May 15, 2008

Academic Capital Flows: U. of Chicago Plans $200-Million Milton Friedman Institute

A decade ago, officials in Mongolia reportedly considered building a statue in honor of Milton Friedman, who was one of the 20th century’s most influential proponents of laissez-faire economics.

Today the University of Chicago announced its own monument to Mr. Friedman, who died in 2006 at the age of 94. The university plans to invest $200-million in a research center to be known as the Milton Friedman Institute.

In a proposal completed in January, a faculty committee at Chicago said that the new institute would “ensure that the singular position of Chicago economics over the last century would serve as a foundation for continued leadership in shaping fields of thought as well as economic and social policies throughout the world.”

The institute will be housed in a building now occupied by the Chicago Theological Seminary. The department of economics might also move to the building. The university will pay for a new structure for the seminary, which will remain in the Hyde Park neighborhood.

Mr. Friedman did much of his graduate course work at Chicago, though he finally earned his doctorate from Columbia University. He taught at Chicago from 1946 to 1976 and maintained ties there until his death. —David Glenn

(Photo by the Flickr user Gabriel M. Used under a Creative Commons license.)

Comments

1. If medicine were as consistently wrong as economic forecasting, we’d call it shamanism.

   — aboriginal marci    May 15, 02:56 PM    #

2. How appropriate to locate a monument to materialistic dogma in one previously dedicated to its antithesis.

   — Mark    May 15, 03:14 PM    #

3. Greed and capitalism are wonderful. All one has to do is compare capitalist countries with the socialist/communist ones. I wish more institutions would recognize that.

   — Eric J    May 15, 03:24 PM    #

4. I think it would be even more appropriate to have a statue of Friedman shaking hands with Augusto Pinochet, since the latter was one of his ‘best’ students

   — Tom    May 15, 03:42 PM    #

5. Laissez-Faire? Nice euphemism. Market fundamentalism might be a better descriptor. I’m ready for a democratic capitalism, not the radicalized capitalism we suffer today.

   — David Ayers    May 15, 04:00 PM    #

6. My, what an angry crowd of obviously poorly performing economic students who apparently still hold a grudge!

   — maxsdadeo    May 15, 04:22 PM    #

7. They don’t hold “a grudge,” max, they hold “the grudge.”

   Some of these people should be forced to listen to immigrants — my grandparents, for example — about why they came to this country. Alternatively, they could actually read some of Milton Friedman’s writings and figure it all out for themselves.

   — S. Britchky    May 15, 05:02 PM    #

8. How appropriate that the MFI will be housed in what has been a theological school — so often the disciples of Milton exhibit faith-based economics and politics.

   — bob    May 15, 05:13 PM    #

9. This is one of the few good things that The U of C has done in a very long time—-bravo. Many years ago I would sit in this brilliant man’s class and enjoy every minute. He was a brilliant economist, a wonderful teacher, and a class act. May God rest his soul.

   — Joseph Spretnjak    May 16, 05:44 AM    #

10. I would prefer a research institute devoted to analysis of the failures of socialism by socialists. Unfortunately, the intellectual resources for such an institute don’t exist. All they have to offer are redoubled attacks on capitalism. The dreams are gone. Only the hate remains.

    — John Frary    May 16, 06:26 AM    #

11. The venom is amazing. The last seventy years have not sunk in. How can people be so clueless in the face of decades and decades of history? The will to believe in the “success” of socialism is monumental. Evidently, there are still old-fashioned, foot-stomping, hand-clapping Marxists for whom socialism is still a living faith, one that just hasn’t been practiced on the “right” people or in the right conditions. The excuses they offer are just the same ol’ same ol’ in warmed over form.

    — Jim    May 16, 12:14 PM    #

12. @aboriginal marci: Wrong.

    The standards for statistical significance are the same for medicine and econometrics. I’ve done research in both fields, and clinical trials are about as trustworthy as economic analyses. Economic predictions just seem to be wrong more often because a prediction is always made — and you get to see the failures. The number of drugs which make it to market is minute in comparison; and, there’s plenty of failures there as well.

    Friedman didn’t advocate materialism or voodoo: he advocated for being honest about costs of our decisions — and, when we can’t measure something’s cost, to let people decide by compromise what that value is. That compromise has had lots of names throughout time: suq, bazaar, tatonnement, auction, negotiation, and (most recently) “the market”.

    Markets have gotten rid of acid rain, allowed the government to make the most money for its citizens in auctioning off airwaves, guided people to making better use of preventative healthcare, and allowed millions of poor kids get funding to attend college and break out of poverty. You think these are bad things? I don’t.

    — Hayek    May 16, 02:17 PM    #

13. Jim asks ‘how can people be so clueless?”

    When it comes to faculty, a Vietnamese refugee told me the answwer (I’d asked her why did she think there were so many Marxist professors): because they are (in her words) “book Marxists.” All they know of communism is from books – they have never experienced the real thing.

    — PJ    May 16, 05:50 PM    #

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