Getting to Know Milton Friedman

One of the frustrations of describing Milton Friedman's work to a noneconomist is that you usually have about four sentences to provide the overview, and maybe can speak a second paragraph if your listener is especially forbearing. It's not enough. But the Fraser Institute has now published The Essential Milton Friedman, by Steven E. Landsburg (2019). It's a free e-book, 73 pages long, that offers an intro-level, highly readable nonspecialist overview of many of Friedman's most prominent ideas, by an author who knows this subject in much greater depth but is just hitting the high spots  The website also includes some short videos and links to other resources. Taken as a whole, the materials seem to me aimed at teachers who want to bring these ideas to their students, as well as those who would just like to learn more themselves.

The topics any economist would expect are covered here: monetary policy, the permanent income hypothesis, the foundations of inflation and unemployment, and also Friedman's arguments in Newsweek columns and best-selling books for the abolition of the military draft, private K-12 schools (with government support for their finance), floating exchange rates, a reduction in occupational licensing, and in support of free markets. Here, I'll mention some other aspects of Friedman that caught my eye: his role in shaping how economists argue and communicate.

For a number of years, Friedman taught a "price theory" course to the first-year PhD students at the University of Chicago. Here's the story as told by Landsberg:

In the 1950s, Friedman’s counterpart at MIT was the enormously influential future Nobelist Paul Samuelson, who also taught microeconomics. Here are a few sample questions pulled almost at random from Samuelson’s final exams and problem sets:

• Write a 45-minute essay explaining what Hicks does in Books I and II of Value and Capital, relating the parts to each other.

• In 45 minutes, state the fundamental problems of bilateral monopoly, duopoly and/or game theory. What solutions have been advanced? Appraise them.

• In 45 minutes, discuss the principal theories relative to capital and interest. Appraise.

At around the same time, Friedman at Chicago was posing exam questions like these:

• Will a specific tax of, say, $1 per cup of coffee raise the price of coffee by more or less than an equivalent tax equal to a specified percentage of the price?

• True or false: Technological improvements in the production of rayon, nylon, and other synthetic fabrics have tended to raise the price of meat.

• If soybean farmers receive a subsidy of a fixed number of dollars per acre, will the yield per acre rise or fall?

• It’s been alleged that the Kodak company’s highly profitable film business allows it to undercut its competitors’ prices in the market for cameras. Under what circumstances would it make sense for Kodak to behave in this way?

Again, these questions were asked of first-year PhD students in economics, but the first set of questions were from MIT and the second set were at Chicago. The MIT questions were explicitly about describing strengths and weaknesses of existing theories. Friedman's Chicago questions were instead asking students to do economic reasoning in real time. For example, an answer to the question about how improvements in synthetic fabrics affect the price of meat would require a student to spell out in step-by-step detail the different ways in which how one might affect the other. Perhaps synthetic fabrics are a substitute for leather, and leather is produced jointly with meat? In addition, perhaps synthetic fabrics are cheaper and thus allow people to spend less on certain items of clothing, which might lead them to spend more on products including other kinds of clothing? Either "true" or "false" can be correct here! The challenge is to spell out a model connecting technological improvements in of one good to price change in another good, and to spell out each of the assumptions that would lead your answer.

This notion of economic discourse as a commitment to spelling out the underlying models,  assumptions, and empirical methods is now taken for granted--but it wasn't always the case.

One vivid example of Friedman's approach in action involved the decision to abolish the military draft and to move to an all-volunteer force. Landsberg tells the story:

In 1966, he [Friedman} participated in a now legendary conference at the University of Chicago, organized by the anthropologist Sol Tax. By all accounts, the shining star of that conference was Friedman’s former student (and my own former colleague) Walter Oi, who estimated the full cost of conscription in brilliant detail. Before Oi’s presentation, a poll of the 74 attendees found two-thirds in favour of the draft; afterwards, a follow-up poll found two-thirds opposed.

Three years later, President Richard Nixon appointed Friedman to a special commission to make recommendations regarding the future of the draft. The 15 members were deliberately chosen to represent a diversity of views: Friedman was one of five who vocally opposed the draft; another five vocally supported it; and the remaining five were declared agnostics. After extensive debates and meetings, Oi and Friedman won over every one of the draft’s supporters and agnostics, and the commission delivered a unanimous report to the president recommending that the draft be abolished.

I remember once hearing Friedman say that when he would speak at colleges and universities in the 1960s, there was often intense opposition to his free-market ideas--until he explained his opposition to the draft, when the audience was then abruptly and strongly on his side.

Friedman put forward his positions with a smile on his face and without using ad hominem attacks, but his rhetoric often had an edge.. Here's a story about the arguments concerning the draft.

The same sharp tongue was in evidence during Congressional testimony about the military draft. Friedman was called to testify along with General William Westmoreland, the top commander of US forces in the Vietnam War. Westmoreland, an opponent of the volunteer army, said that he preferred not to command an army of mercenaries. Friedman immediately responded by asking Westmoreland whether he preferred to command an army of slaves. He went on to observe that if volunteer soldiers are mercenaries, then so is everyone else who is paid to do a job, including Westmoreland, Friedman, and every physician, lawyer and butcher in the country.

Here's a story about his debates with student radicals of the 1960s and 1970s:

When he debated with leaders of the radical Students for a Democratic Society, Friedman always stressed that he and they sought the same things—individual freedom, pluralism, and prosperity for the masses. “Th e only difference between us,” he said with a smile, “is that I know how to achieve those things and you don’t.”

I should add that the Fraser Institute has published two previous introductions to great economic thinkers: The Essential Adam Smith, by James Otteson (2018), and The Essential Hayek, by Donald J. Boudreax (2014). These books (both under 100 pages of not-too-dense text) also provide a real overview of the person and the ideas from a highly informed author, but in the style of a reader-friendly introductory overview.