Brad DeLong has an interesting review of a biography of Milton Friedman. He writes:
Part of what made Friedman a worthy adversary for American liberals was that he had a fully formed worldview, one that started with a bedrock commitment to people, to their ability to make judgments for themselves and to decide what they like best. Out of this commitment grew an imperative to maximize individual freedom. On top of that came the judgment that free markets are almost always the silver bullet to solve all of society’s problems, as well as a powerful conviction that the facts, if honestly examined, will always be on his side. And on top of that was layered a fear and suspicion of government as an easily captured tool for the enrichment of the cynical and powerful, who grab what they can.
[…]But, perhaps more seriously, Friedman ducked the big questions regarding the relationship between economic freedom and political liberty, and he was completely incapable of seeing that political liberty is both a negative and a positive liberty: freedom from tyranny and oppression but also the freedom and power to decide on and accomplish our common purposes. These are the master questions of history and moral philosophy, and for all his brilliance and hard work, Friedman is of absolutely no help in answering them. As Posner says, Friedrich Hayek’s Road to Serfdom “flunks the test of accuracy of prediction ” [The] view that socialism of the sort that Britain embraced under the old Labour Party was incompatible with democracy [is] extreme and inaccurate.” Yet Friedman bought into that Hayekian view. And in so doing, he ultimately led his followers, and tried to lead the rest of us, down a false path.
DeLong also mentions that he himself agrees with Friedman’s monetarist explanation (novel at the time) of what caused the Great Depression and that he regards Friedman as a mostly reality-based “first class” intellect.
I can’t help but think that the problem with Friedman’s intellectual legacy (I think it’s fair to say that the Chicago school of economics has been an unmitigated disaster during the last decade, at least) has more to do with the underlying nature of contemporary conservatism than with Friedman himself. Contemporary conservatives, too often, have a mystic belief in certain texts, gurus, and ideas. American exceptionalism, THE CONSTITUTION, Hayek, Friedman, the bible, free markets, magic dolphins…once upon a time the genius George W. Bush.
They’re almost all like this, whether they couch it in terms of religion (Ross Douthat) or even some kind of neuropseudoscientific marshmallow test mumbo jumbo (Bobo). There’s always a magic bullet right around the corner, or buried just beneath the sands of time.
There are plenty of important far-left writers who I enjoy reading and who have influenced how I see things, Marx and Chomsky, for example. But I don’t see them as infallible and while I find their analysis often brilliant, I probably disagree with their prescriptions at least as much as I agree with Friedman’s.
Like a lot of liberals, I see the future as a hard slog that can hopefully be ameliorated by smart liberal policies, but I don’t think that if everyone went back and read this or that book, we’ll have paradise on earth or that understanding neuropathways better will move us all that far towards a utopia.
And, to me, that’s a crucial difference between the right and the left right now.
drj
Read Friedman’s The Methodology of Positive Economics (pdf).
This paper shows, without question, that Friedman was a hack.
You don’t need to be an economist to see the gaping holes in his argument, by the way.
Kylroy
Well, yeah. Being a conservative does not mean one is incapable of consulting evidence and adjusting beliefs and favored policies in response to reality.
It’s just that, as someone born in 1980, I have to consult the historical record to *find* any examples of reality-based conservatives.
Comrade Dread
This. There is no magical solution. There is a lot of hard work. A lot of trial and error. A lot of policy experiments.
I would also say that the difference between conservatives and liberals is this:
Liberals: If it doesn’t work, keep trying until we find something that does.
Conservatives: If it doesn’t work, give up, defund it, and give the wealthy a tax break so they can buy themselves a solution, and I’m sure everyone else will be able to afford to buy that solution to because something something something…
scav
Step in the slog. Hillary on-board for gay marriage. Cue up the next election speculation.
Gex
This makes perfect sense to me. Conservatives believe the answers come from the past. Liberals, at least I, think that humanity is learning as we are going. There are obviously things from the past that worked, but not all. Some new things can work too. And some old things can be improved. And we figure these things out by results.
So I could believe cutting taxes raised revenues and that trickle down worked. But eventually the falling revenues and the increased inequality in the country would dislodge that belief.
It is largely a difference between being pragmatic and being ideologic. They skew more towards ideology. And the annoying thing about lefty purists is they are ideologic and not pragmatic. I think pragmatism can, and possibly used to, belong to both sides.
c u n d gulag
This Pandora’s Box was opened, when Ronald Reagan invitied the Manichean Dominionist Christians into the political system, via the Republican Party.
They quickly became their most loyal footsoldiers, and then, began infilitrating the Party.
And so now, it’s understandable why they look for Holy texts, and magical figures, since they look at the US Constitution much like the look at The Bible – as infallible.
And never mind that the Founding Fathers were fallible, and allowed the document to be amended, they are how like Noah and Moses and Christ.
The problem with modern American Conservatism, is that Manichean world view.
You’re either with God, or with Satan.
You’re either good, or evil.
Etc…
And frankly, I don’t see any way out for them.
Which is not good, since we do need a rational Republican Party, if for no other reason, than to keep the Democrats honest and corruption free.
Alex S.
Friedman’s research has a lot of value, but just like Marx, he stops being useful when he constructs a grand mythology. Marx’ descriptions of Manchester capitalism and the exploitation of workers are all fine, but why create the idea of a classless utopia? Similarly, Friedman arrived at the conclusion that it’s the moral imperative of the firm to make a profit. Consequently, government interference with the economy is morally wrong. This goes against microeconomic theory which states that in equilibrium, a company in a competetive markets doesn’t make any profit at all. Friedman didn’t accept that the motive of profit maximization is basically the intention to make markets less efficient. Friedman’s economics are just another ideology like communism before it.
Ruckus
I think I can boil it down for you.
Conservatives want to believe in things, even or especially things they don’t understand at any more than first glance. The world has to make sense, in some fashion, or it is a horrible place.
