6 results
1 - The Invisible Hand in Economics and Politics
- Edited by Malcolm Cook, Daljit Singh
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- Book:
- Singapore Lectures 1980-2018
- Published by:
- ISEAS–Yusof Ishak Institute
- Published online:
- 09 October 2021
- Print publication:
- 07 October 2020, pp 1-18
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Summary
Milton Friedman, Nobel laureate in economics and Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago, delivered the inaugural Singapore Lecture on 14 October 1980. He was introduced to the audience by Singapore Deputy Prime Minister Dr Goh Keng Swee. A proponent of free market capitalism with minimal governmental involvement, Professor Friedman's influential ideas helped to move economic consensus to the right, leading to the free market revolutions in Britain and America in the 1980s. They also had strong influence in other parts of the world. Professor Friedman's lecture, followed by a Q&A session, was a stimulating exposition of his ideas.
I am going to talk tonight about some very broad issues, but issues that I believe have a direct bearing on the prospects of much of the world over the coming decade. My comments will be divided into three parts. I want to talk, first, about the changing trends that have dominated developments in the world over the past several centuries, and that I think foreshadow the developments that we shall see in the coming decades. I want then to examine a bit more carefully the nature of the forces that produced those trends; finally, I want to conclude by looking at what developments are likely in coming decades in response to those forces.
In 1899, a famous British constitutional lawyer, A.V. Dicey, gave a series of lectures at Harvard University, which were later collected and published in a book under the title: Lectures on the Relation between Law and Public Opinion in the Nineteenth Century. That book contains a profound analysis of the forces that determine the government policies and of the role of public opinion in shaping those policies. Dicey's main thesis was that legislation affecting public policy follows public opinion but only after a long lag. If public opinion moves, then some ten or twenty years later, that movement in public opinion is reflected in policy. This idea was expressed later in a famous paragraph by John Maynard Keynes when he talked of “madmen in authority … distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back”.
15 - Final word
- Edited by Uskali Mäki, Erasmus Universiteit Rotterdam
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- Book:
- The Methodology of Positive Economics
- Published online:
- 02 December 2009
- Print publication:
- 28 May 2009, pp 355-355
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I have somewhat mixed feelings about the splendid conference that Uskali Mäki organized on my ancient methodology article. On the one hand, it is a source of great satisfaction that an article I wrote more than fifty years ago should still be regarded as worth extensive scholarly discussion. On the other hand, that very fact is a severe condemnation of the essay. Surely, if the essay had been really lucid, scholars should not today still be having different opinions about what it says.
I have myself added to the confusion by early on adopting a policy of not replying to critiques of the article. I decided that I had a choice: I could spend my time discussing how economics should be done – a worthy cause; or I could spend my time doing economics – in my opinion, if not a more worthy, a more attractive cause. That act of self–denial has quite unintentionally been a plus for the discussion of methodology. It has left the field open for all comers, and they have all come and produced a broad stream of commentary. The articles at this conference are a good example.
I have read them all and I am impressed with their high quality and intellectual seriousness. I would not have thought that my modest essay would have relevance to so many issues. I feel like a proud father who has a large brood of bright children – all of them right, all of them wrong, and all entitled to his or her own views. Yet I am also impressed that there is a common thread that runs through them.
The methodology of positive economics (1953)
- Edited by Uskali Mäki, Erasmus Universiteit Rotterdam
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- Book:
- The Methodology of Positive Economics
- Published online:
- 02 December 2009
- Print publication:
- 28 May 2009, pp 3-44
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In his admirable book on The Scope and Method of Political Economy John Neville Keynes distinguishes among “a positive science…[,] a body of systematized knowledge concerning what is, a normative or regulative science …[,] a body of systematized knowledge discussing criteria of what ought ot be …; an art … [,] a system of rules for the attainment of a given end”; comments that “confusion between them is common and has been the source of many mischievous errors”; and urges the importance of “recognizing a distinct positive science of political economy.”
This paper is concerned primarily with certain methodological problems that arise in constructing the “distinct positive science” Keynes called for —in particular, the problem how to decide whether a suggested hypothesis or theory should be tentatively accepted as part of the “body of systematized knowledge concerning what is.” But the confusion Keynes laments is still so rife and so much of a hindrance to the recognition that economics can be, and in part is, a positive science that it seems well to preface the main body of the paper with a few remarks about the relation between positive and normative economics.
