In addition to tiny textbooks on human interdependence and Islamo-skepticism, I would be interested in a tiny book on Milton Friedman if it were to focus on an interesting aspect of his life.
For example, in The Three Languages of Politics you encourage open-minded political reasoning. A tiny book on Milton Friedman, or at least one chapter of a tiny book on a larger topic such as Open-Minded Political Communicators, might examine Friedman’s communication style or reasoning style. Is he a good example of the open-minded reasoning you encourage?
It’s interesting to note your observation about Friedman in The Three Languages of Politics. On page 27 you write.
“In the 1950s and the early 1960s, the people who had the right model were the people who were fighting for black Americans to have true voting rights, equal access to housing, and an end to the Jim Crow laws. The civilization-barbarism axis and the liberty-coercion axis did not provide the best insight into the issue. In fact, I would argue that among conservatives and libertarians, leading icons such as Barry Goldwater and Milton Friedman took positions that in retrospect were wrong-headed. In his 1962 book Capitalism and Freedom, Friedman supported the rights of individuals to discriminate. His view might have been consistent with opposition to government-enforced discrimination, as produced by the Jim Crow laws. However, Goldwater did not even stand up against the Jim Crow laws. Instead, he supported the rights of states to enact such laws against the authority of the federal government.”
This is disappointing for my tribe. Friedman was the reason I joined the libertarian tribe.
So where’s the open-minded reasoning tribe? Is this Substack it? :)
The North could not and even now cannot credit the South with having *any* knowledge of its own society, how to arrange things, how to live given human fallibility. And of course the Civil War had broken Southern society and naturally this elevated its worst people - think of any famous, ignorant Southern demagogue - and put him next to Lee in terms of character - and yet it’s the memory of Lee that must be trodden into the ground. (A small but telling example of myopia.) Out of this hostility arises federal civil rights law which certainly appears to have the full force of justice behind it, considered simply, with no foreknowledge of the coercion and intrusiveness that would flow from it. Law that surely vanishingly few would now entertain undoing, even noble law that can be seen as having been ill-served by the ignoble law profession.
So the North (or whatever axis you want to use - red/blue, Yankee/not) - should not act so shocked at the turnabout, in light of the worsening of so much in the country up to and including race relations, that the South now views the North as, similarly, now, having *no conception* practically down to the last detail - about human nature, and how to order things.
How does this contrast with your view of how civil rights turned out. Wasn’t Goldwater basically correct?
Caldwell wrote a whole book on Civil Rights being a second constitution that overrode the original.
I take it as a given that people at the time in the 1960s had good intentions and that it wasn’t unreasonable for them to be mistaken, but in the end they were.
I think the 1960s stance on discrimination rested on the foundation that it was irrational and so outlawing it would improve the situation whatever the short term hiccups. Since it turned out to be fundamentally rational that fell apart.
1) Discrimination is what you do with incomplete information.
2) information will always be incomplete.
3) asking to end discrimination is asking for perfect information in all circumstances with n=1. That level of underwriting is not feasible.
4) it is unrealistic to think that your perfect level of underwriting can be achieved in a society. People need simple narratives that can be applied at scale
5) equal outcomes is a simple extrapolation applied at scale. It passed the “market test” of civil rights
Individual Freedom to act requires the freedom to act in non-violent irrational ways.
Dem gov't Jim Crow laws were terrible.
It's not clear the Civil Rights Act was better than merely forbidding the Public Schools & Government Agencies and Public Companies from discriminating.
Maybe allowing individual lunch diner owners the freedom to irrationally continue to discriminate based on race would have had slower integration, but with less AA more of the top brains of Black community would have stayed to help the Black communities that instead they left to make more money while making (mostly white) owners richer.
Maybe the explosion of unmarried Black mothers wouldn't have happened with so much white guilt support.
What is Friedman's rationale? (Haven't read book; unlikely to)
Excellent, high energy interview a couple weeks ago with Burns on Russ Roberts (EconTalk). I suspect it will make his 2023 top interviews list. Just say’n.
I listened to McAfee and Burns on Russ Roberts Econtalk. I was much more impressed with Burns. She does original research and it sounded like Roberts even learned things about Friedman he didn’t know. I am most of the way through the biography right now and I have learned a lot. I had the same experience with her Ayn Rand biography even though I thought I knew a lot about her I still learned a lot.
