But at the top of the totem pole
for their contributions to man's progress and to human understanding comes
Milton Friedman, and his wife, Rose D. Friedman. This week, a giant fête is
being held in their honor (nominally about his 90th birthday, although he
actually turned 93 in July) in Los Angeles. I was to be the master of
ceremonies, but I was also needed to preach the good gospel of freedom and
gratitude at the University of Utah that night, so I think I will tell a little
bit about this giant of a man right now.
In addition to being an emeritus
professor of economics at Chicago, where he taught from 1946 to 1976, Milton
Friedman is:
1. A brilliant mathematician;
2. A spectacularly original and
insightful economist (winner of one of the first Nobels in economic science, in
1976, when they were being given to truly heavy hitters instead of the uneven
selection we sometimes see today);
3. A gifted writer;
4. A tireless crusader for
education for the disadvantaged;
5. A loyal and helpful friend; and
6. Above all, a fearless fighter
for individual freedom.
His wife has stood by him and
collaborated in these triumphs.
I first came to know Milton and
Rose Friedman as something other than pals of my Ma and Pa in 1964-65, when
Professor Friedman was, for one fabulous year, the Wesley Clair Mitchell
Research Professor of Economics at Columbia, while on leave from his beloved
Chicago. I was a junior at Columbia and madly in love with a girl named Cathy,
who was at Chicago. On my first visit to Professor Friedman's office, I was
lamenting the fact that Cathy was so far away and that I could never possibly
find a girl I loved as much in a small town like New York. "Benjy,"
Professor Friedman said, "I can tell you as a statistician that if there
were only one right woman for every man, they would never find each other. Go
out and find someone else." It was a flashing insight (and, indeed, I soon
found a much more pleasant girlfriend named Mary right across the street at
Barnard).
A few days later, when I was
crossing Broadway at 116th Street to get to lunch at a Chock full o'Nuts
restaurant with Professor Friedman, I urged him to run ahead and cross against
the light. "Benjy," he said, "why should we risk the rest of our
lives to save 20 seconds?"
These were my first hints that I
was in the presence of genius. Although he was working in the graduate school,
Professor Friedman let me be a pupil. If memory serves, the text we used was
the book he had written with Dr. Schwartz (one of the truly great unsung heroes
of economics and my late mother's best friend at Barnard), "The Monetary
History of the United States." This book was the culmination of their
analysis of the connection between the quantity of money and business cycles in
the United States economy.
Until "The Monetary
History," the prevailing view of economists was that the supply of money
affected the price level but not the real level of economic activity. By dint
of painstaking research and formulas, Professor Friedman and Dr. Schwartz
showed that changes in the money supply greatly affected real levels of output
and employment.
The main thesis of the book was
that the Great Depression had been caused not by changes in tariff laws (always
a questionable notion at best), not by the stock market crash (even more
questionable), but by catastrophically wrongheaded decisions by the Federal
Reserve Board in the period 1929-33 and again in 1936-37. The Fed - obsessed
with fears of inflation even as the economy was collapsing - shrank the money
supply drastically and basically choked the life out of the economy. (There was
also a fascinating ethnic and racial angle to the story, which Professor
Friedman later related to me: certain potentates at the Fed were doing this in
part as an anti-Semitic reaction to the views of a Jewish Fed official named
Eugene I. Meyer, who was also owner of The Washington Post and father of Katharine Meyer
Graham.)
In the world of economics, this
was a discovery on a par with the theory of relativity in physics or Copernican
astronomy. There is simply no way to exaggerate its importance. The use of the
money supply to regulate the economy and to prevent future depressions was
largely born of the work by Professor Friedman and Dr. Schwartz. It was, in
every way, lifesaving.
There was an immense additional
amount of work by Professor Friedman in economics and econometrics, and much of
it had to do with the relation of the price level, monetary aggregates, output
and unemployment to each another, and especially the key role of expectations
in thwarting economic policy. For this work, he won the Nobel. But economics
was just the beginning of his work, along with his wife's.
In about 1965, the whole world was
worshiping at the altar of John F. Kennedy's
words, "Ask not what your country can do for you - ask what you can do for
your country." Professor Friedman, in his writing, said that neither was a
fitting question in a free society. People should be asking what they can do
for themselves and their friends and communities, not how they can serve the
state or what they could get as wards of the state.
This became the beginning of
Professor Friedman's 1980 PBS series "Free to Choose," also about the
role of individual freedom in creating a prosperous, politically free society.
At a time when the prevailing liberal ethos was all about the state, planning
and direction from on high, Professor Friedman and his wife stood up for the
glory of the rights and choices of the individual. From the individual, not
from the state, came creativity, progress, freedom, prosperity. From the state
came oppression and stagnation. While (just as a humble opinion) I see the
state having a vital role in securing freedom for minorities, defending the
society against aggression, and delivering the mail, Professor Friedman's basic
point is certainly correct. (He saw major roles for the state in enforcing
antitrust laws and insuring banks and in other areas, too.) One of Professor
Friedman's most apt students was Ronald Wilson Reagan, and
another is the governor in my home state of California, Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Now, in the autumn of his life,
Professor Friedman works for school choice. He wants to give parents vouchers
so they can send their children to better schools, removing them from failing
public schools. He wants to end the state's near-monopoly on education, which
has produced such disappointing results, especially among the nonrich and
nonwhite. He faces an uphill struggle (and we parents of teenagers who refuse
to do homework think the return of the lash might be a better innovation), but
he is in there pitching for giving poor people the same choices rich people
have in education. It can hardly be worse than what we have today.
THERE are a few really great names
in standing up for the individual in a world where the beautiful people always
seem to want the state to tell us how to live - William F. Buckley; Robert L.
Bartley, the late editor of the Wall Street Journal's editorial page; and Mr.
Reagan - but they all pale before the brain power and ingenuity of Milton and
Rose Friedman. If we have a free society today, if we have avoided anything
close to another Great Depression, if we have prosperity and fairly stable
prices, we owe much of it to Milton Friedman. If we have a free market economy
that will yet pull us through our many travails and will be the beacon of hope
to the whole world, if we still have a majority of the economy not in the hands
of the state, much of the credit goes to Milton Friedman.
It is not a stretch to say that
when great buildings of Manhattan have vanished, intelligent people will still
find inspiration in the works of Milton Friedman. He will be in a pantheon of
economists along with Adam Smith, David Ricardo and John Stuart Mill. And he
helped me find a girlfriend and kept me from getting run over. Happy birthday,
Professor Friedman, and many more to come.