Liberals want the world to be better, to be less violent, to be more protective of each other and therefore themselves, but they understand that it isn’t and probably never will be exactly that. So they are willing to work at making it closer to that ideal. They are willing to try ideas that may prove in the end to be bogus. They are willing to build on the less than perfect for the better rather than wishing for just the perfect. They are willing to work somewhat together for the common good. A rising tide and all that.
quannlace
But Ryan insists his budget is a ‘vision document.’
I have no idea what that’s supposed to mean, except perhaps he’s seeing things.
Chris
Without knowing much about Friedman himself, I think this is what happens with a lot of belief systems. The guy who comes up with them is sort of an okay guy; maybe right, maybe wrong, but basically just trying to come up with a framework of understanding through which the unruly universe will make more sense. The disciples are usually the ones who go completely bugfuck in the name of Holy Messiah’s words.
(Applies to many religions; applies to Marxism. It’s no surprise that it would apply to movement conservatism).
Hill Dweller
The Right, and their media allies, refuse to acknowledge events happening right now. They live in a very insular world designed to affirm their preconceived notions.
patroclus
I don’t think Friedman was a hack; just someone who was fixated on finding simplistic explanations for very complex subjects. His Monetary History of the U.S. tome was actually well done, but the level of monetary aggregates (i.e., the money supply) has been shown by empirical studies to not be the sole cause of economic activity, as he believed. Instead, it is one of many factors that contributes to economic well-being and to focus solely upon it to the exclusion of others results in not particularly well-honed economic policy.
Monetarism was tried by the Fed for a number of years in the late 70’s and early 80’s – and it resulted in extremely high interest rates, slow growth, high unemployment and a perversion of the thrift industry (from which we are still recovering). Even “conservative” policy-makers regard it now to be simplistic and unsuited as a guidepost of economic policy-making; although it is one of many factors that need to be considered. Thus, Friedman’s analysis survives, but only as a partial help to decision-making; not as the lodestar that he regarded it as.
But Friedman was not a bad guy – he was a scholar. He was generally honest and dealt with others on a friendly and evidence-focused basis. Posner is a good example of a former disciple that has moved on; whilst still honoring his past association. The problem is that some of Friedman’s disciples have not moved on – instead taking his free market theories to extremes where even he might not have gone. Friedman is kind of like Francis Schaeffer was to the anti-abortion movement and should be regarded similarly.
Ruckus
@quannlace:
He is. He is seeing what he wants to see and trying to reverse engineer a path to that. He has two problems. 1. His end result is bullshit. 2. His project would probably work to it’s intended end.(See #1)
DougJ, Friend of Hamas
@patroclus:
Yes, that is my impression as well.
a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)
@c u n d gulag: This is indeed accurate about the world view, and its injection into the mainstream, if you will, should be laid at the feet of St. Ronaldus Maximus.
And DougJ’s point is of course correct about the fundamental divide between the right and the left. Though I suspect that any given members of each group would have different results on a competently administered reality test.
Linnaeus
The “pragmatic vs. ideological” dichotomy comes up here a lot, and I’m not sure that’s the right way to draw the line, so to speak. I think we all have an ideology, meaning a general view of how things should be and how to achieve those things. Pragmatism strikes me more as a style of enacting one’s ideology, rather than something that is oppositional to ideology.
I tend to be skeptical of claims that this person or that is “non-ideological”. What I think is happening is that person has normalized her or his ideology as a baseline or “common sense” or whatever you’d like to call it. It’s still ideology, though.
Xantar
@Chris:
“The shoe is the sign. Let us follow His example. Let us, like Him, hold up one shoe and let the other be upon our foot, for this is His sign, that all who follow Him shall do likewise.”
rda909
@drj: Yea, he always seemed like an early boarder of the Wingnut Welfare train to me, and yes, I’m not an economist and can see that. And wow, from your link, he’s Palin-esque in his word saladness. His conclusion:
“Progress in positive economics will require not only the testing and elaboration of existing hypotheses but also the construction of new hypotheses. On this problem there is little to say on a formal level. The construction of hypotheses is a creative act of inspiration, intuition, invention; its essence is the vision of something new in familiar material. The process must be discussed in psychological, not logical, categories; studied in autobiographies and biographies, not treatises on scientific method; and promoted by maxim and example, not syllogism or theorem.”
jamick6000
hahah good line.
RobNYNY1957
As one of my finance professors put it, Milton Friedman was “the longest running one-joke show since Gilligan’s Island.”
Chris
@Ruckus:
I think there’s also the fact that membership in the conservative Movement, for many of its activist members, gives meaning to their life in a deep and mystical sense that I just don’t see from most liberals.
I remember reading a Bill Whittle testimonial on PJMedia about how he transformed from an awkward, insecure, self-loathing geek with liberal ideas into a confident, successful person… something that went hand in hand with his becoming born-again to conservatism. Yeah, I’m sure at least part of it was just used car salesmanship for his audience; but I remember being struck by the extent to which he tied personal self-worth as a human being to his political identity. Basically the same principle as an inner city kid joining a gang, or a more spiritual personality joining a cult.
When your self-image and The Movement are intertwined that deeply, it’s not easy to question The Movement. Which also explains why they react so furiously, as if personally attacked, every time a liberal questions their theories (think Niall Ferguson and Paul Krugman a couple weeks ago).
Ben Franklin
Back then, Friedman was relatively liberal in the American sense. He had trust and confidence in the market, yet he also thought that Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, while destructive in a considerable part of its detailed policies, was worth doing
Yes, the Stimulus. Righties often decry the spending during an economic depression, and credit the war for truly bringing us out of it. In the meantime, a net was spread for the hardest hit, and it softened the landing. So, in the end it was destructive for a small class of people, who could afford to ride it out, and worth doing.
PeakVT
DeLong also mentions that he himself agrees with Friedman’s monetarist explanation (novel at the time) of what caused the Great Depression
Wait, what? The GD was certainly exacerbated by the FR’s actions, but it wasn’t the root cause of the GD any more than the FR was the root cause of the latest recession. Deregulation, a stock market bubble, a housing bubble (regional in the 1920s), technological shifts, and more all contributed to both crises. Easy credit from the FR may have kicked both off (and I don’t know enough about the 1920s to say if that’s the case) but there were a series of failures after that which allowed the economy to overheat, leading to the crash.
rda909
@Chris: “I remember being struck by the extent to which he tied personal self-worth as a human being to his political identity. Basically the same principle as an inner city kid joining a gang, or a more spiritual personality joining a cult.”
