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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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

The sample was selected from the Taiwanese top companies list. Altogether, 150 valid responses from senior managers of 150 companies were returned.

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.

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.

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.

This paper is designed to provide a practical response to the question of “why be ethical in business” framed around the classic critique of business ethics and corporate social responsibility penned by Milton Friedman.

The primary method is logical reasoning along the following line: Social Environment – > Ethical Norms – > Legal (and especially future legal requirements or consequences). While Friedman argues that the key is to focus on current legal requirements this paper argues that strategic advantages are gained by being ethical and going beyond legal requirements since a firm insulates itself from changes that can result in new or even retroactive legal requirements.

Based on its reasoning the paper argues that acting ethically can serve as a form of insurance or a “strategic shock absorber” for firms. Examples are cited.

The problems of Enron and other firms have increased attention on the role of business ethics. However, since Enron appears to have engaged in illegal conduct, it does not serve as a strong example to be ethical, rather it reinforces the need to simply obey the law. This paper provides a motivation for ethical behavior encapsulated in a framework that managers are likely to already be familiar with based on strategic planning.

While Friedman's critique is over 30 years old and there have been many responses to it, none have been as tightly integrated to extant strategy frameworks as the central argument of this paper.

The purpose of the paper is to perform bid mark‐up optimisation through the use of artificial neural networks (ANN) and a metric of the selected bid mark‐up's derived entropy. The scope is to provide an alternative, entropy‐based method for bid mark‐up optimisation that improves on the analytical models of Friedman and Gates.

The proposed method enables the incorporation of bid parameters through the use of ANN's pattern recognition capabilities and the integration of these parameters with a mark‐up selection process that relies on the entropy produced by possible mark‐up values. The entropy metric used is the product of the probability of winning over the bidder's competitors multiplied by the natural logarithm of the inverse of this probability.

The case study results show that the proposed entropy‐based bidding model compares favourably with the prevailing competitive bidding models of Friedman and Gates, resulting in higher optimisation with regards to the number of jobs won, the monetary value of contracts awarded and the value of “money left on the table”. Furthermore, the method allows for the incorporation of several objective and subjective bid parameters, in contrast to Friedman's and Gates's models, which are based solely on the bid mark‐up history of a bidder's competitors.

While the proposed method is a useful tool for the selection of optimal bid mark‐up values, it requires historical data on the bidding behaviour of key competitors, much like the classic bidding models of Friedman and Gates.

The method is suitable for quantifying objective and subjective competitive bidding parameters and for optimising bid mark‐up values.

The similarities among the writings of Ralph Hawtrey, Lauchlin Currie and Milton Friedman are re‐affirmed, as is the influence of the former on what Friedman has called “the Chicago tradition” of the 1930s. The underconsumptionist analysis of Paul Douglas is not integral to that tradition.