One of Columbia’s most touted affiliates/sons, economist Milton Friedman, died today.
There is gnashing of teeth. Please, let us know your favorite (fictional) Milton Memories.
One of Columbia’s most touted affiliates/sons, economist Milton Friedman, died today.
There is gnashing of teeth. Please, let us know your favorite (fictional) Milton Memories.
13 Comments
@you fool Galbraith is in hell. Friedman is in heaven.
Don’t fool yourself. There were plenty of fraudsters in the 40s, 50s and 60s. Keynes, Galbraith, JFK, and the list goes on.
@please, chris friedman is definitely in hell.
@What I'll remember: He was a leader of a lost generation of intelligentsia who cared more for being right and doing good than for creating the most plausible lie.
RIP, Friedman. Go keep Galbraith company.
@wth Thank the gods Galbraith’s ideas didn’t have enough traction to find a prominent role in economic policy.
This is what’s wrong with the world. Galbraith had noble intentions but misguided and actually harmful solutions, yet he is still praised. Friedman had both good intentions and effective solutions and he is maligned by the economically illiterate anti-capitalists because his solutions are rooted in free-market capitalism.
If Galbraith made it to heaven (unlikely since he spent his life paving the road to hell), I’m sure he would keep his distance from Friedman. Milton didn’t have nice things to say about him: “Many reformers — Galbraith is not alone in this — have as their basic objection to a free market that it frustrates them in achieving their reforms, because it enables people to have what they want, not what the reformers want. Hence every reformer has a strong tendency to be averse to a free market.”
@Friedman Choir http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-6407847019713273360&q=milton+friedman
@I remember Mitlon I first met Milton not long after my first wife and I split up. I had just gotten over a serious illness that I won’t bother to talk about, except that it had something to do with the miserably weary split up and my weary feeling that everything was dead. With the coming of Milton Friedman began that part of my life you could call my life on the road. Before that I’d often dreamed of going west to see the country, always vaguely planning and never taking off. Milton is the perfect guy for the road because he was actually born on the road, when his parents were passing through Salt Lake city in 1926, in a jalopy, on their way to Los Angeles. First reports of him came to me through Chad King, who showed me a few letters from him written in a New Mexico reform school. I was interested in the letters because they so naively and sweetly asked Chad to teach him all about Nietzsche and all the wonderful intellectual things that Chad knew about. This is all far back, when Milton was not the way he is today, when he was just a young jailkid shrouded in mystery. Then news came that Milton was out of reform school and was coming to New York for the first time; also there was talk that he had just married a girl named Marylou.
@what i'll remember I like the time he showed up drunk at a white house recepetion, started blaming the low value of the US dollar on the Jews and called Betty Ford “Sugar Tits”. He was a funny guy.
They say he had the biggest schmeckle in all of hollywood.
@true story well in 1918, milty, which was what we called him on account of that was what we called all the young pollacks in the neigborhood, helped us collect a bunch of mint-condition 1918 liberty-head silver dollars. You see, back in those days, rich men would ride around in Zeppelins, dropping coins on people, and one day I seen J. D. Rockefeller flying by. So I run of the house with a big washtub and� hey! Where are you going?
… Anyway, about my washtub. I�d just used it that morning to wash my turkey, which in those days was known as… a walking bird. We’d always have walking bird on Thanksgiving with all the trimmings: cranberries, injun eyes, yams stuffed with gunpowder. Then we’d all watch football, which in those days was called “baseball”…
@foul! simpsons reference
@extra point for catching the simpsons foul
@Anonymous AS A BOY FRIEDMAN WAS UNRULY AND I FONDLY RECALL AN INSTANCE OF FIGHTING HIM FISTUALLY. HIS FISTS WERE SMALLER IN THOSE YEARS AND I HELD HIM FOR MORE THAN A SHORT TIME. IT IS ONLY FITTING THEN THAT HE WOULD EVENTUALLY RETALIATE, AND RETALIATE HE DID, BY STEALING MY ORIGINAL PLAN OF BECOMING A NOBEL-PRIZE WINNING ECONOMIST.
@FISTUALLY yes!
@john maynard keynes there’s no such thing as a free lunch…in hell