Economic Principals has followed developments in Russia at a distance since 1989; more closely since 1991, when the Soviet Union dissolved; with active interest since 1996, when Boris Yeltsin was re-elected;  with hopes since 1999, when Vladimir Putin was appointed; with curiosity since 2007, when Putin condemned America’s invasion of Iraq; with shock since 2008, when NATO began to ignore Putin’s clearly expressed “red line;” with alarm since Putin’s annexation of the Crimean peninsula; with sorrow when Putin invaded Ukraine; with no surprise when most Russia citizens rallied to support t ..read more

Last week Economic Principals emailed and posted an unedited version of A Doppelgänger for Keynes? The page was full of typos (since replaced on the Web by the edited version). EP had been distracted earlier in the day and wasn’t paying attention. Two good things emerged from the mix-up. The week before, I had compared both Milton Friedman and John Maynard Keynes to Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde – brilliant economists and dubious cultural entrepreneurs. An old friend wrote to ask whether I might find a better analogue for Keynes. I tried, and last week he wrote to say that he approved of my choice ..read more

Economic Principals has become interested in the difference of opinion between Joh Maynard Keynes and Milton Friedman with respect to their explanations for the causes of the Great Depression, Keynes blamed social aggregates within the economy itself for a sudden fall, Friedman blamed an inept Federal Reserve. History has shown that Friedman was right and Keynes wrong. Last week EP likened both men to Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, a split personality from the famous novel by Robert Louis Stevenson.  The comparison seemed apt for Friedman, insofar as in contrast to the relative precision of his ..read more

From the beginning I have been convinced that Milton Friedman possessed a dual personality, somewhat like Doctor Jekyll and Mister Hyde: a strong economist by day, a weak citizen by night. Nothing I’ve read and written about in the last nine weeks has convinced me otherwise, not even Edward Nelson’s meticulous explication Friedmans’ professional life from 1929 to 1972. Instead, my suspicions have grown with the passage of time that with John Maynard Keynes, it was the other way around. What if Keynes was a weak technical economist, but a strong citizen by night? Turning things on their heads a ..read more

A Monetary History of the United States 1867-1960 (National Bureau of Economic Research,1962) by Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz, is a most intimidating book. A heavy-lifting 860 pages, packed full of tables and charts, some of them old-fashioned fold-outs, as long as three pages off the book itself. It introduces itself as an “analytical narrative” of changes of the stock of money in the  U.S. over slightly less than a century. It begins with a quotation from the great nineteenth century economist Alfred Marshall, a sly swipe at the short equation-filled “papers” that, since the Thirti ..read more

It was a transformative  national debate, on the level of Hamilton and Jefferson, or Lincoln and Douglas: Paul Samuelson, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Milton Friedman, of the University of Chicago, wrote dueling columns for Newsweek magazine from 1965 until May 1984. Then their arrangement ended abruptly, With no public explanation, Samuelson quit. Why? Friedman had become well known as a critic of government spending on basic research.  In Free to Choose, the 1980 book accompanying their highly successful television series, he and his economist wife Rose, had ar ..read more

Milton Friedman was recognized with a Nobel Memorial Prize in 1976, but something more important to economics happened that year, and I don’t mean the bicentennial of the American Revolution. The Glasgow Edition of the Works of Adam Smith appeared that year as well, timed to commemorate the two hundredth anniversary of the publication of An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of The Wealth of Nations. “Modern economics can be said to have begun with the discovery of the market,” began Sir Alexander Cairncross, Chancellor of the University of Glasgow, in his opening address to the convocation th ..read more

John Maynard Keynes and Milton Friedman traveled different paths to become the dominant policy economists of their respective ages. In The Academic Scribblers, in 1971, William Breit and Roger Ransom invoked the motto of the Texas Rangers to explain Friedman’s success: “Little man whip a big man every time if the little man is right and keeps a’comin’.” But there was more to it than that. Both Keynes and Friedman were slow starters and late bloomers. “It was The Economic Consequences of the Peace [in 1919] that established Keynes’ claim to attention”, as biographer Robert Skidelsky wrote at th ..read more

From its beginnings, in 1947, the Mont Pelerin Society sensed a problem, which its members understood better than most.  In the aftermath of World War II, amid the smoldering ruins of Europe, it was impossible not to be repelled by the two familiar examples of government planning, Hitler’s National Socialism and Lenin’s Bolshevik Revolution. But the philosophers, historians, economists, and journalists who formed the market advocacy group Mont Pelerin Society knew the roots of government planning went much deeper than that. In 1727, The King of Prussia established a chair of “Oeconomie, P ..read more

Milton Friedman may have been the face of neoliberalism familiar to most Americans. But the man who, in the 1940s and ‘50s, pioneered the dual role economist and cultural entrepreneur had an office on the floor above the economics department in the Social Science building at the University of Chicago.  Friedrich Hayek may have had as much influence as Friedman in the revival of enthusiasm for markets, a revival that occurred during the second half of the twentieth century, The story is well-told in The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free Markets since the Great Depression (H ..read more