Milton Friedman Dies

heh, yeah heard about that this morning. Was gonna post a thread the other day about the other friedman... thomas or something. Someone mentioned him in a thread the other day and i read a book he wrote a few weeks back. (also about economics)
 
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the guy who wrote that book on capitalism.

edit: weird, I just did a debate in my Intellectual Heritage course today on Friedman/capitalism Vs Marx/communism... I was going with capitalism and needless to say, I fucking owned it ridiculously.
 
The guy was the most dominant economist of the last 50 years. He basically invented whats called the monetarist school (basically what the Fed does since the 80s).

Typically right leaning, laissez faire style capitalist government with a strong fed controlling money supply. More or less reversed the keynsian dominance in economic thought (nowdays most economist are monetarists).
 
Livingdeath said:
The guy was the most dominant economist of the last 50 years. He basically invented whats called the monetarist school (basically what the Fed does since the 80s).

Typically right leaning, laissez faire style capitalist government with a strong fed controlling money supply. More or less reversed the keynsian dominance in economic thought (nowdays most economist are monetarists).
Click to expand...

I don't know if most economists are monetarists, but it is true that there is a huge influence from the Chicago School in much of today's world.

It's also true that if you put 100 economists in the room, you'll get 100 different opinions about the state and direction of the economy, what steps should/should not be taken to maintain/adjust the eocnomy, or whether we can do anything to affect it significantly one way or the other.


On the other side, you have econometrics, basically the discipline devoted to statistical analysis (or statistical distortion as I view it). These are the people like Stephen D. Levitt (Freakonomics) who try/do find a correlation between potentially the most minute of detail.

Yes, technically Levitt is also at the Chicago School, but he didn't come on until after he already got his PHD (undergrad from Harvard and doctoral from MIT).

edit: I'm also fairly sure that the last thing Friedman wanted was a strong Federal Reserve, in fact he often criticized it and wanted it abolished entirely and replaced with a computer.
 
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Besides, since they started this theory of Rational Expectations, everything in econ is bullshit anyways.
 
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