Through Greg Mankiw's blog, I read the whole thing Paul Krugman wrote for The New York of Books on Milton Friedman. I always think that Paul Krugman is smart. Yet I also believe that smart people can be very opinionated and partisan. Here is the most striking part in his tirade:
----What's odd about Friedman's absolutism on the virtues of markets and the vices of government is that in his work as an economist's economist he was actually a model of restraint. As I pointed out earlier, he made great contributions to economic theory by emphasizing the role of individual rationality—but unlike some of his colleagues, he knew where to stop. Why didn't he exhibit the same restraint in his role as a public intellectual?
The answer, I suspect, is that he got caught up in an essentially political role. Milton Friedman the great economist could and did acknowledge ambiguity. But Milton Friedman the great champion of free markets was expected to preach the true faith, not give voice to doubts. And he ended up playing the role his followers expected. As a result, over time the refreshing iconoclasm of his early career hardened into a rigid defense of what had become the new orthodoxy.----
If you replace Friedman with Krugman in these paragraphs and reverse the ideologies, you will find they are still very well written and true.(Picture: MIT)
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