Good point. Hadn’t thought of it that way before.
schrodinger's cat
I don’t read DeLong’s blog, doesn’t he teach at George Mason, whose Econ dept is the hot bed of glib libertarian policy ideas, much beloved by the Republicans. Of course he is a Friedman apologist.
Suffern ACE
@schrodinger’s cat: He teaches at Berkley.
schrodinger's cat
@Suffern ACE: Ok then I am clearly mixing him up with someone else.
ETA: Sorry my bad, I had DeLong confused for Tyler Cowen.
the Conster
Conservatives are authoritarian sheep who desperately want a shepherd, and any authority will do. Liberals are skeptical cats who really need to see the evidence before believing anything, and maybe not even then. Hence Will Rogers’ quip about being a Democrat.
Xenos
I used to think that Milton Friedman was a first-class intellect, but then I learned that the guy who wrote ‘Friedman on Leases’ was Milton R. Friedman, not to be confused with the economist who was Milton no-middle-initial Friedman.
Maybe that Friedman was also a genius. Since all the Reaganites worshiped him I just assumed he was a fool or a grifter.
PeakVT
@schrodinger’s cat: You’re probably thinking of Tyler Cowan, who not only teaches at GM but is the head of the Koch-funded Mercatus Center.
TF79
@patroclus:
Or as Bob Solow put it, “Everything reminds Milton Friedman of the money supply. Everything reminds me of sex, but I try to keep it out of my papers.”
schrodinger's cat
@PeakVT: Yes, I realized that and added a correction to my earlier comment.
Cacti
The father of shock doctrine economics, and advisor to such exemplars of liberty as Pinochet.
If there is a hell, Milton’s there holding hands with Reagan and Nixon.
Anoniminous
Friedman’s work is chock-a-block with post hoc, ergo proptor hoc fallacies; he made the same tired fundamental error macro-economists are still mired in: he has no justified scientific basis for judging, thus predicting, macro-economic effects on meso- or micro-economic activity. His knowledge of the scientific method, mathematics and Complex bifurcative dynamic systems was, let’s say, limited. (Being kind.)
These aren’t limited to Friedman. A friend (Pd.d mathematical physicist from CalTech) started reading Samuelson and after, about, 100 pages came to the same conclusions about him.
As Chomsky recently said, about Computational Cognitive Science but it’s applicable to economists (paraphrasing):
What this means is the criterion of success in Neo-Classical Economics is to get close to an approximation of the phenomena under investigation using ad hoc, arbitrary data as the fundamental investigatory basis to which ad hoc, arbitrary, statistical mathematical techniques are applied and then claiming the result adequately models the phenomena — which is ludicrous.
Ruckus
@Chris:
I’m pretty sure you are right. Once a person accepts the one true way they find it much easier because they don’t really have to think about it any more. Everything is laid out for them, all they have to do is believe.
Every study physics? How do you know that it works the way you were shown? Because you believe the presenter or because the steps are demonstrably provable, allowing you to see how and why the proof works each step of the way?
Petorado
Economic theories from guys like Friedman seem to point to money as being an inherently good thing. It is the reward for success, it’s the arbiter of right and wrong through the market, those who have more money are more virtuous than those without.
The one thing economic models fail to take into account is that money is not just a tool, but a weapon as well. It corrupts markets, it functions as a mechanism for power and control, it significantly alters the pattens of human behavior that models think are so easy to predict. And that seems to be the primary difference between the left and the right: Democrats look at money as a tool to fix things and Republicans use it as a weapon of control, division, punishment, and accumulation of power.
schrodinger's cat
@Anoniminous: This is a problem with most economists even the heterodox variety, they are too attached to their conclusions to be good scientists.
reflectionephemeral
I thought of Douthat & Brooks when I read this, from Krugman, a few days ago: “we do know what The Economist said, in 1848, about proposals for a London sewer system:
Cacti
@Ben Franklin:
Which is an inherently contradictory position, as WWII was the greatest debt-financed economic stimulus that the US has ever seen, before or since.
The Other Chuck
I’m trying to understand how anyone ever took Friedman seriously at all when his entire oeuvre appears to consist of “A CAB DRIVER TOLD ME THERE’S A KFC IN INDIA SO WOW!!!!!!”
EDIT: oh FFS, that’s Thomas Friedman. What is it with that name? It’s like pundits and the name “Tucker”.
Mike G
Yes, when I think on General Pinochet’s Chile, the first thing that comes to mind is individual freedom. And I also think of the legions of Friedmanite ideologues who blithely overlooked political oppression, torture and murder to have a playpen for their economic theories. How blinkered an ideologue do you have to be to think minimizing marginal tax rates and corporate regulation are symbolic of ‘freedom’ in a country where people are routinely hauled off to jail in the middle of the night by the secret police.
SenyorDave
@rda909: I think it ties into why talk radio is virtually all conservative (at least successful talk radio). Its like belonging to a club where you get validation on a constant basis. Hear some factual data that bursts a part of your world view – just listen to Rush and he’ll tell you its liberal garbage.
rda909
@Ben Franklin: I love it when they try that one on me…that WWII pulled us out of the Depression. Funny to watch their faces when I then point out WWII was the largest deficit-spending in American history, with some estimates saying the national debt was $30 TRILLION in today’s dollars coming out of WWII, and led to a period of the highest tax rates in American history. So what they’re arguing for then is really high taxes and massive national debt to improve economic conditions. They inevitably try to end the conversation with some nervous little joke or some form of “agree to disagree,” which of course I don’t agree to since they’re so simply flat-out wrong.
