Milton Friedman: Perspectives, Particularly on Monetary Policy

When my son Jason was an economics Ph.D. student at Harvard in the 1990s, he said: “I have observed that only two economists can push you around, Milton Friedman and Gary Becker.” I agreed but argued that it was a good thing. Everyone needed heroes, and Gary had only Milton. Milton had no one, except Ronald Reagan in the 1980s, but Reagan did not really qualify as an economist. Arthur Burns may once have been the economist hero—as an instructor at Rutgers, he apparently helped to persuade the undergraduate Milton not to be an actuary. However, Burns’s exalted status ended in 1971 when he went over to the dark side by endorsing Richard Nixon’s outrageous price controls. Milton told me that Frank Knight was also his “god,” presumably between 1932 and 1935 when Milton was a graduate student at the University of Chicago and after 1946, when Milton joined the Chicago faculty. Longtime friend George Stigler told the story of how Milton got his faculty appointment at Chicago. The two were together in 1945–46 on the faculty of the University of Minnesota. Stigler says: