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Friedman was the ultimate baller genius in economics.
+1 - RIP Friedman.
I wonder where this kid is today....
LOL! I'm hooking that up with an SB!
I need to create a thread just for Milton. Where I just post as many videos as I can find. Friedman can, single handedly, teach one more about economics than any other economist alive or dead.
farming for beets in a commune
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/59/Gini_Coefficient_Wor…
[quote=selfstudy]http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/59/Gini_Coefficient_Wor…]
Point?
[quote=selfstudy]http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/59/Gini_Coefficient_Wor…] You, sir, are stupid.
The Gini coefficient is a measure of inequality at a given point in time. The OP's video mentions the possibility to move between classes over time.
So how do you think Africa can improve itself in terms of social-economic mobility?
Africa is pretty unequal. I hope it gains the liberty that will bring them prosperity and equality too.
That was awesome, SB to you. Free to Choose Network totally baller. Friedman my hero. There needs to be a forum on WSO dedicated to him.
Sorry, i don't read any Milton. But isn't that the point? Shouldn't Africa focus foremost on its establishment of a free market in order to prosper? And eventually general prosperity will help the poor too.
You might have the most disingenuous username ever used on this site.
I love watching an scholarly heavyweight mop up the floor with some snotnosed pseudo-intellectual with a half baked 'argument'[right OR left wing, I don't care]. If the kid has something else he's trying to say, then say it. But watching the bullshit get shredded was strangely satisfying.
As for Africa - I spent two weekends ago with a former Nigerian banker and his family. They had risen from the depths of poverty and worked to the heights of high finance there and they had this opinion: Africa is doing this to themselves. The mineral wealth in the continent could make them wealthy like America, but everyone is so busy fucking each over for every scrap and cannibalizing civil society that in places that mine gold there is mass starvation. The west could be more helpful, for sure, but it is not America's job [yet] to teach them to grow up. With all the money and power they had there, they chose to come here and work in an accountants office....I think this speaks volumes to the US.
Don't mind me, I'm just extra patriotic this week.
Well then you should love this exchange:
It goes from 1:13:36 to 1:19:08.
I wish I could see Milton own Krugman...
P.S. The guy in this interview actually made a strong, articulate case. Unlike the young punk up top...
Yeah, me too lol.
Then you'll enjoy these:
http://www.youtube.com/embed/2GklCBvS-eI
http://www.youtube.com/embed/26QxO49Ycx0
Sowell is the most badass black dude ever. Friedman is in the room too!
There is a very strong relationship between mineral wealth and lack of freedom. When the government doesn't need private citizens for tax revenue, you tend to see a lot less freedom or respect for those citizens.
SB.
When was this? Looks like the 1970s sometime. The quality of video and audio just seemed too good to be so old (because of degeneration).
punk bitch idealist got owned!!!!!!
seriously I see the same arguments (and haircut/facial hair) espoused from dozens of kids today. After Milton's first riposte, that kid couldn't even form a complete sentence here is a similar video:
Is this the shit that goes on in business school?
Here he is owning "Micheal Moore":
http://www.youtube.com/embed/cD0dmRJ0oWg
I strongly disagree with Friedman's premise here. If Ford is knowingly making products that will kill people every year via a manufacturing defect (which was also not made public for obvious reasons), then this is in no way comparable to cigarette smoking or generally allowing people to choose how much risk they want to take. Yes, you can die from a car accident, but you should not have to worry about your car purposefully having a dangerous defect because a company wanted to save money. We're talking about people dying because of a dysfunctional product that Ford knew was dysfunctional and sold anyway, and Friedman is acting like it's an example in a text book. Real life is not a text book and there are limits to this line of thinking.
You have to be such a strict academic clown to hear that Ford wanted to save 13 dollars (that's it) per car despite knowing people could die from their cutting of corners and not think that the people that made that decision are assholes. Give me a break.
Who will ensure there isn't a dysfunctional product being produced? A government regulator? HA! Regulatory capture is a well known phenomenon. Eventually the regulators become puppets of the regulated.
There are decades of products liability tort law on the books that would easily provide redress for any defective products.
The regulation of profit/loss and an efficient court system are all that is needed to ensure safety.