Not to mention the 10 YEARS between the Depression beginning and America getting involved in WWII, and how the two New Deals were beginning to show a lot of improvement in the economy before the US ever entered WWII. Funny how they never seem to know these basic facts in history, yet still try to use history to bolster their false ideas.
Suffern ACE
@Cacti: In my lifetime, they’ve changed their argument from “the New Deal extended the Depression and wasn’t effective and only the war saved us” to “The New Deal Hurt Poor People”.
But see one of Broder’s final columns in which he was urging Obama to bring the nation together and help end the recession by preparing for war with Iran to see how pervasive that view is. He stopped short of actually calling for the war – just, you know, being beligerent and building a huge arsenal and hoping Iran wouldn’t do anything about that. That’s about has peaceful as the right ever gets.
Anoniminous
@schrodinger’s cat:
Yup.
I don’t fully understand why Economics has degenerated into a festering pile of “Just So Stories.” Isn’t my field. People I know who are in the field, and struggling to get their colleagues to get a grip, tell me students aren’t “educated” so much as “indoctrinated” and that carries across into their professional life.
Relayed what it’s worth.
ETA: “degenerated into a festering pile of “Just So Stories.'” Put that way because I’m being nice. ;-)
Ruckus
Has any conservative position ever been right, financial or otherwise? Have they ever accepted any possible theories that have proven even close to true?
Chris
@Suffern ACE:
Sorry to bring up a pet peeve again;
GOD FORBID that the massive resources, energy, thoughts, political attention, etc that are dedicated to the military-industrial complex should EVER be directed towards any other problem… like, just off the top of my head, building infrastructure right here in the U.S.
Lee
I’ve read different accounts that Friedman also embraced Negative Income Tax and several other ‘liberal’ ideas. As well as The Fed.
pluege
Contemporary conservatives, too often, have a mystic belief in certain texts, gurus, and ideas. American exceptionalism, THE CONSTITUTION, Hayek, Friedman, the bible, free markets, magic dolphins…once upon a time the genius George W. Bush.
this is not correct. Contemporary conservatives don’t believe in these things at all. The cited itemws and others like them are mere props to conservatives, used to justify their manufactured (typically fact-free) view of the world.
Contemporary conservatives create in their minds (individually and reinforced collectively) a world view that suits their purpose of power, enrichment, and self-aggrandizement – a gunslinger, megalomaniac view of the world. Everything flowing from there is a prop to justify their fantasy world view.
Its conservatives’ belief in nothing except their own view of things that makes them capable of spewing so many contradictions and diametrically opposed views all at the same time; its why they can pretend to worship Jesus – the ultimate liberal and at the same time be violently against liberals and liberalism; its why scalia, the so-called Constitutional scholar can pervert voting rights into racial entitlement; its why they continue to spew enrichment of the rich as a means of job creation in the face of 40 years of utter failure of “trickle-down” economics.
Conservatives no more believe in the actual words and content of Constitution, the Bible, or anything else, then they can have a rational discussion with someone who disagrees with them – something impossible for them to do.
Pokeyblow
There’s a video of worthless teabagger beatstick Joe Walsh, veins popping out, yelling at constituents in a diner that they don’t understand how economics works. He insists on a misinformed, unsubtle, unnuanced “free-markets solve all” world view. Friedman and the others at UC may not have held Walsh’s childish beliefs exactly, but they also sure as Hell haven’t done enough to insist that loudmouths like Walsh repeat their ideas with any caveats or subtlety,
Southern Beale
RNC PR BS issued his 2012 post-morten “report” on what needs to happen for Republicans to ever be relevant again nationally, and it’s the kind of stuff that will never, ever, EVER happen because, a) I think as Doug points out they’re hoping some magic dolphins will come in and wave their magic flippers, and b) they are so fully bought and paid for by the GOP Sugar Daddies that the idea they can ever stop being seen as the party of big money just defies credibility.
Citizen_X
Wow. I have never heard of a natural scientist having that sort of idiotic attitude. As Chomsky points out in the quote above, it’s kind of destructive to the whole enterprise.
jo6pac
Dead uncle milton freidman beliefs what the money world should look like has taken down more countries then the us military. Brad need to get a real job and may be fly down to Chile and ask the citizens of that nation how they like DUMF plan for their country. The guy was a F*&^$$$ Nazi.
That plan is coming to Amerika soon and remember he’s hero was ayn rand. Scary
Cacti
@Suffern ACE:
One wonders how they square that with the fact that prior to Roosevelt’s public works projects, about 90% of rural America had dirt roads and no electric lighting.
Another Halocene Human
FYWP. Shorter me: if a theory sounds right, but fails to predict observed behavior, time to give your theory the heave-ho. So it is with the Austrian school of economics.
jl
Friedman kept scientific discipline with his relatively Keynesian approach to macroeconomics. Also, macro can be considered a ‘real’ scientific discipline in the sense that there are things you can predict, or retrodict, that are kind of objective, like national product and income, inflation.
The current fashion in microeconomics is not empirical in the same sense. You are free, indeed encouraged, to redefine variables, modify your models, dredge data, whatever you need to do, until you can explain any behavior at all as the solution to a set constrained optimization problems operating in an overall economic equilibrium
Most economists consider micro more scientifically respectable, but most economists are deeply confused.
I think the empiricist scientific discipline of macroeconomics disciplined Friedman and there he made his most important and lasting contributions.
Friedman’s later libertarian microeconomics was, IMHO, a mess, and he soon became an ideological showman. It is more polemic than science. Not sure he did anything that could be called empirical or theoretical scientific work, he just wrote persuasian. But I might be wrong.
The recent version of ‘Chicago Economics’ has given the place a bad name. There have been, and are, some very interesting ‘non-Chicago’ economists at Chicago.
IMHO, mainstream newclassical (that is, non Krugman, non DeLong) macroeconomics caught the ‘micro’ disease about 30 years ago, in terms of methodology, and we have seen the results over the last 5 or 10 years.
Eric U.
