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The world Milton Friedman lived in was very different than the world we have now. Much of what he had to say no longer applies, today. Its analogous to reading
by spicyusername 2y ago
The world Milton Friedman lived in was very different than the world we have now. Much of what he had to say no longer applies, today. Its analogous to reading philosophy from pre-enlightenment or pre-naturalist philosophers. Academically interesting, but totally irrelevant.
Economists like to masquerade as hard-scientists, but once you get past supply and demand and behavioral economics, its just academics making things up that sound good.
The world we live in is globally interconnected with civilization and planet-sized problems. The actors squabbling in today's world are no longer small local groups, focused on community-sized problems, as they mostly were pre-1900. They are impossibly large, country-spanning, corporate entities with huge reach and influence.
Public institutions need to be sized appropriately to solve modern problems and to properly contend with their corporate competitors.
Tiny pre-WWI-sized governments are not going to cut it with post-WWII-sized problems.
- BlandDuck 2y agoInteresting ideas. I respectfully disagree with all of them. Do you have any evidence to back them up, or are you yourself "just [...] making things up that sound good" ?
- bryanlarsen 2y agoPerhaps Friedman's most widely known saying is that "inflation is a monetary phenomenon". In the last 30 years the correlation between money supply expansion and inflation has been low. OTOH the correlation between supply shocks and inflation has been high. A real science would update in the face of contradictory evidence. Some economists have, but most haven't.
- zdragnar 2y agoWe did see massive inflation in subsectors of the broader economy, though, and there were a lot more monetary policy levers moving than just supply expansion.
- spicyusername 2y agoThe outcomes of public policy throughout the 1900s, particularly pre-Reagan and post-FDR. Quite expansionary, but nearly all of the bedrock institutions most people have come to rely on and take for granted materialized in this period. - The GI Bill - Medicare / Medicaid - Social Security - Unemployment Insurance - Regulatory institutions / policies like the SEC, FDIC, OSHA, and the EPA. - The Civil Rights Act None of this stuff just happens by accident, and these kinds of things definitely don't magically fall out of unregulated free-markets. And they DEFINITELY don't fall out of markets where the participants are massive corporate interests. You need institutions whose focus is solely on social / economic wellbeing and who have the power and authority to provide it. There are also plenty of modern academics, making things up themselves, who articulate similar points. - Joseph Stiglitz - Thomas Piketty - Ha-Joon Chang - Mariana Mazzucato - Robert Reich - etc
- ori_b 2y agoMilton Friedman died in 2006. He was two years old when the WWI started.
- spicyusername 2y agoYea, but he was born in 1916 and, like most other humans, the world that he group up in shaped him for the rest of his life. Most of his popular works were published in the early 60's, before many of our modern problems were obvious and the outcome of many of the expansionary policies of that period had time to take root.
- ori_b 2y ago> Most of his popular works were published in the early 60's A significant portion of his writing postdates 1995. Very little predates 1965.
- dghlsakjg 2y agoSure, but what worldview is his thinking rooted in. I can write about Kant's ideas in 2025, but it doesn't make them new ideas. Did he evolve his views past where he was in the mid-century era? Does thinking from the late 1990s really apply well to the world we live in today?
- tim333 2y ago>The world Milton Friedman lived in was very different than the world we have now. How so in any meaningful way? I was alive when he was popular and things don't seem very different on the economics front.