Milton Friedman--a true gentleman and a scholar! [wipes away a tear in joy and pleasure]
The man! I love this short clip
Milton went to Rutgers.
The long story short is that our consuption of Africa's resources, more specifically the MONEY we pay into their system is very concentrated and generally directed to highly centralized government or corporate interests. In MENA countries, those interests are both represented by royal families [or WERE]. ANT pointed out that without a real need for cooperation from the citizenry, the powers that be don't really respect them....so the logic follows: 1. Developed countries want the resources [more so than undeveloped ones] 2. We pay out for these resources [Europe, China, Russia, USA, etc...] 3. The payout is recieved by relatively autocratic organizations / indivuals Sooooo: 4. We are indirectly responsible 5. We can indirectly influence this trend by having strings attached, but we won't really make an effort 6. The pattern will continue. The will to change the pattern simply doesn't exist right now. 7. We didn't create the problem, we just made it worse: tribal/religious rivalries originated in antiquity 8. They have themselves to blame 9. There is no end in sight.... 10. Life is unfair. Be thankful you live here. 11. If you want to help change this, go ahead: but realize that it will NOT change overnight 12. The long term solution is political, with economics as a trailing interest. Simply throwing money at the problem won't change anything: if you think this point is debateable, then why did Ghadafi have $70B sitting in bank accounts. 13. Terrorism and debt are short term problems. The next long term problems are A. China. enough said B. Lack of faith in the American system C. the UN...who controls it and how much power it has
My personal opinion is that these countries need to start developing industries [and civilization in general] that are separate from their resource wealth. I don't think the solution is rooted in economics, and there are countries with highly concentrated industries that are democratic, so the solution is political. Honestly though, I see the root of the problems there as ignorance. Look what happened in Egypt and Libya when the people found out how the leaders were screwing them over....
Damn... that kid was scared.
dude is that seriously your avatar pic? haha nicely done.
Kid in the video- GDI.
Actually I think the kid has a point. Also, Friedman's answer is considering a longer timeframe (3 generations) than his own concept of capitalism (applied since the early 70's). Don't get me wrong, I am a capitalist. But Friedman just can't recognize that his ideas are flawed and are not sufficient to guarantee economic well being. Not only that, if they don't have an adecuate legal system, the liberal capitalist effects are exactly the opposite of the ones Friedman may have intended. Friedman is just a human, an academic who needs to write papers to make a living. We can agree with his ideas, but we cannot take them as a rule for life.
His ideas are perfectly suitable for economic "well-being."
Friedman was the intellectual force behind Reagan. Lower marginal tax rates, deregulation, strong dollar/cut inflation, and reduce deficits. Reagan barely accomplished 2 of those goals and only began to address the last 2 before unleashing an economic boom that generated over 19+ million jobs in this country alone!
After Reagan set in motion the end of the Cold War, Bush I and Clinton benefitted as his deficits turned into peace dividends fueling another decade of growth.
Friedman is for the free/mutually beneficial exchanges that take place trillions of times per day across billions of people. This decentralized cooperation has been the greatest boon to human flourishing in HISTORY.
Why is it that for 99% of human existence we lived in extreme poverty but only recently have brought incredible comparative affluence ot even our poorest? Because of free markets!
Also, not that I really give a fuck, but why would someone throw monkey shit at me for my view? I think it's pretty reasonable.
"Durrr...someone no likey text book free market rules, durrrr, me no likey"
drex you're missing the point.
First of all, modern society is based on the fundamental fact that economic forces are superior at allocating resources (and providing goods and services) than political ones. Hence the market-economy.
Thus, Ford is best positioned to decide what level of safety to implement in their product because they face economic forces. In this case I would agree with you that they got their cost-benefit analysis wrong. However, a quick look at Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Pinto#Schwartz_paper) shows that the case isn't as clear-cut as "Michael Moore" would have you believe.
No-one, least of all Friedman, is saying company's are perfect, nor that free-enterprise requires companies to make the right choices 100% of the time. Profit maximization is important because it creates the aforementioned incentives and forces.
You need to stop thinking about it as what happened versus utopia, but rather the trade-offs involved in reality. Corporations (in this case Ford) make mistakes, but thats life - whats the next best alternative? More government involvement (via regulation or other means) would produce an even inferior outcome because of increased politicization of economic forces.