THE RELATION BETWEEN POSITIVE AND NORMATIVE ECONOMICS
Confusion between positive and normative economics is to some extent inevitable. The subject matter of economics is regarded by almost everyone as vitally important to himself and within the range of his own experience and competence; it is the source of continous and extensive controversy and the occasion for frequent legislation.
7 - The Methodology of Positive Economics
- Daniel M. Hausman, University of Wisconsin, Madison
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- Book:
- The Philosophy of Economics
- Published online:
- 05 June 2012
- Print publication:
- 17 December 2007, pp 145-178
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Milton Friedman (1912–2006) was born in Brooklyn, New York, and received his Ph.D. in economics from Columbia University. He taught at the University of Minnesota, and then for many years at the University of Chicago. After 1977, he was a Senior Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution in Stanford, California. Friedman is best known for his work in monetary theory and for his concern for free enterprise and individual liberty. Milton Friedman was awarded the Nobel Prize in economics in 1976. The following essay, which is reprinted in its entirety, is the most influential work on economic methodology of this century.
In his admirable book on The Scope and Method of Political Economy John Neville Keynes distinguishes among “a positive science … [,] a body of systematized knowledge concerning what is; a normative or regulative science … [,] a body of systematized knowledge discussing criteria of what ought to be …; an art … [,] a system of rules for the attainment of a given end”; comments that “confusion between them is common and has been the source of many mischievous errors”; and urges the importance of “recognizing a distinct positive science of political economy.”
This [essay] is concerned primarily with certain methodological problems that arise in constructing the “distinct positive science” Keynes called for – in particular, the problem how to decide whether a suggested hypothesis or theory should be tentatively accepted as part of the “body of systematized knowledge concerning what is.”
Looking Backward, Looking Forward: MLA Members Speak
- April Alliston, Elizabeth Ammons, Jean Arnold, Nina Baym, Sandra L. Beckett, Peter G. Beidler, Roger A. Berger, Sandra Bermann, J.J. Wilson, Troy Boone, Alison Booth, Wayne C. Booth, James Phelan, Marie Borroff, Ihab Hassan, Ulrich Weisstein, Zack Bowen, Jill Campbell, Dan Campion, Jay Caplan, Maurice Charney, Beverly Lyon Clark, Robert A. Colby, Thomas C. Coleman III, Nicole Cooley, Richard Dellamora, Morris Dickstein, Terrell Dixon, Emory Elliott, Caryl Emerson, Ann W. Engar, Lars Engle, Kai Hammermeister, N. N. Feltes, Mary Anne Ferguson, Annie Finch, Shelley Fisher Fishkin, Jerry Aline Flieger, Norman Friedman, Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Sandra M. Gilbert, Laurie Grobman, George Guida, Liselotte Gumpel, R. K. Gupta, Florence Howe, Cathy L. Jrade, Richard A. Kaye, Calhoun Winton, Murray Krieger, Robert Langbaum, Richard A. Lanham, Marilee Lindemann, Paul Michael Lützeler, Thomas J. Lynn, Juliet Flower MacCannell, Michelle A. Massé, Irving Massey, Georges May, Christian W. Hallstein, Gita May, Lucy McDiarmid, Ellen Messer-Davidow, Koritha Mitchell, Robin Smiles, Kenyatta Albeny, George Monteiro, Joel Myerson, Alan Nadel, Ashton Nichols, Jeffrey Nishimura, Neal Oxenhandler, David Palumbo-Liu, Vincent P. Pecora, David Porter, Nancy Potter, Ronald C. Rosbottom, Elias L. Rivers, Gerhard F. Strasser, J. L. Styan, Marianna De Marco Torgovnick, Gary Totten, David van Leer, Asha Varadharajan, Orrin N. C. Wang, Sharon Willis, Louise E. Wright, Donald A. Yates, Takayuki Yokota-Murakami, Richard E. Zeikowitz, Angelika Bammer, Dale Bauer, Karl Beckson, Betsy A. Bowen, Stacey Donohue, Sheila Emerson, Gwendolyn Audrey Foster, Jay L. Halio, Karl Kroeber, Terence Hawkes, William B. Hunter, Mary Jambus, Willard F. King, Nancy K. Miller, Jody Norton, Ann Pellegrini, S. P. Rosenbaum, Lorie Roth, Robert Scholes, Joanne