Friedman on Method
16 November 2006 at 5:44 pm Peter G. Klein 1 comment
| Peter Klein |
There is a huge secondary literature on Friedman’s 1953 essay “The Methodology of Positive Economics” (one summary of the various debates is here), and I have little to add to it. Two quick notes, however:
1. Samuel Brittan’s lengthy and informative obituary in today’s Financial Times includes this interesting remark:
The very modernity of Friedman meant that he was vulnerable in his technical findings to new researchers claiming to refute his work by still more up to date statistical methods. Indeed, Friedman lived long enough to see a reaction against basing economics on discoverable numerical relationships and the revival of so-called Austrian methods which concentrated on predicting general features of interacting systems on the lines of biology and linguistics.
2. Hayek reports (Hayek on Hayek, p. 145), that “one of the things I most regret is not having returned to a criticism of Keynes’s [General Theory], but it is as much true of not having criticized Milton Friedman’s [Essays in] Positive Economics, which in a way is quite as dangerous a book.”
Entry filed under: - Klein -, Methods/Methodology/Theory of Science.
Organizations and Markets 
1.
Eric H | 18 November 2006 at 5:06 pm
Ah, see? Another category in which Friedrich beats Salma: “Cogent criticism of Friedman” (I’m going to assume that what he would have had to say would have been more informative than what she had to say in, for example, Frida).
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120679/