Exactly. Utopia is not an option. You got to compare like with like. You shouldn't compare utopia vs. the market, but rather realistic gov't vs. realistic markets.
"There are no solutions, only tradeoffs"
Interesting how consumers continue to purchase GM, Toyota, Ford, etc. even after safety errors... consumers must judge the cars to be "safe enough" and appreciate the value they receive for their $$$.
Well, Milton Friedman made very important contributions to economics. But the ideas of free markets are basically more ideologically based than based on sound economic theory. Models in which information is assumed perfect just don't make sense in the modern world. You are talking about an information economy where so many people are engaged in acquiring, processing, disseminating information, and the models that Friedman grew up in and that he's worked on for most of his life, information was effectively assumed to be perfect, and there wasn't the close study of how this information processing works, how markets handle risk. So he was really in the tradition of Adam Smith, elaborating on those ideas in a very particular intellectual frame, a particularly narrow intellectual frame. And part of that progress is to say, "Well, that was an important contribution. But today we know our economy has changed, and we know more about how the kind of economy that we have today functions, and the kinds of theories that he developed simply don't work well, either in the developed or the less-developed countries
Wrong. Friedman knew all about information asymmetries. Sure, a lot of old school models assume perfect information, but that's because all models are abstractions from reality. More importantly, plenty of economists are still making "free market" arguments, despite the fact that they know all about these models with information asymmetries.
The idea that information asymmetries models weaken the case for free markets rests on one critical (and flawed) assumption. Namely, that government intervention will improve upon the information asymmetries (and at an reasonable cost, but let's put that component to the side for now). In other words, proving a market failure doesn't weaken the argument for free markets. Showing that something isn't perfect doesn't imply it's not optimal. After all, utopia is not an option. If information is asymmetrical, how can government make it better? First of all, bureaucrats and policy makers might also lack the necessary information (so information is still asymmetrical even when they enter the picture). Second, even if they had perfect information, they might suffer from all sorts of incentive problems (see public choice theory). So, when one weights the tradeoffs between market failures and government failures, there's a pretty strong case to be made for free market economics, despite markets being imperfect.
This brings me to your point about free market economics being mainly ideological. I would say it's the exact opposite. It's people who call for government interventions who are being mainly ideological. For one thing, pretty much nobody is born/raised with a free market bend. Free market ideas are usually an adopted view (and you have to abandon everything you used to believe). I was pretty liberal up until 20 years old, at which point I started reading some free market stuff and realized how logical it was (and how much it matched up with reality, once I stopped to think about it). Pretty much every free-marketer I know is the same way. Milton Friedman himself was a liberal for many years. F.A. Hayek believed in socialism for much of his youth. Thomas Sowell was a Marxist. The list goes on and on. Furthermore, people who call for government intervention assume the government will make everything better, despite enormous evidence to the contrary. They also assume that any problem in markets can be solved by the government. They assume any market failure is a justification for the government. In other words, they assume the government is perfect. So, who's really being ideological?
Lastly, markets often find ways of solving their own information asymmetries (and market failures more generally). Why do you think that consumer reports exist? Because there's profits in reducing information asymmetries. Ever heard of JDPower and Associates? What about Car-Fax? Ever seen the reviews on Amazon for books? The list goes on and on. A classic example of a so-called market failure is the light house. Economists, for many years, said that light houses could never be provided privately because of the free rider problem. It was deemed as the classic example of a market failure, and a classic example of a place in which governmental intervention was necessary. Then an economist by the name of Ronald Coase decided to do some research about the history of light houses in the real world, and found out that, in fact, there were privately owned light houses. Basically, people (using markets) figured out a way to solve that problem. There are plenty of examples like this in economics. For more of them, check this out: http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2008/03/munger_on_subsi.html
So, again, I'd like to ask you: Who's really being ideological?
Well done +1
Watch this, and then try to tell me that Milton doesn't know about information asymmetries and other forms of market failure:
Friedman didn't write about "our economy today" He wrote about timeless laws governing human exchange. He wrote about scarcity and tradeoffs. He wrote about the advantage of persuasion over coercion. He wrote about equality through freedom, not equality imposed via force.
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