Shattock, Rosemary T. VanArsdel, Alfred Bendixen, Alarma Kathleen Brown, Michael J. Kiskis, Debra A. Castillo, Rey Chow, John F. Crossen, Robert F. Fleissner, Regenia Gagnier, Nicholas Howe, M. Thomas Inge, Frank Mehring, Hyungji Park, Jahan Ramazani, Kenneth M. Roemer, Deborah D. Rogers, A. LaVonne Brown Ruoff, Regina M. Schwartz, John T. Shawcross, Brenda R. Silver, Andrew von Hendy, Virginia Wright Wexman, Britta Zangen, A. Owen Aldridge, Paula R. Backscheider, Roland Bartel, E. M. Forster, Milton Birnbaum, Jonathan Bishop, Crystal Downing, Frank H. Ellis, Roberto Forns-Broggi, James R. Giles, Mary E. Giles, Susan Blair Green, Madelyn Gutwirth, Constance B. Hieatt, Titi Adepitan, Edgar C. Knowlton, Jr., Emanuel Mussman, Sally Todd Nelson, Robert O. Preyer, David Diego Rodriguez, Guy Stern, James Thorpe, Robert J. Wilson, Rebecca S. Beal, Joyce Simutis, Betsy Bowden, Sara Cooper, Wheeler Winston Dixon, Tarek el Ariss, Richard Jewell, John W. Kronik, Wendy Martin, Stuart Y. McDougal, Hugo Méndez-Ramírez, Ivy Schweitzer, Armand E. Singer, G. Thomas Tanselle, Tom Bishop, Mary Ann Caws, Marcel Gutwirth, Christophe Ippolito, Lawrence D. Kritzman, James Longenbach, Tim McCracken, Wolfe S. Molitor, Diane Quantic, Gregory Rabassa, Ellen M. Tsagaris, Anthony C. Yu, Betty Jean Craige, Wendell V. Harris, J. Hillis Miller, Jesse G. Swan, Helene Zimmer-Loew, Peter Berek, James Chandler, Hanna K. Charney, Philip Cohen, Judith Fetterley, Herbert Lindenberger, Julia Reinhard Lupton, Maximillian E. Novak, Richard Ohmann, Marjorie Perloff, Mark Reynolds, James Sledd, Harriet Turner, Marie Umeh, Flavia Aloya, Regina Barreca, Konrad Bieber, Ellis Hanson, William J. Hyde, Holly A. Laird, David Leverenz, Allen Michie, J. Wesley Miller, Marvin Rosenberg, Daniel R. Schwarz, Elizabeth Welt Trahan, Jean Fagan Yellin
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- Journal:
- PMLA / Publications of the Modern Language Association of America / Volume 115 / Issue 7 / December 2000
- Published online by Cambridge University Press:
- 23 October 2020, pp. 1986-2078
- Print publication:
- December 2000
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18 - “Factors accounting for changes in the stock of money”
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- By Milton Friedman, Hoover Institute, Anna Jacobson Schwartz, Hoover Institute
- Edited by Robert Whaples, Wake Forest University, North Carolina, Dianne C. Betts, Southern Methodist University, Texas
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- Book:
- Historical Perspectives on the American Economy
- Published online:
- 05 June 2012
- Print publication:
- 26 May 1995, pp 576-595
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Summary
The factors accounting for changes in the stock of money during the four years from 1929 to 1933 are strikingly different from those in the other periods we have examined. Generally, the pattern for high-powered money has impressed itself most strongly on the total stock of money, the behavior of the two deposit ratios serving mainly to alter the tilt of the money stock relative to the tilt of high-powered money. That relation holds in Chart 1 only for the period up to October 1930, the onset of the first banking crisis. Thereafter, the two deposit ratios take command. High-powered money moves in a direction opposite to that of the total stock of money, and not even most of its short-term movements leave an impress on the stock of money.
From August 1929 to March 1933 as a whole, the change in highpowered money alone would have produced a rise of 17½ per cent in the stock of money. The change in the deposit-currency ratio alone would have produced a decline of 37 per cent; the change in the deposit-reserve ratio, a decline of 20 per cent; interaction between the two ratios, a rise of 10 per cent; these three converted the 17½ per cent rise that highpowered money would have produced into a 35 per cent decline in the stock of money. For a more detailed examination of these changes, we consider separately each of the periods distinguished in the preceding section and marked off on our charts.