AN INTERVIEW WITH MILTON FRIEDMAN

Abstract

“His views have had as much, if not more, impact on the way we think about monetary policy and many other important economic issues as those of any person in the last half of the twentieth century.” These words in praise of Milton Friedman are from economist and Federal Reserve Chair Alan Greenspan. They are spoken from a vantage point of experience and knowledge of what really matters for policy decisions in the real world. And they are no exaggeration. Many would say they do not go far enough.

It is a rare monetary policy conference today in which Milton Friedman's ideas do not come up. It is a rare paper in macroeconomics in which some economic, mathematical, or statistical idea cannot be traced to Milton Friedman's early work. It is a rare student of macroeconomics who has not been impressed by reading Milton Friedman's crystal-clear expositions. It is a rare democrat from a formerly communist country who was not inspired by Milton Friedman's defense of a market economy written in the heydays of central planning. And it is a rare day that some popular newspaper or magazine around the world does not mention Milton Friedman as the originator of a seminal idea or point of view.

Any one of his many contributions to macroeconomics (or rather to monetary theory, for he detests the term macroeconomics) would be an extraordinary achievement. Taken together they are daunting:

[bull ] permanent income theory;

[bull ] natural rate theory;

[bull ] the case for floating exchange rates;

[bull ] money growth rules;

[bull ] the optimal quantity of money;

[bull ] the monetary history of the United States, especially the Fed in the Great Depression, not to mention contributions to mathematical statistics on rank-order tests, sequential sampling, and risk aversion, and a host of novel government reform proposals from the negative income tax, to school vouchers, to the flat-rate tax, to the legalization of drugs.

Milton Friedman is an economist's economist who laid out a specific methodology of positive economic research. Economic experts know that many current ideas and policies—from monetary policy rules to the earned-income tax credit—can be traced to his original proposals. He won the Nobel Prize in economics in 1976 for “his achievements in the field of consumption analysis, monetary history and theory and for his demonstration of the complexity of stabilization policy.” Preferring to stay away from formal policy-making jobs, he has been asked for his advice by presidents, prime ministers, and top economic officials for many years. It is in the nature of Milton Friedman's unequivocally stated views that many disagree with at least some of them, and he has engaged in heated debates since graduate school days at the University of Chicago. He is an awesome debater. He is also gracious and friendly.

Born in 1912, he grew up in Rahway, New Jersey, where he attended local public schools. He graduated from Rutgers University in the midst of the Great Depression in 1932. He then went to study economics at the University of Chicago, where he met fellow graduate student Rose Director whom he later married. For nearly 10 years after he left Chicago, he worked at government agencies and research institutes (with one year visiting at the University of Wisconsin and one year at the University of Minnesota) before taking a faculty position at the University of Chicago in 1946. He remained at Chicago until he retired in 1977 at the age of 65, and he then moved to the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.

I have always found Milton and Rose to be gregarious, energetic people, who genuinely enjoy interacting with others, and who enjoy life in all its dimensions, from walks near the Pacific Ocean to surfs on the World Wide Web. The day of this interview was no exception. It took place on May 2, 2000, in Milton's office in their San Francisco apartment. The interview lasted for two-and-a-half hours. A tape recorder and some economic charts were on the desk between us. Behind Milton was a floor-to-ceiling picture window with beautiful panoramic views of the San Francisco hills and skyline. Behind me were his bookcases stuffed with his books, papers, and mementos.

The interview began in a rather unplanned way. When we walked into his office Milton started talking enthusiastically about the charts that were on his desk. The charts—which he had recently prepared from data he had downloaded from the Internet—raised questions about some remarks that I had given at a conference several weeks before—which he had read about on the Internet.

As we began talking about the charts, I asked if I could turn on the tape recorder, since one of the topics for the interview was to be about how he formulated his ideas—and a conversation about the ideas he was formulating right then and there seemed like an excellent way to begin the interview. So I turned on the tape recorder, and the interview began. Soon we segued into the series of questions that I had planned in advance (but had not shown Milton in advance). We took one break for a very pleasant lunch and (unrecorded) conversation with his wife Rose before going back to “work.” After the interview, the tapes were transcribed and the transcript was edited by me and Milton. The questions and answers were rearranged slightly to fit into the following broad topic areas:

[bull ] money growth, thermostats, and Alan Greenspan;

[bull ] causes of the great inflation and its end;

[bull ] early interest in economics;

[bull ] graduate school and early “on-the-job” training;

[bull ] permanent income theory;

[bull ] return of monetary economics;

[bull ] fiscal and monetary policy rules;

[bull ] use of models in monetary economics;

[bull ] use of time-series methods;

[bull ] real business-cycle models, calibration, and detrending;

[bull ] natural rate hypothesis;

[bull ] role of debates in monetary economics;

[bull ] capitalism and freedom today;

[bull ] monetary unions and flexible exchange rates.