More Pooping on the MFI

A professor in the Chicago anthropology department writes into the Chronicle complaining about the Milton Friedman Institute. He brings up Pinochet. For those who don't know, my understanding of the story is that Chicago had some kind of exchange program with a Chilean university. About 25 economists ultimately graduated from this Chicago program and ended up advising in the Pinochet regime, which was a brutal, right-wing military regime. Friedman delivered a dozen or so lectures down there, and advised on macroeconomic policy, including but not limited to a plan to eradicate their hyperinflation problem. For this, Friedman's legacy is linked to Pinochet's regime in the minds of leftist academics.

What a difficult balance it is to give economic policy. Presumably, had no one provided that administration with reasonable policy, then the lives of Chileans would've undoubtedly been worse. The author of the above Chronicle piece seems to have a difficult time believing that counterfactual. The fact of the matter is that authors like this one oppose something like the MFI on purely ideological grounds. They are almost always Marxist in philosophical orientation and so are genetically inclined to hate Millton Friedman because of his general endorsement of market liberalization and his general suspicion of government intervention. Nevermind that nearly all economists agree with him, or that his ideas have more or less won the war of ideas even in monetary policy (see this Ann Schwartz reply to Paul Krugman in a recent Journal of Monetary Economics for how Friedman's positions and theories withstood the tests of science and time).