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Economically speaking, Friedman No. 1
U. of C. marks the 90th birthday of a star student and one of the more influential minds of his time
By Ron Grossman
Tribune staff reporter
Published November 9, 2002
At the University of Chicago's all-day academic bash Friday in honor of Milton Friedman's 90th birthday, one speaker after another noted that he has revolutionized modern economics.
Yet "revolutionary" probably would not be the word the fervently conservative Friedman would choose to describe himself. When he entered the field of economics in the 1930s, it was dominated by Marxism and its intellectual cousins, philosophies that aimed to remake the world according to some grand scheme.
In good part because of his influence, economists have largely exchanged that view for Friedman's concept that freedom of choice is what most effectively makes the world go around. He has made disciples out of presidents, including George W. Bush. Former Secretary of State George Shultz dropped in on the celebration.
Friedman's ideas even have established a beachhead in Communist China.
Yet true to form, Friedman, a Nobel Prize laureate, was less conscious Friday of his achievements than of the work still left to do.
"When I started out, we were confronted by galloping socialism," said Friedman, who officially turned 90 on July 31. "Now we're confronted by creeping socialism."
As if to provide a background for the Friedman celebration, halfway across Chicago anti-globalization activists were protesting one of his pet ideas: worldwide free markets. But inside the university's Ida Noyes Hall, Friedman's standing among the young was quite different.
At every break in the proceedings, dozens of students lined up to treat him like a pop-culture hero, asking for his autograph or to have a photograph taken with him. Most towered over the diminutive Friedman, who, like his wife and intellectual partner, Rose, seems to stand barely 5 feet tall.
Friedman and his ideas have not always been so celebrated. Economist John Kenneth Galbraith once pooh-poohed Friedman's tough-love approach to the issue of jump-starting Third World economies.
"To ask Friedman to advise on economic planning," Galbraith observed, "was like asking the Holy Father to counsel on the operations of a birth control clinic."
That was not a viewpoint heard at the U. of C.'s symposium, where Gary Becker, himself a Nobel Prize winner and the program's final speaker, said he considers Friedman "simply the greatest economist of the 20th Century."
Each of the program sessions was organized around a concept pioneered by Friedman and now a commonplace of contemporary political debate: privatization of Social Security, economic incentives to move people off welfare rolls, school vouchers.
"No, I didn't invent vouchers," Friedman said, protesting that last credit. "Thomas Paine did in `Common Sense.' I was merely its sponsor."
Though he is a founding father of the conservative revival of recent decades, a few of Friedman's ideas have been more welcomed by the left than right. He has called for the legalization of recreational drugs and was an early proponent of ending the military draft.
He also has the ability to turn the tables on political opponents, sometimes even gaining their respect.
In "Two Lucky People," his and his wife's joint autobiography, Friedman told of being a visiting professor at UCLA when students--many of them self-professed liberals--were up in arms over a proposed tuition increase. Friedman observed that if middle-class students didn't pay higher tuition, then it would fall to low-income taxpayers to keep the public university afloat.
"The people of Watts were paying the college expenses of the people of Beverly Hills," he noted, an argument that won the debate.
The road to that kind of intellectual nimbleness began not far from the site of Friday's celebration, as U. of C. President Don Michael Randel noted in his welcoming remarks. In 1932, Milton Friedman and Rose Director, both offspring of Jewish immigrants, registered for Economics 301 at the university.
"Students were seated in alphabetical order," Randel said. "And as there were none with names beginning with an `E,' Milton and Rose sat next to each other."
They have been together ever since, authoring books and eventually establishing a foundation bearing both their names to promulgate their philosophy.
When Friedman finished his graduate work during the Depression, academic slots were limited. So he went to Washington to work for a series of New Deal agencies.
Shortly, though, he drew a bead on the large-scale government. By the time he joined the U. of C.'s faculty in 1946, he was arguing that Big Brother not only is a drag on economic development but also robs humans of dignity by taking choice out of the individual's hand and making him subservient to bureaucrats.
By the time his best seller "Capitalism and Freedom" was published in 1962, Friedman was attracting an audience far beyond academic circles. He also regularly left the campus to pump his ideas. He advised presidents--Ronald Reagan was especially attentive--and preached his views in a celebrated public television series. He even went out on the political hustings.
In 1976, he was campaigning in Michigan for a proposal to limit government spending when reporters informed him he had won a Nobel Prize. The proposition subsequently lost at the polls.
The moral of the story, as Friedman sees it, is never to rest on your laurels--as Harvard professor Martin Feldstein also observed Friday.
"I'm sure that government will be smaller when we gather to celebrate his 100th birthday," he said. "But it will never be as small as Milton would like it to be."
Copyright © 2002, Chicago Tribune
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