我不久之前在marginal revolution上面找到的一篇有意思的文章。本文作者Lanny Ebenstein借助公开发表的文章及其他资料梳理了在长达六十多年的时段中,经济学家米尔顿.弗里德曼在意识形态方面的演变。有意思的一个细节是,弗里德曼在30,40年代也深受当时占主导地位的凯恩斯经济学的影响,当日后他重读1942年他本人在国会所做的关于通货膨胀的一份证词时,他不由得发出如下感叹:“I had completely forgotten how thoroughly Keynesian I then was”。
本文应当对经济思想史,尤其是战后美国经济思想史和芝加哥学派的研究者有所帮助,亦可作为闲暇时的读物。事实上本人就属于第二类读者。
最后将原文摘要抄录如下:
This article traces the evolution of Milton Friedman’s ideological views over the course of his adult life. It finds the evolution to be from a moderate liberalism to a definite classical liberalism and then, during the last 50 years of his life, to an increasingly robust libertarianism. Friedman explicitly acknowledged a change in his views on a number of policy issues; also, sometimes even if his opinion on an issue did not change, the strength with which he held and promoted it did. A significant point in Friedman’s life was his retirement and relocation to San Francisco in 1976. There he became almost exclusively a public policy advocate, and his mode of discourse shifted significantly away from empirical demonstration and toward invoking and applying what he considered to be the broad verities and maxims of the outlook he had established for himself.