Milton Friedman R.I.P.

Update:

For all of our coverage of the passing of Milton Friedman, and all the links you could ever want, go to our Milton Friedman Memorial page.

The long struggle for true human freedom lost its most influential and humane intellectual voice today. The great Milton Friedman has passed from this life.

When I was just awakening politically I remember sitting in my fathers room watching the landmark television series “Free To Choose” based on his best selling book and getting my first real introduction to the ideas and ideals behind what is now called libertarianism. Later it was the centerpiece (at least for me) of my high school course on Free Enterprise. I had read “Free to Choose” and “Capitalism and Freedom” before I ever left high school and have remained committed to the great passion of his later years, allowing every child and parent the chance to attend the educational institution of their choice. I am sure it is hard for many to understand the emotional impact this sad event has on me. All I can say, is that whatever your ideological background, understanding Milton Friedman is a necessity to grappling with the world. His arguments are what need to be faced or embraced.

I, and anyone of my co-conspirators here who wish to, will be updating this obituary throughout the day. Please send any links or stories you think would be appropriate to gather together and remember him with to us.

Laissez Faire Books has a fine tribute here with a link to a 1992 piece at the end which analyzes Milton and Rose’s success. I especially like point number 8:

8. Be nice.
The most basic lesson of salesmanship is that customers buy from those whom they like. Your ideas might be correct, and your research might be solid, but if you come across as a disagreeable sourpuss, an audience will probably favor your nicer opponent. A major asset of the Friedmans is that they are such nice, decent, outgoing people who don’t engage in factional fighting or personal attacks. As Milton says engagingly of his opponents: “I object not to the softness of their hearts but the softness of their heads.”
Too few in the political and ideological struggles of today have taken that lesson to heart.

From the Financial Times:

Milton Friedman, who has died aged 94, was the last of the great economists to combine possession of a household name with the highest professional credentials. In this respect he was often compared to John Maynard Keynes, whose work he always respected, even though he to some extent supplanted it.

Moreover, in contrast to many leading economists, Friedman maintained a continuity between his Nobel-Prize winning academic contributions and his current journalism. The columns he contributed to Newsweek every third week between 1966 and 1984 were a model of how to use economic analysis to illuminate events.

Both his admirers and his detractors have pointed out that his world view was essentially simple: a passionate belief in personal freedom combined with a conviction that free markets were the best way of co-ordinating the activities of dispersed individuals to their mutual enrichment. Where he shone was in his ability to derive interesting and unexpected consequences from simple ideas. As I knew from my postbag, part of his appeal lay in his willingness to come out with home truths which had occurred to many other people who had not dared to utter them. Friedman would then go on, however, to defend these maxims against the massed forces of economic correctness; and in the course of those defences he, almost unintentionally, added to knowledge.

Those who wanted to write him off as a right-wing Republican were disabused by the variety of radical causes he championed. I was not impressed in my own student years by the claims to a belief in personal freedom of the pro-market British economists whom I first encountered. It was not until I came across Friedman, and learned that he had spent more time in lobbying against the US “draft” than on any other policy issue, that I began to take seriously the wider philosophic protestations of the pro-market economists.

Friedman’s iconoclasm endured. He regarded the anti-drugs laws as virtually a government subsidy for organised crime. Even in the financial sphere, he espoused causes such as indexed contracts and taxes as a way of mitigating the harm done by inflation which did not endear him to natural conservatives.

But there was no self-conscious balancing of the political ticket in these positions. He adopted them by following the argument wherever it led. Unlike his fellow exponent of free market capitalism, Friedrich Hayek, he had no great patience for hidden truths that might be embedded in inherited attitudes, rules and prejudices.

There was indeed nothing of the Herr Professor about Friedman. A small voluble figure, he preferred the spoken to the written word, and he took to television as a duck to water. He came to add a good many subtleties to the book Free to Choose, which he wrote with his wife Rose, which were not in the broadcast version. But there is no systematic treatise except some written-up lecture notes outlining Friedmanite economics or even Friedmanite monetary theory.

Those who were won over by his unexpected charm sometimes underestimated his resolve. He would not give a millimetre where his convictions were at stake. Although an unassuming and essentially democratic personality, he was human enough to be aware of, and enjoy, his reputation in the last decades of his life.

His professed attitude to the political process was that of the critical Public Choice theorists. The latter believe that legislators follow their self-interest in a highly defective political marketplace in which geographical and industrially-concentrated special interest groups gain at the general expense. But Friedman’s ingrained belief in the power of reason and persuasion always got the better of any such theoretical misgivings. Although he occasionally professed gloom about the future of freedom, such forebodings were best left to the central Europeans whom he met at the Mont Pelerin Society. Friedman himself was an optimistic American to his fingertips.

Read the whole thing.

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