Search results
1 – 10 of over 11000
This chapter explores a number of relatively unknown aspects of the controversy over Milton Friedman’s March 1975 visit to Chile through the analytical framework provided by James…
Abstract
This chapter explores a number of relatively unknown aspects of the controversy over Milton Friedman’s March 1975 visit to Chile through the analytical framework provided by James M. Buchanan’s late 1950s assessment of the economist-physician analogy. The chapter draws upon a range of archival and neglected primary sources to show that the topics which generally rear their head in any contemporary discussion of Friedman’s visit to Chile – for example, whether it is appropriate to provide policy advice to a dictator – were aired in a largely private mid-1970s exchange between Friedman and a number of professional associates. In particular, the controversy over Friedman and Chile began several months before Friedman arrived in Santiago.
Details
Keywords
Reviews Milton and Rose D. Friedman’s, Two Lucky People: Memoirs, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1998, $35 (£24.95), ISBN 0‐226‐26414‐9. Focuses on how the memoirs…
Abstract
Reviews Milton and Rose D. Friedman’s, Two Lucky People: Memoirs, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1998, $35 (£24.95), ISBN 0‐226‐26414‐9. Focuses on how the memoirs illuminate the main contributions Friedman has made to political economy and the economics literature.
Details
Keywords
Charles G. Leathers and J. Patrick Raines
In speeches and testimonies, Alan Greenspan claimed intellectual links between his financial policies and the ideas of Milton Friedman and Joseph A. Schumpeter on banks, central…
Abstract
Purpose
In speeches and testimonies, Alan Greenspan claimed intellectual links between his financial policies and the ideas of Milton Friedman and Joseph A. Schumpeter on banks, central banks, and financial crises. As the financial crisis deepened in 2008, Greenspan admitted that his policies had been shockingly wrong. The purpose of this paper is to explain why his claims of intellectual links between those policies and the ideas of Friedman and Schumpeter were also wrong.
Design/methodology/approach
Beginning with representative examples of Greenspan's citations of Friedman and of Schumpeter as supporting his financial policies, the authors review the economic ideas of Friedman and Schumpeter on banks, central banks, and financial crises. In each case, we contrast Greenspan's financial policies with those ideas, demonstrating the spurious nature of his claims of intellectual links.
Findings
While expanding the role of the Federal Reserve in the financial markets, Greenspan's financial policies were based on the declaration that deregulation and financial innovations were providing flexibility and stability for the entire financial system. In his financial policies, Greenspan rejected Friedman's recommendations for changes in the powers and functioning of the Federal Reserve that featured a monetary policy rule and the 100 percent reserve requirement for deposits that would involve the separation of depository banking from loans and investments. From a Schumpeterian perspective, Greenspan's policies encouraged and facilitated the massive “reckless” finance that was responsible for the financial crisis of 2007‐2009.
Originality/value
Greenspan's legacy as Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board is one of policies that first contributed to recurring financial crises of increasing severity and were then followed by an extraordinary policy expansion of the Federal Reserve in attempts to cope with the crises. On that basis, it is important to have a clear understanding of the lack of intellectual support for those policies from the influential economists with whom he claimed intellectual links.
Details
Keywords
Brian Snowdon and Howard R. Vane
An interview with Milton Friedman in 1996 ‐ presents his reflections on some of the important issues surrounding the evolution of, and currrent debates within, modern…
Abstract
An interview with Milton Friedman in 1996 ‐ presents his reflections on some of the important issues surrounding the evolution of, and currrent debates within, modern macroeconomics. A world‐renowned economist and prolific author since the 1930s, Milton Friedman has had a considerable impact on macroeconomic theory and policy making. Associated mostly with monetarism and the efficacy of free markets, his work has ranged over a broader area ‐ microeconomics, methodology, consumption function, applied statistics, international economics, monetary theory, history and policy, business cycles and inflation. In the interview discusses Keynes’s General Theory, monetarism, new classical macroeconomics, methodology, economic policy, European union and the monetarist counter‐revolution.