@Lee: Nixon came up with a negative income tax too, IIRC. Our Republicans nowadays are a real mess. A mix of the evil of Nixon with the stupidity of a rock.
patroclus
@TF79: LOL
I suspect that if someone had asked Keynes about the money supply, he would have said yes, that it was an important component of effective demand. But he would have left it at that, and Friedman, who believed that the money supply was all-determinative, was clearly not satisfied with that explanation. So, he spent his entire life studying it just to prove that Keynes and Keynesians were wrong, when they weren’t wrong in the first place. So, we got an entire lifetime work of study of the money supply because of the supposed dismissive attitude of Keynesians to the money supply.
Which is fine, other than the fact that conservative politicians then took Friedman’s work as Gospel and tried to implement it. And after all that, we’re back to Keynes’ original view that the money supply is an important part of effective demand and one factor that needs to be considered in economic policy-making. (Or at least most of us are because there are still a lot of conservative politicians that continue to believe that Friedman was right – Paul Ryan comes to mind here; although he’s a tad more Randian than Friedmanesque).
? Martin
@Anoniminous: A big part of the problem is that the assumed foundation of ‘rational self-interest’ is pretty much bullshit. It assumes perfect knowledge; the ability to properly weigh decisions in the short, medium, and long term; and the ability to weigh decisions by different value sets – financial vs pleasurable vs communal and so on.
Turns out none of us have perfect knowledge and worse, by assuming perfect knowledge we open the door to the powerful rigging the system against the powerless (see Elizabeth Warren). We also are not very good at weighing short vs long term benefits (see our anemic savings rate – even among the upper middle class and lack of retirement savings). We also are not very good at weighing what’s best for us across measures (see countless studies showing that money doesn’t make us happier).
Rational self-interest is the bedrock upon which modern economics is built. If you don’t toe that line, you threaten to destroy the discipline as it currently exists. Can’t have that.
Loneoak
Ah, I see. The biography is by Lanny Ebenstein. He’s one of those conservative economists who is friendly with the race-realist genetics folks, like Steve Sailor. They not only believe that free markets provide optimal guidance, but the very nature of human biology mandates them.
Ruckus
@Cacti:
They don’t have to square it. Belief does not require proof. They believe what they are told without any investigation or acknowledgement of history. They don’t need any reality, they make their own.
mdblanche
@rda909: The nearest I can parse this he’s saying “we need new ideas and I have no clue how to come up with them.”
@RobNYNY1957: I’m sure that this time
austerity will grow the economythe castaways will get off the island.Chris
@pluege:
You do make a pretty good point, although I would argue that while they don’t actually follow the Bible or the Constitution, they certainly believe they follow the Bible or the Constitution.
Mike G
@rda909:
Republicans have a boner for war in general, so therefore WW2 must have cured the Depression and not that icky soshulism of the New Deal, because shut up.
The Repuke rubes get a boner at the idea of cheerleading (but not necessarily fighting in) an all-out war and the authoritarianism and vicarious violence of a wartime society, and the GOP’s moneymen get a boner at the thought of defense spending at 42% of GDP.
The actual WW2 economy with rationing, government command and control of industry, and 94% income tax rates, not so much.
Chris
@Eric U.:
Nixon was their last Keynesian president, I do believe, unless we’re counting Ford.
TooManyJens
Abstinence, for another. If only liberals weren’t leading people away from the One True Path of sexuality and giving them false confidence with those icky pills and condoms, we’d be free of the scourges of unintended pregnancy, abortion, STIs, and heartbreak. We see ourselves as dealing with the complicated reality of human sexual behavior in a practical way; they see us as deliberately and wickedly leading people astray from the perfect solution.
Kyle
@Loneoak:
Lanny Ebenstein is a Republican Party hack’s hack despite his libertarian pretensions. He lives in my area and gets local media publicity now and then. In the run-up to the Iraq invasion he was a giddy cheerleader for Bush. It’s funny how military invasions don’t count as government distortions of the sacred ‘free market’.
jl
@Chris:
I read once that Nixon has contempt for economics and economists. He saw it as kind of like political plumbing and garbage collection, which needed to run smoothly for the purposes of crowd control.
So, stuff like negative income tax, environmental protection agency, basically, Nixon did not care a fig for ideological consistency in economics, he thought it was bunkum. If you needed to do something to ‘keep a nice place’ and keep the voters happy, you did it.
Not saying that makes Nixon a good guy at all. His idea of health care reform was to make people pay more for their health care, and as long as the median voter was happy… whatever, get it passed, and all it whatever you wanted.
rda909
@pluege: THIS! What a joke it is to see Ron Paul and his insane clown posse of Republican/Libertarians, and people like Scalia and his “originalist” lie, going around for years acting as if they own the Constitution and are its arbiter (unfortunately, sort of Scalia’s job I realize to be an arbiter), when practically everything they preach is the opposite of what was clearly the “original intent.”
They even have clearly bastardized the 2nd Amendment which is about a “well-regulated militia” and couple that with Article 1, Section 8, where Congress has control of the “Militias,” and all the other writings at the time from the Framers, meant basically the National Guard, not a group of beer-bellied jokers playing war games in the woods.
Amazing to me how someone can read this then conclude America is all about “me, me, me and my stuff…back off or I’ll shoot you!” which is essentially the Republican default position on anything now:
“We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”
The Constitution itself was created to set up rules and structure around people, and in essence limited “personal liberty.” Of course, the media never calls them out on their false fantasies, so they keep spewing unabated.
Ruckus
@TooManyJens:
…leading people astray from the perfect solution.
They also believe that everyone wants to be led to the perfect solution so they ask anyone who questions them and their solutions, “Why are you fighting us on this?”. Of course that leads to anyone who questions them as enemies who need to be punished for questioning their authority.
John
@Gex:
I don’t think it is at all reasonable to suggest that this kind of attitude is at all inherent in left or right. There are still leftists who view Marx and other writers with the same kind of uncritical awe and veneration that afflicts modern conservatism, and such people were far, far more common before 1989 (or, even more so, 1956). The big difference is that those people have never had much (or any) influence in the mainstream of American politics.
