Macroeconomic Dynamics, 5, 2001, 101–131. Printed in the United States of America.
MD INTERVIEW AN INTERVIEW WITH MILTON FRIEDMAN
Interviewed by John B. Taylor Stanford University
May 2, 2000
“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 de- fense 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 the- ory, for he detests the term macroeconomics) would be an extraordinary achieve- ment. Taken together they are daunting: permanent income theory; natural rate theory; the case for floating exchange rates; money growth rules; the optimal quantity of money; 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.
Address correspondence to: John B. Taylor, Department of Economics, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305- 6072, USA; e-mail: [email protected].