Details
Keywords
This paper is a review essay of Leeson, R. (Ed.), Keynes, Chicago and Friedman (2 volumes), Pickering and Chatto, London, 2003. These volumes contain a comprehensive collection of…
Abstract
This paper is a review essay of Leeson, R. (Ed.), Keynes, Chicago and Friedman (2 volumes), Pickering and Chatto, London, 2003. These volumes contain a comprehensive collection of previously published papers, and also some interesting new materials, relating to the controversy about the accuracy of Milton Friedman's depiction of the “oral tradition” in monetary economics at the University of Chicago in the 1930s and 1940s. As such, the work is a notable addition to the scholarly literature. The broader issue raised by this collection is the precise relationship between Friedman's “monetarism” and the so‐called “Keynesian economics” of the neoclassical synthesis, and specifically, whether there was any real difference between them.
Details
Keywords
Hugh V. McLachlan and J.K. Swales
In a recent article, Boland attacks critics of Friedman's methodology. He writes:
This study examines the influence of context on Taiwanese senior managers' corporate social responsibility (CSR) decisions. The study seeks to identify the current profiles of…
Abstract
Purpose
This study examines the influence of context on Taiwanese senior managers' corporate social responsibility (CSR) decisions. The study seeks to identify the current profiles of managerial CSR perspectives and organizational CSR investments in Taiwan. In particular, whether a non-Friedman perspective is more prevalent than a Friedman perspective and whether community-related CSR is more prevalent than other CSR practices in Taiwan remain unclear. The study also seeks to identify the relationship between managers' CSR perspective profiles and organizational CSR investment profiles in Taiwan.
Design/methodology/approach
The sample was selected from the Taiwanese top companies list. Altogether, 150 valid responses from senior managers of 150 companies were returned.
Findings
The reported evidence shows that senior managers' Friedman/non-Friedman CSR perspective has a great influence in directing a firm's CSR decision in Taiwan. Managers holding the Friedman perspective are slightly more than those holding the non-Friedman CSR perspective, but both perspectives are popular. There is a tendency for firms to make either more or less investments in all CSR dimensions. A Friedman perspective tends to be associated with low CSR investments, and a non-Friedman perspective tends to be associated with high CSR investments.
Originality/value
A major contribution of this study is to offer a different perspective from the Western view regarding CSR implementation in a Chinese-dominant culture society. The study extends the upper echelon theory that managerial CSR perspectives can be a driver of a firm's CSR decision-making. The study also offers further evidence for the institutional theory that CSR is contextually dependent.
Details
Keywords
JOHN WILLIAMSON and NICHOLAS RAU
A recent symposium in the Journal of Political Economy was devoted to two papers in which Professor Friedman had developed more explicitly than previously the theoretical…
Abstract
A recent symposium in the Journal of Political Economy was devoted to two papers in which Professor Friedman had developed more explicitly than previously the theoretical framework underlying his monetary analysis. In the view of the present authors — and, to judge from his reply to his critics, in Friedman's view as well — the symposium was disappointing in its concentration on secondary and polemical questions to the neglect of the basic issues that Friedman had raised. The present paper therefore returns to a consideration of what we conceive to be the fundamental questions posed by Friedman's two papers. The most important of these is, we shall argue, an issue that was never raised in the symposium at all: namely, whether it is appropriate to construct a theory which seeks first to predict changes in nominal income and then to determine the price‐output breakdown, rather than to predict price and output changes separately and to obtain changes in nominal income by aggregating the two. But discussion of this question requires a brief survey of one of Friedman's models, and two related models specified at the same level of generality.
While the concept of legal culture has been receiving a growing attention from scholars, this research often overemphasizes the similarity of the opinions held by different…
Abstract
While the concept of legal culture has been receiving a growing attention from scholars, this research often overemphasizes the similarity of the opinions held by different segments of population. Furthermore, the relationship of migration and the change of legal-cultural attitudes has not received particular attention. Drawing on 70 in-depth interviews with the immigrants of the early 1990s from the former Soviet Union to Israel and the secular Israeli Jews, this chapter provides a comprehensive account of the various aspects of legal culture of these groups. The second important finding is the persistence of the legal-cultural attitudes and perceptions over time.