And you can find times and places in history when the mainstream right was much more pragmatic and non-dogmatic than the left. The clearest example I can think of is post-war West Germany, where the Christian Democrats built a functioning modern economy with a health welfare state at a time when the Social Democrats were arguing among themselves about whether they should continue to adhere to doctrinaire Marxism. Likewise, the pre-Thatcher Tory Party had a longstanding tradition of pragmatism – even opportunism – going back at least to Peel and Disraeli.
Hell, even here, the Republican Party from roughly Eisenhower through Nixon/Ford was distinctly the more conservative of the two parties, but its dominant faction was willing to expropriate whatever liberal ideas were useful to the cause of helping Republicans win elections.
jl
funny thing is that Friedmans later association with Hayekians and libertarians turned on him.
There is a funny, and perhaps event true, story about the elderly Friedman talking about the importance of monetary policy at a conference. Some young economist gets up and starts raving about the blessings of free unregulated money supply, and how free unregulated markets in private moneys will Solve All Problems, and he hectors Friedman.
Friedman is horrified, says the guy is nuts, asks where this person could ever have possibly gotten a PhD in economics.
And the guy’s answer was, “Chicago Department of Economics”
marshall
When has the following the prescriptions of the Chicago school of economics ever not been an unmitigated disaster?
Anoniminous
@? Martin:
Absolute 100% agree.
AI Cybernetic Decision Making Systems is my field and Human Decision Making, going down to the neurological level, is 50% of that. Neuroscientists, Antonio Damasio, et. al., and neuro-psychologists have proven beyond shadow of doubt there’s no such thing as purely “Rational” decision making. All non-sterotyped human decisions require the good old Limbic System aka “The Emotional System.” If the Limbic System is somehow severed from higher cognitive processing areas, by a lesions or having a steel rod stuck through the frontal orbital cortex a person can’t decide whether to have potatoes or rice for dinner.
And I don’t know which Universe economists are describing with their “Perfect Knowledge” but it isn’t the one we’re living in.
karen
@Linnaeus:
I am a pragmatic liberal, who believes that you pick your battles. Don’t fight what you know you will never win. Take what you can get.
The difference between the right and left is the words FREEDOM and LIBERTY
The left believes in freedom for everyone and liberty for everyone. The right believes in freedom and liberty for themselves. Not you.
rda909
@? Martin: Interesting video on this topic:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc
Alex S.
@Anoniminous:
Yes, I can’t explain how much that annoys me. Economists assume that rational consumers completely know the underlying economic model and act accordingly. In other words, consumers know just as much about the economy as economists. So why would we need economists at all?
Chris
@Alex S.:
I think it’s at least partly a feature, not a bug, as far as the righties are concerned. Sure, people are often not fully rational or informed, but hey, that’s how the system punishes people for being irrational and ignorant. If they don’t want to get fucked, they’ll try to know better next time, etc.
Course, it’s very often not the public’s fault that they don’t know everything about the market they’re operating in, but this is one of the many times that for them, everything that happens to you is your fault. (Depending on the identity of “you,” of course; if the market ever screws over someone they approve of, they’ll find a way to say an injustice was committed).
rda909
@karen: My kids are at an age where they’re asking about politics and trying make some sense of it all. I explain, after of course telling them they should make up their own minds, that my opinion is that some people in the world believe you make it a nicer place by teaching people to share, and other people believe it is better to be selfish. So “Sharing versus Selfishness.”
I tell them that’s why I work to make sure the people who believe in sharing are elected, such as President Obama. When I ask what they think, they immediately answer, “well, sharing is the best way of course!” So far so good!
liberal
@schrodinger’s cat:
No, he teaches at Berkeley.
liberal
Certainly things would be a lot better if everyone read Progress and Poverty, which accurately describes the main cause of poverty and how to fix it.
MeDrewNotYou
@rda909: To me the more egregious act by conservatives is their interpretation of the Bible, especially the Jesus stuff. There are tons of contradictions between their acts and their professed beliefs, but one always stands out to me.
Jesus flat out says rich folk ain’t getting into heaven without a ton of work. Yet the Prosperity Gospel is embraced by a huge number (a majority?) of American ‘Christians.’ How does, “I’m rich so Jesus must be pleased with me!” square with, “I tell you the truth, it is hard for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.”?
The guy you purport to worship and claim is perfect explicitly called you out on your BS! As a thinking person this offends me but if I were a Christian* I’d look like a cartoon character with steam coming out of my ears.
*- I’m agnostic, but Robot Jews from Futurama perfectly state my view on Jesus: “We believe he was built, and that he was a very well-programmed robot.”
Chris
@MeDrewNotYou:
And they rationalize it with a mountain of articles like that one titled “Today’s ‘poor’ are the ‘rich’ Jesus warned us about” (large screed about entitlement, unearned wealth, all that crap).
Sometimes I think the entire purpose of the clergy (though nowadays we have regular pundits for the same purpose) is to produce those kinds of rationalizations so that people who WANT to (for example) be selfish pricks but are afraid that Jesus might not be happy with them for it, can be comfortable in the knowledge that no, it’s okay, Jesus really wants you to be selfish.
Well. Okay. Maybe a little more often than “sometimes…” :D
ETA: another good one is their marriage of Christianity with American nationalism. Never mind that America wouldn’t even exist until 1700 years and change after Jesus; never mind the fact that one of the big reasons Jesus came was to spread the message to all people and no longer just to one “chosen” nation; never mind believing the Bible and “my country right or wrong” simultaneously kind of violates the whole “don’t serve two masters” thing…
karen
@MeDrewNotYou:
I haven’t seen “The Bible” on the History Channel but my dad has and was pissed off about how they changed the story of Passover from the blood on the door they changed it to the blood on the wall. It might seem like something minor but Jews like myself know the story of Passover, it’s OUR story. Can you imagine what would happen if there was a program on that changed the story of Jesus? There would be death threats.
scav
@Alex S.: Economists don’t know about the economy (most of them). Economists know how their models and theories of the economy behave.
The real economy is Just So Messy and Refuses To Follow Their Rules. They often seem to believe simplifying assumptions actually operate in the wild exactly as simplified.
