In Memoriam: Milton Friedman
One of my heroes, Milton Friedman, has died at 94. He was a great social scientist, a brilliant popularizer and polemicist, and a mensch. His intellectual influence, on both scholarly economics and the revival of classical liberalism, can hardly be overstated. And, more than any other single person, we can thank him for ending the scourges of the 1970s: inflation and the draft.
Remarkably respectful NYT obit here. (They probably lifted the Bernanke quote from this column of mine.) Detailed Financial Times obit here.
UPDATE: In a special Economic Scene column, Austan Goolsbee recounts the reaction to Friedman's death, and life, at the University of Chicago: "What struck me as I talked with my colleagues yesterday was how Mr. Friedman's legacy among economists is in some ways similar but in some ways quite different from the public view. His manner of research, his personality, even the topics he studied spawned a great deal of the economics we know today — even among economists whose politics differ greatly from his. A striking number of topics he worked on, for example, ultimately developed into other people's Nobel awards"