More on Milton Friedman

An update for one of my previous posts. In the last days many have written on Milton Friedman. I chose below a selection of pieces written by well-known economists and not just any of them, but indeed some of my favourites:

• Gary Becker's more personal note, very moving and very well written. See a fragment:

When I spoke on the phone with him last Monday, he sounded strong and a bit optimistic about his health, even though he had just returned from a one-week hospital stay with a severe illness, an illness that a few days later took his life. Although his ideas live on stronger than ever, it is hard to believe that he is not here. I can no longer seek his opinions on my papers, but I will continue to ask myself about any ideas I have: would my teacher and dear friend Milton Friedman believe they are any good?

• Bernard Salanié's excellent piece on L'économie sans tabou. An extract here:

Comme toujours, il serait très excessif de donner trop de poids aux écrits d'un homme. On rappelle toujours cette fameuse citation de Keynes, tellement éculée que je vais vous l'épargner. Pour beaucoup d'Américains, (dont Hillary Clinton, à l'époque !) c'est la campagne présidentielle de Barry Goldwater en 1964 qui signe le point de départ d'un mouvement de masse. Mais Friedman avait déjà écrit Capitalism and Freedom (en 1962), qui est en quelque sorte le manifeste économique de cette école de pensée---sûrement plus que les écrits de Hayek, plus arides et moins diffusés (en tout cas moins lus), mais beaucoup plus profonds à mon sens. Ce livre, comme plus tard Free to Choose (1980--mais le combat était déjà gagné), a eu une influence considérable. Seul Galbraith avait un impact comparable sur ses lecteurs ; mais Galbraith était un poids léger dans le milieu des économistes, et son arrogance comme son manque de sens des réalités lui ont barré le chemin de l'influence politique (au-delà de quelques postes symboliques)---sans parler du fait que ses livres paraissent aujourd'hui très datés. Friedman, lui, était un debater hors normes, et un vulgarisateur génial.

• Richard Posner's good attempt to remain objective and critical, where possible. A fragment:

...I find slightly off-putting what I sensed to be a dogmatic streak in Milton Friedman. I think his belief in the superior efficiency of free markets to government as a means of resource allocation, though fruitful and largely correct, was embraced by him as an article of faith and not merely as a hypothesis. I think he considered it almost a personal affront that the Scandinavian nations, particularly Sweden, could achieve and maintain very high levels of economic output despite very high rates of taxation, an enormous public sector, and extensive wealth redistribution resulting in much greater economic equality than in the United States. I don't think his analytic apparatus could explain such an anomaly.

• And again the very active Greg Mankiw pointing out more great recent editorials on Friedman. I single out two. The first is the tribute to Friedman by Thomas Sowell A fragment below:

As one of those privileged to have studied under Friedman, I felt a special loss at his death but also a sense of good fortune to have learned from him, not only when I was at the University of Chicago but also in the years and decades since then. He was a tough, no-nonsense teacher in the classroom but a kind and generous human being outside.
Students were not allowed to walk into his classroom after his lecture had begun, distracting others. Once, I arrived at the door just minutes after Friedman began speaking and had to turn around and go back to the dormitory, wondering all the while whether what he taught that day would be on the next exam. After that, I was always in my seat when Friedman entered the classroom. He was also a tough grader. On one exam, there were only two B’s in the whole class--and no A’s.

• The second is the op-ed piece written with great style by Larry Summers in The New York Times. An excerpt below:

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.

Finally (see also the link from the title), a sampler of views of Milton Friedman, from the Wall Street Journal, also indicated on Greg Mankiw's blog.