Dexter's new approach
I was engaged to a girl whose father earned his PhD under Freidman at Chicago. Super-bright guy with MS in physics from Berkeley as well. And he was also very nice, generous, gentle and gregarious. He wasn’t a political person, but he did buy into the Chicago School so not surprisingly was a Derbyshire-like racist.
Scratch a Libertarian and you usually find a racist (or at least a strong racial resentment)
MeDrewNotYou
@Chris: You know, that view on clergy really makes a lot of sense when it comes to conservative churches. And if The Free Market is a modern religion, aren’t many pundits the new clergy?
Also, I hate to miss an opportunity to link to The Straight Dope, so here’s a mailbag post that I agree with 100%.
ETA- Quickly reread the article I linked to. Well, I guess I don’t agree with the theology. But putting myself in a believer’s shoes, I think the theology is spot on.
Chris
@MeDrewNotYou:
I came to the realization by seeing the way an ultra-religious cousin’s Facebook postings evolved before and after seminary. He was never going to be a liberal, but he used to be at least capable of having thoughts of his own; reprimanded Jerry Falwell for saying that the environment didn’t matter, criticized Bush’s foreign policy, think he even believed in evolution.
Ever since he’s gone to seminary, it’s been 100% party line and zero criticism of his side ever again. Seminary does a grand job of crapping out clones, it seems.
From your article –
And what would “it’s easier for a camel to walk into Jerusalem than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God” even mean?
MeDrewNotYou
@Chris: I just caught what you added and combining Jesus and America has always struck me as bizarre. And then get a load of the Mormons!
@karen: “Well, Jesus gave you a chance and you left him hanging. So we own all your stuff now.” Seriously, though, I think that changes like that are a Christian thing rather than a media or American things. (At first I was thinking artistic license, but promptly recalled history.) You probably know better than me how Jews have had to deal with Christians and their co-opting of your traditions.
I’m trying to imagine a similar situation with Jesus, something that isn’t a major change but definitely doesn’t square with texts and tradition. Perhaps instead of water into wine let’s say Jesus: The Miniseries has him magically providing food for the wedding. Mainline churches might say, “We like that you’re promoting Jesus but you muddled the facts from passage XYZ.” The John Hagees and Pat Robertsons I can see being pissed, boycotting the network/company for making Jesus look like a common caterer. (Although water to wine and the fishes and loaves really do lend themselves to that description…)
MeDrewNotYou
@Chris: Huh. I would have thought that outside of the big-on-hierarchy groups like Catholics seminary wouldn’t make you more doctrinaire. Sure, you’d now know the official line on say evolution and won’t tolerate dissent. But you’d also learn more about other topics that allow you to appreciate differences of opinion. Then again it really does tie back to what others said earlier in the thread: conservatism is authoritarian in nature and requires believers to accept a single correct interpretation of the Bible, the Constitution, etc.
On the camel bit, I’m just throwing an idea out, but maybe its a mental smokescreen. I ask how do you square the two, you reply and consider the argument won. The substance of the reply doesn’t matter and isn’t really meant to be carefully parsed, its just there to relieve the tension introduced by my question.
Chris
@MeDrewNotYou:
I’m sorry, I should have specified: he’s Southern Baptist. There are plenty of more tolerant seminaries out there, but those that’re controlled by our religious right… yeah.
I think the mental smokescreen thing is probably the best explanation. It also has that vibe where it’s kind of like the “look at it in historic context, don’t take it literally!” beloved of liberals, so they think that should make it even more authoritative to the Fucking Lib they’re arguing with.
schrodinger's cat
@liberal: Yes I know, I confused him with Tyler Cowen.
NonyNony
@Chris:
It’s a dodge – the fact that the camel has to kneel to get through the gate but it gets through means that the reading of that passage is along the lines of “rich people can get into heaven, but only if they grovel for it. So don’t worry about having too much money, you can always make sure you endow the church with your lands after you die, we’ll say some prayers for you and boom you’re in heaven”.
That was the original source for it anyway – these days you have to modernize it to add the bizarre American flavor of Calvinism that most evangelical fundamentalist churches have embraced, but it comes to the same thing.
MeDrewNotYou
@Chris: I figured. For all the problems the Catholic Church has they’ve become reasonable enough on evolution. I can live with ‘Evolution is real but God made us special,’ and they seem to accept that our special-ness doesn’t need to be taught in biology class. That’s a far cry better than sneaking in ID or flat out creationist bullshit and ‘teaching the ‘controversy.” (Double scare quotes!) Unfortunately I wouldn’t be surprised for Bill Donohue and his ilk proving me wrong.
@NonyNony: That’s a great explanation. Nothing to add other than thanks shedding a bit more light on it. The response makes even more sense now.
Chris
@NonyNony:
Ah, see, that’s more logical. Still worth mentioning that “no historical evidence for such a gate ever” as MeDrew’s article points out, but at least it’s not gibberish anymore.
@MeDrewNotYou:
Yeah, I don’t mind people saying “the world around you works the way it does because some God, somewhere, designed it like that” (crediting God for evolution basically). It’s when they start saying “the world does not in fact work like it does, that’s just a lie of the left” that the problem starts happening. “You’re entitled to your own beliefs, but not your own facts,” as the saying goes.
TAPX486
I CAN understand Friedman’s ‘ And on top of that was layered a fear and suspicion of government as an easily captured tool for the enrichment of the cynical and powerful, who grab what they can.’. What I don’t understand is why he thought that the cynical and powerful would be any less greedy in a free market with minimal government. Greedy /corrupt people are going to game the system whither it’s free enterprise capitalism or the economies of medieval Europe.
Barry
@Gex: “This makes perfect sense to me. Conservatives believe the answers come from the past. Liberals, at least I, think that humanity is learning as we are going. There are obviously things from the past that worked, but not all. Some new things can work too. And some old things can be improved. And we figure these things out by results.”
