Choosing Freely: The Friedmans’ Influence on Economic and Social Policy - Free to Choose Conference Proceedings - Dallas Fed

t Milton Friedman's sixtieth birthday conference, in 1972, George Stigler, the dinner speaker and Milton's friend and colleague, discussed econo-mists' or academics' influence, particularly Milton Friedman's influence. As I recall the lecture after more than thirty years, Stigler began by noting that Mil-ton Friedman was among the most influential of all economists. Then he asked how influential that might be. The implicit answer was that maximizing individuals recognized their self-interest and acted accordingly. There was limited room for influence or persuasion. Influence had, at most, the modest role of hastening the adoption of better solutions. To bolster his argument, Stigler chose the role of economists in repealing the British Corn Laws. With his typical irony, he drove home the point: " How heartening a tale! Economists turned a great nation from error to truth, from inefficiency to maximum output " (Stigler 1975, as quoted in Schwartz, 1993, 207). Stigler then gave his own explanation of the repeal of the Corn Laws. Economists' defense of free trade had a modest role. I found this argument unpersuasive and, in fact, more than a little strange. It was made by an academic, a person whose life was devoted to teaching and research. These activities are useful only if there are ideas that are not known to students or not yet discovered or facts that are misperceived or misinterpreted. It was written by a superb essayist who spent much of his life trying to persuade, even influence, others. And it was based on a model of the political process that denigrated the role of ideas, particularly new ideas, in political campaigns. Stigler's comments went unchallenged for two decades. On Milton Fried-man's eightieth birthday, Anna Schwartz took the other side. She argued that Stigler's alternative explanation of the repeal of the Corn Laws was not compelling. She went on to cite some examples of Friedman's influence: the volun