on the icon. Without question, Friedman was the most influential economist of the second half of the twentieth century, as his admirers claim. What they do not say is that he was also the most destructive public intellectual of our time.

Friedman actually failed as a scientific economist but succeeded as a moral philosopher. His greatest scholarly accomplishment--his monetarist theory of how to regulate money and credit--was intellectually flawed at its core and collapsed when the Federal Reserve tried to follow it. The central bank wisely discarded Friedman's money-supply approach before it did more damage. It is now a forgotten relic at the Fed.

Friedman's broader argument--that a society should be governed by self-regulating markets instead of big government--did better but also did not lead to the utopia he promoted. His "free market" faith has produced instead the very thing Friedman regularly denounced: a bastardized system of interest-group politics that serves favored sectors of citizens at the expense of many others. Enterprise and markets were indeed set "free" of government regulation, but big government did not go away (it grew bigger). Only now government acts mainly as patron and protector for the largest, most powerful interests--the same ones that demanded their liberation. Instead of serving the broad general welfare, government enables capital and corporations to feed off the taxpayers' money and convert public assets into private profit centers, shielded from the wrath of any citizens trying to object. If that is what Friedman really had in mind, he should have said so.

His most profound damage, however, was as a moral philosopher. He championed an ethic of unrelenting, unapologetic self-interest that effectively pushed aside human sympathy. In fact, humans' responsibility to one another has been delegitimized--portrayed as an obstacle to the hardheaded analysis that maximizes returns. Friedman explained: "So the question is, do corporate executives, provided they stay within the law, have responsibilities in their business activities other than to make as much money for their stockholders as possible? And my answer to that is, no, they do not."

Pay no attention to the collateral consequences. Your only obligation is to the bottom line. Friedman's message was highly appealing--he promised people a path to freedom--but it triumphed, ultimately, because it served the powerful forces of capital over labor, economic wealth over social concerns. Government was indeed failing on many fronts, especially inflation, and liberalism had no answer. Friedman's answer was alluringly simple. Get rid of government.

People everywhere now understand what Friedman's kind of "freedom" means. America has been brutally coarsened by his success at popularizing this dictum--millions of innocents injured, mutual trust gravely weakened, society demoralized by the hardening terms of life. Most people know in their gut this is wrong but see no easy way to resist it. Friedman's utopia is also drenched in personal corruption. The proliferating scandals in business, finance and government flow directly from his teaching people to go for it and disregard moral qualms. When you tell people in power that their highest purpose in life is to maximize their own returns, there is no limit to how much "good" they will do for the rest of us. I don't recall hearing Friedman express any discomfort. Perhaps he regarded looting and stealing as natural features of capitalism that market forces would eventually correct.

This is what the memorials left out: the cruel quality of Friedman's obliviousness. Art Hilgart, a retired industrial economist, recalls hearing Friedman lecture in 1991 and recommend the destruction of Medicare, welfare, the postal system, Social Security and public education. The audience was dumbfounded.

Finally, a brave young woman asked what this would mean for poverty. "There is no poverty in America," Friedman instructed. A clear voice arose from the back of hall: "Bullshit!" The audience cheered wildly.

[The Magnificent Goldberg]

Oh, that's a GOOD one!

MG

[Guy Berger]

Friedman actually failed as a scientific economist

Huh?

Guy

[The Magnificent Goldberg]

Friedman actually failed as a scientific economist

Huh?

Guy

Well, I think maybe he's relating this to what I saw of Friedman on TV in the early '80s. He was trying to explain, within the limits of an hour's programme, what his view of monetarism was, how it worked and what Governments should do. And in the end his recipe came down to controlling physical money - M1 - notes and coins in circulation.

He may have been doing his ideas a disservice in the programme, of course.

MG

[jlimoges]

This might have to move into politics eventually.

Not surprisingly (and perhaps unfortunately), they emphasize his politics over his scholarly contributions to economics.

Not many of the giants of economics left -- Paul Samuelson, Robert Solow, Ken Arrow, maybe a few others.

link

SAN FRANCISCO - Milton Friedman, the Nobel Prize-winning economist who advocated an unfettered free market and had the ear of Presidents Nixon, Ford and Reagan, died Thursday. He was 94.

In more than a dozen books and in his column in Newsweek magazine, Friedman championed individual freedom in economics and politics.

His theory of monetarism, adopted in part by the Nixon, Ford and Reagan administrations, opposed the traditional Keynesian economics that had dominated U.S. policy since the New Deal. He was a member of Reagan's Economic Policy Advisory Board.

His theories won him a Nobel Prize in economics in 1976.

That's an odd obit to Friedman. The first thing that jumps out is how overtly political Friedman really was. I wonder why the author believes we should ignore his primary function as a political ideologue. The second surprise is the statement about Ford and Nixon who more or less rejected monetarism unlike Reagan.

I remember reading one of his newly released books in the early 80s? after he won the Nobel Prize. One chapter was a scathing report on how labor unions artificially drove up prices and violated free market principles. So what was his supporting example that gave evidence and reasoning for Friedman to draw such conclusions? Why it was the American Medical Association of course. (I know I know, that's laughable, but it's true! And he won a Nobel Prize. Go figure.)

In the 80s and 90s, Friedman was able to witness the failure of his theories as deficits rose to record levels while slashing the wealthy income tax levels some 20%. What did we do to recover some of this loss in revenue that was never supposed to occur according to Friedman. Well, we reinstated a capital gains tax on Wall Street, and payroll taxes on the working man went to an all time high. We spent the greater part of the 90s undoing this fiasco.

We entered a new era of Friedman economics the last 8 years that again brought us into extraordinary deficits and landed the world on the brink of its worst calamity and depression in history. One has to imagine that Friedman will not rest peacefully for some time. His soul will stir with trepidation I am sure. 'Who will saaave his soul?'

Edited November 24, 2008 by jlimoges

[JSngry]

RIP

[jlimoges]

No rest not even from the University of Chicago

However, more than 100 faculty members have signed a petition objecting to the Milton Friedman Institute. The group of dissenting professors calls itself the Committee for Open Research on Economy and Society (CORES). CORES will make its case against the MFI at a faculty senate, a rarely held assembly of the entire faculty to be held this fall.

Yali Amit, a professor in the Departments of Statistics and Computer Science and one of the petition’s signers, cites several broad objections to the proposed institute. The most basic complaint involves the MFI’s name. According to Amit, Friedman, the Nobel laureate and accomplished technical economist, “cannot be disentangled from Milton Friedman, the right-wing ideologue.”

Edited November 24, 2008 by jlimoges