Which, please note, means that liberals also learn from the past, but are not limited to just the (approved, far back) past.
jefft452
@pluege: “this is not correct. Contemporary conservatives don’t believe in these things at all. The cited itemws and others like them are mere props to conservatives, used to justify their manufactured (typically fact-free) view of the world”
I don’t know
Try going over to the Slactivist and you can see examples of how “Biblical Literalists” don’t really know what’s in the Bible. They just assume that the mixture of 19th cen. theology and 1950’s Bircherism that makes up their ideology is in the Bible somewhere
You see the same thing with “Strict Constructionist” and “Originalists” who wouldn’t recognize Article 1 Section 8 if it bit them in the ass, they just assume that Constitution enacted the Texas Republican Party platform
So I think you are right, but I don’t think that they realize that that is what they are doing
PS
“its why scalia, the so-called Constitutional scholar can pervert voting rights into racial entitlement”
Scalia “We cant just leave this up to Congress”
15th Amendment “The Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.”
jefft452
@Chris: “And what would “it’s easier for a camel to walk into Jerusalem than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God” even mean?”
“Camel” most likely a Greek mistranslation of the original “Rope”
As in “easier to thread a rope through the eye of a needle”
i.e. impossible
Bubblegum Tate
@Chris:
Excellent point. Pretty much every “liberal-to-wingnut” conversion story I’ve heard is like that: It isn’t just “I used to believe A, but then, as I learned more, I came to believe B.” It’s “I was weak, stupid, confused, ignorant–in other words, a liberal, ha ha ha! But then I came to know the way, the truth, the wisdom, and now I’m awesome and strong like a true conservative, and I will fight anybody who would dare imply otherwise!”
I can understand people being ashamed of their former selves or proud of the personal progress they feel they’ve made, but there’s this creepy-culty undertone to it that’s just weird to me.
MeDrewNotYou
@jefft452: There was a follow-up to the Straight Dope article I linked earlier that discusses rope vs camel. Here ya go. The quick version is that the rope interpretation, while still close to the original intent, is probably wrong linguistically and from similar rabbinic references.
Bubblegum Tate
@rda909:
The wingnuttiest wingnut I know likes to claim that “conservatism” is really just “Constitutionalism.” Her favorite joke is that a radical conservative is “someone who REALLY, REALLY believes that the Constitution is the law of the land.”
She’s kinda clueless.
The Other Chuck
@jefft452: Sounds plausible …. but hey, it’s pretty darn impossible for a camel as well.
Do all biblical scholars think people just completely lacked any capacity for imaginative phrasing back then?
good2go
“Contemporary conservatives, too often, have a mystic belief in certain texts, gurus….” Yes, but without actually reading or understanding “certain texts,” especially true with Friedman.
Also, have you REALLY read Marx and Chomsky? I have, and would not classify them as “far left.” Well, maybe by American standards, but not internationally. (Marx in particular is astonishing in his intellectual integrity. He’d work on something for years but if a friend–or enemy–demonstrated its flaws, he’d rethink. That’s why “The Communist Manifesto” would never had seen the light of day had it not been for some silly trials years after 1848. Marx had them destroyed because he felt it was the wrong course.)
Now, Lenin, Stalin, Mao…THEY’RE far left.
jefft452
@MeDrewNotYou: Thanks!
looks like I was wrong
I had always thought the mistranslation theory made sense as in “blessed are the peacemakers” fits better then “blessed are the cheesemakers”
At least his hovercraft was eel free
Stillwater
Nice post Doug. WORD!
LosGatosCA
Excellent post. You have done the Friends of Hamas proud.
Friedman operated in two worlds, economics (first rate) and politics (hack).
He transferred his well-earned credibility in economics to unearned perceived credibility in politics. And he contributed greatly to distorting the whole field of economics with his contributions to the micro-foundations trends and the idiotic political discrediting of Keynes.
He completely confirmed his intentions when he said he would support capitalism/free markets even if they weren’t the most efficient because it allows the most freedom. Everything he had to say in a political context after that should have been suspect.
He was very clever in not explicitly supporting or condemning supply side economics or the Laugher Curve. Yet today most conservatives have a Saddam-was-involved-in-9/11 view of Friedman – meaning Friedman supposedly thought lower income tax rates led to higher tax revenues (he did not – he did believe lower taxes, smaller government was the goal), that he supported tort reform to keep businesses more efficient (he did not – he saw legal action as a check on business performance), and they think Friedman’s Nobel Prize was related to supply side economics as well (no it wasn’t). His economics based legitimacy from the Nobel really had no relation to his conservative policy positions.
Friedman as a political figure was no more a disinterested or better informed on governance matters than say Dick Armey, But he was much more influential.
Similar things can be said about Paul Krugman. PK is a political liberal (though not a hack) who won a Nobel in an area his NYT acolytes are likely unfamiliar with and many would be uncomfortable with if they understood it.
marshall
@jefft452:
Thank you for saying this. I am always struck by how poor the theology tends to be on the “fundamentalist” side. Biblical literalism without much clue what the Bible literally says. And when they start talking about things like the Rapture! Let’s just leave that train wreck alone.
marshall
@c u n d gulag:
That was just after the period when those people, with backing from a shadowy cabel of wealthy whack-jobs, took control of the Southern Baptist Convention, perverted its politics to ensure that they would stay in power indefinitely, and perverted its theology in furtherance of their political ends.
The right-wing takeover of the Southern Baptist Convention was the Spanish Civil War of the attempted conservative seizure of power, where the political tactics for taking over first the GOP, and then the country as a whole, were given a trial run.
Chris
@marshall:
I’ve always thought that fundamentalists were essentially just another denomination (like Lutherans, Methodists, or Presbyterians), but one that was either too lazy to write out a coherent theology explaining their particular worldview, or didn’t think they could come up with a plausible one.
So instead, they just say “Theology? What theology? Our only theology is to be exactly like Jeebus, and against all these other people, because they’re all heretics.”
Steve J.
. As Posner says, Friedrich Hayek’s Road to Serfdom “flunks the test of accuracy of prediction ”
Hayek also never admitted that he was wrong about this.