Foundations of liberty
馃搱 Economic Thinkers: Friedman, Hayek, Mises and the Free-Market Schools
The economic ideas of Milton Friedman and the thinkers around him: Hayek and the knowledge problem, Mises and the Austrian school, the Chicago school, public choice, supply-side economics, and Thomas Sowell and Walter Williams. Each school is stated in its own words, tested against the record, and answered by its best critics. Each lesson ends with a short quiz.
- 1The Map of Free-Market ThoughtA guide to the schools of free-market economics: the Austrians, Chicago, the Virginia public choice school, supply-side economics, and the writing of Thomas Sowell and Walter Williams. The lesson shows who taught whom, where the schools agree, and where they have fought, including Friedman against Mises on method and Hayek against Friedman on money.17 min
- 2Friedman the EconomistMilton Friedman's scholarly work: the permanent income hypothesis, the monetary history of the Great Depression written with Anna Schwartz, the 1968 address on the natural rate of unemployment, and the test the 1970s and the Volcker years put to them. The lesson separates what held up from what was revised.19 min
- 3Friedman: The Public Policy VoiceMilton Friedman outside the seminar room: school vouchers and the 1955 essay, the negative income tax and the Earned Income Tax Credit, the Gates Commission and the end of the draft, floating exchange rates, the tax withholding he helped build and later regretted, his Newsweek column, Free to Choose, and his ties to Reagan. The lesson closes with a record of what was adopted and what was not.21 min
- 4Hayek and the Knowledge ProblemFriedrich Hayek's quarrel with Keynes in the 1930s, what The Road to Serfdom (1944) actually argues, the 1945 essay on knowledge and prices that economists of every school still assign, spontaneous order, The Constitution of Liberty and its postscript refusing the conservative label, the 1974 Nobel Prize and its lecture on the pretence of knowledge, his late proposal for competing private money, and the points on which he and Milton Friedman never agreed.24 min
- 5Mises, Rothbard and the Austrian SchoolThe Austrian school from Carl Menger and Eugen von Bohm-Bawerk to Ludwig von Mises, Murray Rothbard and Henry Hazlitt: subjective value, the 1920 argument that socialism cannot calculate and the debate it started, the Austrian theory of the business cycle, praxeology and why most economists reject it, Rothbard's turn from economics to a political creed, Hazlitt's one lesson, and the Mises Institute. Each claim is set beside its strongest critics.25 min
- 6The Chicago School: Price Theory Applied to EverythingThe University of Chicago economists around Milton Friedman: Knight, Simons, Director, Stigler, Becker, Coase, Posner, Fama and Lucas. What each contributed, where the work was confirmed or challenged, what the Chicago Boys did in Chile, and why one of the sharpest critics of the school, Richard Thaler, also won his prize there.26 min
- 7Public Choice and Government FailureThe Virginia school of public choice: James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock's Calculus of Consent, rent seeking from Tullock and Anne Krueger, Mancur Olson on why small groups beat large ones, William Niskanen on bureaucracy, and Buchanan's constitutional economics. The sugar program and farm payments serve as test cases, and the lesson sets out where the evidence on voters and politicians supports the theory and where it does not.21 min
- 8Supply-Side Economics, Thomas Sowell and Walter WilliamsThe supply-side movement from Robert Mundell and Arthur Laffer to the Kemp-Roth bill, the Economic Recovery Tax Act of 1981 and the Tax Reform Act of 1986, tested against Treasury, CBO and Joint Committee on Taxation estimates. Then the work of Thomas Sowell and Walter Williams on trade-offs, knowledge, minimum wages and occupational licensing, with the evidence and the critics.23 min
- 9The Critics and the EvidenceThe strongest critics of free-market economics, from Keynes, Galbraith and Minsky to Card and Krueger, Piketty, Stiglitz, the behavioral economists and Acemoglu and Robinson. For each, the lesson states the critic's best case, gives the free-market answer, and then asks what the data show, including how a Fed chairman used Friedman and Schwartz in 2008.25 min
- 10Markets and Moral OrderThe tradition that defends free markets while insisting they rest on moral foundations they cannot supply: Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments, Burke and Russell Kirk, the ordoliberals Wilhelm Ropke and Alexander Rustow, Catholic social teaching from Rerum Novarum to Centesimus Annus and Dilexi Te, Michael Novak and Deirdre McCloskey. It closes with how the ordered-liberty framework of this site's author accepts markets and asks for moral limits.24 min