On the other hand McAfee’s interview made me think his book is mainly based on him reading other books and then writing one himself. I get the impression you would be much better off reading the source material than his summary. At one point in the interview he tells Russ about a/bing that companies should do to test methods or products. He gives the example of Apples’ portrait mode of including the realtime software induced bokeh mode of adding a blurry background to a photo to show depth. Robert’s quickly dismisses his example as kind of bogus since Russ thinks his background in photography allows him to comment from a place of expertise on the utility of the real time bokeh function. Funny enough the newest iPhones trick has been able to add the portrait type effect after taking the picture in non-portrait mode and this has been marketing as a new feature. So Russ is likely right. Russ graciously allows McAfee to make his point a different way. I think the second time he tried the Pepsi taste test?
The whole exchange reminded me of Knolls law “everything you read in the newspapers is absolutely true, except for the rare story of which you happen to have firsthand knowledge.” I don’t know if McAfee’s book is filled with this kind of stuff and just summaries of other people’s ideas or what but so far it doesn’t seem worth picking up.
Thanks for the pointer to the McAfee book. Seems fascinating! I recently (re-)discovered the idea of the “E-Myth” by Michael Gerber, which says the jobs of *managing* and *making a company’s products* are really different, which is why you need professional management (ie pointy-haired Dilbert bosses). A very cursory look at this new book makes it look like it makes the opposite recommendation (ie that managers should be technical experts too).
Given that the E-Myth was written around the same time as your passage above, I’d be curious if (a) you think it has aged better/worse/other than your late-90s take(s), and/or (b) to what extent has the landscape changed due to 2.5 decades of technological/PSST change, such that management theories that worked then are now obsolete?
LLM summary of your autobio: ```Thesis: The author argues that mainstream macroeconomics has fundamental flaws in how it models production and discovery of new economic patterns. He believes macro models wrongly treat production as instantaneous and ignore the time needed to discover successful production processes through trial-and-error entrepreneurship.
Insights:
Financial crises and business cycles often stem from Minsky-Kindleberger cycles of fragility/stability in finance.
Inflation expectations are anchored most of the time but can shift between different regimes.
Money supply does not control inflation due to velocity offsets.
Fiscal stimulus is unlikely to be effective due to monetary offset.
The economy needs time to discover new comparative advantages and production patterns after major shifts.
Bio: The author, Arnold Kling, studied economics in the 1970s, worked as an economist at the Fed and Freddie Mac, started an internet business in the 1990s, and now teaches and writes. His career has spanned roles in academia, policy, business, and writing.
In summary, Kling argues mainstream macro models are too simplistic about production and discovery. He draws on insights from multiple schools of thought and his varied career experiences to critique current macro theory and policy.```
I’m very interested in reading your reviews of Galbraith and the Geek Way. Just bought the latter. I’m particularly interested as I run a professional services company and believe we are at the beginning of an era of using easily built software tools but the culture of a company like mine is not adapted to software development and management. I don’t think there’s an option going forward not to adapt to software development.
Friedman’s most important and influential (or vice versa) work was his support for people to be “Free to Choose” thru his book and media. Another review of Burns omits mention of this, so maybe Burns also fails to highlight it. His monetary ideas and great history of the Great Depression were also more important to the public, tho perhaps not to pro economists.
In many late 70s, early 80s Palo Alto meetings, he would emphasize that he was an R-Republican, and an l-libertarian (as I would describe myself now, tho then I was L-Libertarian).
His work got him his Nobel, as did Krugman for himself, and that plus his very reasonable speaking kept him in the media spotlight. More so than Hayek, or the more radical non-Nobeled Rothbard.
Milton claimed that Central Europe needed 3 things after the fall of communism: privatization, privatization, privatization. I came to Czechoslovakia for the Vaclav Klaus coupon privatization, including advising to avoid some unfair pricing aspects. But I learned, as Milton also later conceded, that market supporting institutions and government laws are also needed for privatization to work for the common good. “Tunneling” is a great word for how poor decision making heads of big companies could turn semi-public, semi-government owned assets into fully private cash in their own bank accounts.
Previous reading about Friedman noted what fierce competitor he was, even as a senior tennis player. I’d guess he never tore his Achilles tendon. His son David’s book is also great The Machinery of Freedom.
Thank you. These are helpful mini reviews.
In addition to tiny textbooks on human interdependence and Islamo-skepticism, I would be interested in a tiny book on Milton Friedman if it were to focus on an interesting aspect of his life.
