It seems that many people misunderstood my post on Milton Friedman. It was not intended as Friedman-bashing, as a claim that MF was a bad economist; in fact, I’m on record declaring Friedman a “great economists’ economist”. His work aimed primarily at a professional audience — the permanent income theory of consumption, the case for flexible exchange rates, the natural rate (even if it does break down at low inflation), the optimum quantity of money — was often, maybe even usually, brilliant, and will live on.
What isn’t living on, however, is Friedman’s role as a guiding light for conservative economic policy.
Think about Paul Ryan, who is, like it or not, the leading economic intellectual of the modern GOP. Ryan sometimes drops Friedman’s name — but when he does, it’s to cite Capitalism and Freedom, not A Monetary History of the United States. When it comes to monetary policy, Ryan has said that his views are based on fictional characters in Atlas Shrugged. No, really.
Or think about the economics rap video of Keynes versus Hayek everyone had fun with. Never mind that back in the 30s nobody except Hayek would have considered his views a serious rival to those of Keynes; the real shock should be, what happened to Friedman?
Partly this disappearance reflects real problems with Friedman’s analysis. His views on the omnipotence of monetary policy,let alone the adequacy of a simple quantity-of-money rule, haven’t withstood the test of time. As far as stabilization policy is concerned, he was indeed, as Brad DeLong archly puts it, a minor post-Hicksian.
But the bigger issue, I’d argue, is that modern conservatives can’t accept the things Friedman was right about. Take, in particular, his essay on flexible exchange rates, in which he argued that a country that finds its wages and prices out of line should devalue its currency rather than rely on unemployment to push wages down, “until the deflation has run its sorry course.” Contrast this with Ryan’s declaration that “There is nothing more insidious that a country can do to its citizens than debase its currency.”
The point is that Friedman was, when all is said and done, a pragmatist; he leaned right ideologically, but was willing to make room for awkward realities. And these days reality has a well-known liberal bias. Hence, Friedman has become an unperson.