Milton Friedman: Did he really have an impact over the long term?

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.

One of the more downbeat assessments of Milton Friedman’s legacy comes from the Guardian. Richard Adams suggests that Milton left little impact upon public policy:

Milton Friedman, who has died aged 94, was not the most important economist of the post-war era – that title belongs to the brilliant Paul Samuelson- but he was certainly the most controversial. Yet despite his views being championed by so many politicians on the right, it may come as a surprise that Friedman’s career as a policymaker largely ended in failure.

Given his status as a long-standing hate figure, the assumption by many of the left is that his agenda was cemented into place during the Reagan and Thatcher administrations in the early 1980s, especially Friedman’s well-known view that inflation is solely influenced by changes in the money supply. But very few of Friedman’s most cherished proposals were ever put in to practice. Of those that where – such as monetarism- almost all turned into failure.

The great irony for Friedman’s fans is that the one piece of public policy he was responsible for that was widely and internationally adopted was one that greatly increased the ability of central governments to collect taxes – a policy he later repudiated in disgust.

Obituaries of Friedman will doubtlessly sing of his successes. But close examination will show them to be few, and none unalloyed. For all his high public profile – thanks to his regular column in Newsweek and series on US television, Free To Choose, which made him into something of a star – today no mainstream academic economist is a monetarist and Friedman left no lasting school of academic heirs. Even the “Chicago school” at the University of Chicago has waned in influence, eclipsed by the mighty MIT army of economists that followed Samuelson.

Read the whole thing.

Given all the comments we have gathered here and here I am interested in the thoughts of our readers as to the impact of Friedman. Feel free to discuss at length.

powered by performancing firefox