For example, in The Three Languages of Politics you encourage open-minded political reasoning. A tiny book on Milton Friedman, or at least one chapter of a tiny book on a larger topic such as Open-Minded Political Communicators, might examine Friedman’s communication style or reasoning style. Is he a good example of the open-minded reasoning you encourage?
It’s interesting to note your observation about Friedman in The Three Languages of Politics. On page 27 you write.
“In the 1950s and the early 1960s, the people who had the right model were the people who were fighting for black Americans to have true voting rights, equal access to housing, and an end to the Jim Crow laws. The civilization-barbarism axis and the liberty-coercion axis did not provide the best insight into the issue. In fact, I would argue that among conservatives and libertarians, leading icons such as Barry Goldwater and Milton Friedman took positions that in retrospect were wrong-headed. In his 1962 book Capitalism and Freedom, Friedman supported the rights of individuals to discriminate. His view might have been consistent with opposition to government-enforced discrimination, as produced by the Jim Crow laws. However, Goldwater did not even stand up against the Jim Crow laws. Instead, he supported the rights of states to enact such laws against the authority of the federal government.”
This is disappointing for my tribe. Friedman was the reason I joined the libertarian tribe.
So where’s the open-minded reasoning tribe? Is this Substack it? :)
Burns takes the time to explain how Friedman and Goldwater rationalized their positions in the early 1960s.
The North could not and even now cannot credit the South with having *any* knowledge of its own society, how to arrange things, how to live given human fallibility. And of course the Civil War had broken Southern society and naturally this elevated its worst people - think of any famous, ignorant Southern demagogue - and put him next to Lee in terms of character - and yet it’s the memory of Lee that must be trodden into the ground. (A small but telling example of myopia.) Out of this hostility arises federal civil rights law which certainly appears to have the full force of justice behind it, considered simply, with no foreknowledge of the coercion and intrusiveness that would flow from it. Law that surely vanishingly few would now entertain undoing, even noble law that can be seen as having been ill-served by the ignoble law profession.
So the North (or whatever axis you want to use - red/blue, Yankee/not) - should not act so shocked at the turnabout, in light of the worsening of so much in the country up to and including race relations, that the South now views the North as, similarly, now, having *no conception* practically down to the last detail - about human nature, and how to order things.
How does this contrast with your view of how civil rights turned out. Wasn’t Goldwater basically correct?
Caldwell wrote a whole book on Civil Rights being a second constitution that overrode the original.
I take it as a given that people at the time in the 1960s had good intentions and that it wasn’t unreasonable for them to be mistaken, but in the end they were.
I think the 1960s stance on discrimination rested on the foundation that it was irrational and so outlawing it would improve the situation whatever the short term hiccups. Since it turned out to be fundamentally rational that fell apart.
Discrimination was not rational. Insisting on equal outcomes created a mess.
1) Discrimination is what you do with incomplete information.
2) information will always be incomplete.
3) asking to end discrimination is asking for perfect information in all circumstances with n=1. That level of underwriting is not feasible.
4) it is unrealistic to think that your perfect level of underwriting can be achieved in a society. People need simple narratives that can be applied at scale
5) equal outcomes is a simple extrapolation applied at scale. It passed the “market test” of civil rights
Individual Freedom to act requires the freedom to act in non-violent irrational ways.
Dem gov't Jim Crow laws were terrible.
It's not clear the Civil Rights Act was better than merely forbidding the Public Schools & Government Agencies and Public Companies from discriminating.
Maybe allowing individual lunch diner owners the freedom to irrationally continue to discriminate based on race would have had slower integration, but with less AA more of the top brains of Black community would have stayed to help the Black communities that instead they left to make more money while making (mostly white) owners richer.
Maybe the explosion of unmarried Black mothers wouldn't have happened with so much white guilt support.
What is Friedman's rationale? (Haven't read book; unlikely to)
Good to know. Thank you.
Excellent, high energy interview a couple weeks ago with Burns on Russ Roberts (EconTalk). I suspect it will make his 2023 top interviews list. Just say’n.
I listened to McAfee and Burns on Russ Roberts Econtalk. I was much more impressed with Burns. She does original research and it sounded like Roberts even learned things about Friedman he didn’t know. I am most of the way through the biography right now and I have learned a lot. I had the same experience with her Ayn Rand biography even though I thought I knew a lot about her I still learned a lot.
