The late, great economist Milton Friedman would have been 100 years old if he died today. About a year ago I was in Chicago to record an episode of a retroactive look back at his influential Free to Choose TV series so I got to spend some time scrutinizing his ideas and pondering their legacy.
But I think it's noteworthy that even though today everyone will be talking about how influential he's been, probably his most historically important argument has never had less influence today. This was a combined analytic argument about the Great Depression and monetary policy, and a kind of canny rhetorical move. The way it went was that after the Great Depression a conventional wisdom was put in place holding that the Depression was a crisis of unregulated capitalism and that it showed that a prosperous market economy required active management by the government. This was both a rhetorical crisis for proponents of free markets, and a philosophical crisis for opponents of income redistribution. After all, if prosperity relies on active macroeconomic management then it's difficult to see market incomes as reflecting deep pre-political moral entitlements.
Friedman had a two-part counterattack. Part one was to argue—fairly persuasively—that monetary policy rather than fiscal policy was the key to recovery from the Great Depression.
Part two has a more complicated legacy. The straightforward reading of Friedman's point about monetary policy and the Depression is that, yes, a propserous market economy does require active public sector management of the demand side of the economy. But Friedman wanted it to be read a different way, as an example of the damage done by the government doing bad things. These characterizations are basically equivalent, but Friedman's way better suited his ideological proclivities regarding income redistribution. But faced with a new depression, Friedman's way of putting this has created two problems. One is that on the right a lot of folks view calls for central banks to adopt appropriate monetary policy as just another form of government activism. Meanwhile on the left thanks to co-branding between a monetary focused view of macroeconomic policy and Friedman's views on other matters, many view it as a kind of sellout to argue that business cycle problems can be cured with monetary policy.
So we're left with a world in which Friedman is an iconic figure, and yet no major political movement in any of the developed world's major countries is calling for a Friedmanite solution to the dominant policy problem of the moment.
Friedman puhui paljon rahasta ja sen tarjonnasta. Kuten nobelistitoveri Robert Solow kuuluisasti sanoi:
Everything reminds Milton Friedman of the money supply. Everything reminds me of sex, but I try to keep it out of my papers.
Paleface puhuu eräässä haastattelussa "miltonfriedmanilaisesta vapaasta markkinataloudesta", mikä on typerää parillakin tasolla. Ensinnäkin: miltonfriedmanilainen? Vähän niin kuin johnmaynardkeynesiläinen? Toiseksikin jää vähän epäselväksi, mikä ero on miltonfriedmanilaisen vapaan markkinatalouden ja vapaan markkinatalouden välillä. Friedman puhui paljon vapaasta markkinataloudesta ja vaikutti voimakkaasti sen puolesta, mutta ei hänellä ollut mitään erityistä omaa mallia siinä.
Jos haluaa jotain sanoa miltonfriedmanilaiseksi politiikaksi, niin sopivin kandidaatti olisi rahapolitiikka, jonka ytimessä on rahan tarjonnan vakaa kasvu. Friedmanilta peräisin on toinenkin tunnettu rahapolitiikkasääntö, ns. Friedmanin sääntö, hintateorian (se, mitä nykyään sanottaisiin mikroksi) ihailtava soveltaminen rahan kysyntään ja tarjontaan. Mutta rahan tarjonnan vakaa kasvu, se oli Monetary History:n ja hänen suhdannevaihteluita koskevien näkemystensä keskiössä. Vielä hienommaksi tämän politiikan yhdistämisen Friedmaniin tekee se, että hän muutti mieltään sen suhteen. Kuten nobelistitoveri Robert Barro kertoo [pdf]:
Milton has been very successful with the broad proposition that monetary policy activism tends to be mistaken. However, his well-known, specific proposal—that a monetary aggregate such as M1 or M2 grow at a pre-specified rate such as 2 or 3% per year—has problems. In fact, this area is the only one I know of where Milton has pretty much reversed his previous position. The problem is that the real demand for money is not that stable, most dramatically in the current, high-tech financial environment, but also over the longer history. Therefore, a constant growth rate for any monetary aggregate does not ensure anything close to inflation stability. One way or another, a monetary policy aimed at inflation stability has to allow the nominal quantity of money to adjust to shifts in the real quantity of money demanded.
Joka tapauksessa rahalla on erityinen rooli taloudessa. Money matters. Tätä taustaa vasten loppuun pari kuviota euroalueen rahan tarjonnasta parilla mittarilla. Jotain näyttää tapahtuneen viime vuosina.
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