Paul Krugman on Milton Friedman
Mark Thoma directs us to the New York Review of Books, where Paul Krugman sums up his view of Milton Friedman:
Who Was Milton Friedman? - The New York Review of Books: Friedman's laissez-faire absolutism contributed to an intellectual climate in which faith in markets and disdain for government often trumps the evidence. Developing countries rushed to open up their capital markets, despite warnings that this might expose them to financial crises.... Electricity deregulation proceeded despite clear warnings that monopoly power might be a problem.... Conservatives continue to insist that the free market is the answer to the health care crisis, in the teeth of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
What's odd about Friedman's absolutism on the virtues of markets and the vices of government is that in his work as an economist's economist he was actually a model of restraint. As I pointed out earlier, he made great contributions to economic theory by emphasizing the role of individual rationality—-but unlike some of his colleagues, he knew where to stop. Why didn't he exhibit the same restraint in his role as a public intellectual?
The answer, I suspect, is that he got caught up in an essentially political role. Milton Friedman the great economist could and did acknowledge ambiguity. But Milton Friedman the great champion of free markets was expected to preach the true faith, not give voice to doubts. And he ended up playing the role his followers expected. As a result, over time the refreshing iconoclasm of his early career hardened into a rigid defense of what had become the new orthodoxy.
In the long run, great men are remembered for their strengths, not their weaknesses, and Milton Friedman was a very great man indeed—-a man of intellectual courage who was one of the most important economic thinkers of all time, and possibly the most brilliant communicator of economic ideas to the general public that ever lived. But there's a good case for arguing that Friedmanism, in the end, went too far, both as a doctrine and in its practical applications. When Friedman was beginning his career as a public intellectual, the times were ripe for a counterreformation against Keynesianism and all that went with it. But what the world needs now, I'd argue, is a counter-counterreformation.
And Krugman counters criticisms by Schwartz and Nelson:
'WHO WAS MILTON FRIEDMAN?' - The New York Review of Books: I'm sorry that Anna Schwartz, one of the world's greatest monetary scholars, is so upset at what I wrote. Rather than getting into a point-by-point argument, let me address three issues.
First, the letter from Anna Schwartz and Edward Nelson actually illustrates Friedman's slippery treatment of the Fed's role in the Depression even better than the examples I used in the article. On one side the letter says, as Friedman did, that the problem was that the Fed did too little—-that it failed to exercise its power to rescue the banks. But on the other side the letter approvingly quotes Friedman saying that the Fed did too much—-that in the absence of the Fed, with its "enormous power," we wouldn't have had a downturn on "anything like the scale we experienced." I'm sorry, but those are contradictory positions. If there's doubletalk here, it's not on my part.
Second, do I believe that monetary policy was helpless in the 1930s? Yes, I do. At the beginning of the Depression, expansionary monetary policy might have averted the worst. But after the banking crisis had run its course, and interest rates were almost zero, what could open-market operations have accomplished? They would simply have pushed cash into idle hoards, as happened in Japan in the late 1990s.
And given Japanese experience, I'm truly puzzled by the assertion that the liquidity trap—-a situation in which interest rates are so low that there's no incentive to lend, so that increasing the money supply doesn't do anything to stimulate the economy—-has no empirical basis: here we had a modern central bank, which knows all about what modern theory says you should do to fight a slump, and did in fact conduct large open-market operations under the rubric of "quantitative easing" And despite all that, the Bank of Japan still found itself impotent.
Finally, about monetarism: I don't think anything I said implies that "monetary policy today has returned to the pre-Friedman status quo." But to say that central banks now take responsibility for inflation is a long way from saying that monetarism has succeeded. And it is, by the way, very strange to imply that only monetarists thought that Nixon's wage and price controls were a mistake.
The point is that monetarism doesn't mean supporting responsible monetary policy; by that criterion everyone is a monetarist, and almost everyone always was. Nor does it mean accepting the fact that monetary policy matters. If monetarism means anything at all, it means believing that a stable money growth rate is the key to a stable economy. And it isn't.