On the other hand McAfee’s interview made me think his book is mainly based on him reading other books and then writing one himself. I get the impression you would be much better off reading the source material than his summary. At one point in the interview he tells Russ about a/bing that companies should do to test methods or products. He gives the example of Apples’ portrait mode of including the realtime software induced bokeh mode of adding a blurry background to a photo to show depth. Robert’s quickly dismisses his example as kind of bogus since Russ thinks his background in photography allows him to comment from a place of expertise on the utility of the real time bokeh function. Funny enough the newest iPhones trick has been able to add the portrait type effect after taking the picture in non-portrait mode and this has been marketing as a new feature. So Russ is likely right. Russ graciously allows McAfee to make his point a different way. I think the second time he tried the Pepsi taste test?
The whole exchange reminded me of Knolls law “everything you read in the newspapers is absolutely true, except for the rare story of which you happen to have firsthand knowledge.” I don’t know if McAfee’s book is filled with this kind of stuff and just summaries of other people’s ideas or what but so far it doesn’t seem worth picking up.
Thanks for the pointer to the McAfee book. Seems fascinating! I recently (re-)discovered the idea of the “E-Myth” by Michael Gerber, which says the jobs of *managing* and *making a company’s products* are really different, which is why you need professional management (ie pointy-haired Dilbert bosses). A very cursory look at this new book makes it look like it makes the opposite recommendation (ie that managers should be technical experts too).
Given that the E-Myth was written around the same time as your passage above, I’d be curious if (a) you think it has aged better/worse/other than your late-90s take(s), and/or (b) to what extent has the landscape changed due to 2.5 decades of technological/PSST change, such that management theories that worked then are now obsolete?
LLM summary of your autobio: ```Thesis: The author argues that mainstream macroeconomics has fundamental flaws in how it models production and discovery of new economic patterns. He believes macro models wrongly treat production as instantaneous and ignore the time needed to discover successful production processes through trial-and-error entrepreneurship.
Insights:
Financial crises and business cycles often stem from Minsky-Kindleberger cycles of fragility/stability in finance.
Inflation expectations are anchored most of the time but can shift between different regimes.
Money supply does not control inflation due to velocity offsets.
Fiscal stimulus is unlikely to be effective due to monetary offset.
The economy needs time to discover new comparative advantages and production patterns after major shifts.
Bio: The author, Arnold Kling, studied economics in the 1970s, worked as an economist at the Fed and Freddie Mac, started an internet business in the 1990s, and now teaches and writes. His career has spanned roles in academia, policy, business, and writing.
In summary, Kling argues mainstream macro models are too simplistic about production and discovery. He draws on insights from multiple schools of thought and his varied career experiences to critique current macro theory and policy.```
I’m very interested in reading your reviews of Galbraith and the Geek Way. Just bought the latter. I’m particularly interested as I run a professional services company and believe we are at the beginning of an era of using easily built software tools but the culture of a company like mine is not adapted to software development and management. I don’t think there’s an option going forward not to adapt to software development.
Friedman’s most important and influential (or vice versa) work was his support for people to be “Free to Choose” thru his book and media. Another review of Burns omits mention of this, so maybe Burns also fails to highlight it. His monetary ideas and great history of the Great Depression were also more important to the public, tho perhaps not to pro economists.
In many late 70s, early 80s Palo Alto meetings, he would emphasize that he was an R-Republican, and an l-libertarian (as I would describe myself now, tho then I was L-Libertarian).
His work got him his Nobel, as did Krugman for himself, and that plus his very reasonable speaking kept him in the media spotlight. More so than Hayek, or the more radical non-Nobeled Rothbard.
Milton claimed that Central Europe needed 3 things after the fall of communism: privatization, privatization, privatization. I came to Czechoslovakia for the Vaclav Klaus coupon privatization, including advising to avoid some unfair pricing aspects. But I learned, as Milton also later conceded, that market supporting institutions and government laws are also needed for privatization to work for the common good. “Tunneling” is a great word for how poor decision making heads of big companies could turn semi-public, semi-government owned assets into fully private cash in their own bank accounts.
Previous reading about Friedman noted what fierce competitor he was, even as a senior tennis player. I’d guess he never tore his Achilles tendon. His son David’s book is also great The Machinery of Freedom.
Yes, I greatly enjoyed Free to Choose, both the television show and the book. He also wrote very good columns for Newsweek for many years.