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U of C Committed to Milton Friedman Institute
Produced by Mike Rhee on Wednesday, October 15, 2008
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The University of Chicago says it's committed to going forward with an institute named after a controversial economist, the late Milton Friedman. The university held a meeting with faculty members Wednesday. Some criticized the naming of the institute after Friedman, who championed strict, free-market ideals. But university spokesperson Julie Peterson says the institute is not attached to that idealogy.
PETERSON: It has always been intended as a place to foster the most distinguished economic scholarship and that's what the University of Chicago is known for.
The Milton Friedman Institute officially launched in July. Peterson says university officials will consider the issues raised during Wednesday's meeting. A faculty group that opposes the name of the institute plans to meet Friday.
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Greg Blankenship, Springfield // Thursday, October 16, 2008 @ 11:40 AM
Uh...that some leftist find him controversial is trivial compared to his Nobel Prize, his longevity, accomplishments, contributions to his field.
I would question the competence of any reporter or editor who failed to mention Paul Krugman's achievements or any other Nobel winner in a story and I would do so here with regard to Milton Friedman.
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Marshall Sahlins, Hyde Park/Chicago // Thursday, October 16, 2008 @ 6:13 PM
The words “Friedman” and “impartial” do not seem to go well together, any more than in Friedman’s philosophy the “political” and the “economic” are terms that can be separated. The MFI, according to its sponsors, will reflect the traditions of the Chicago School, particularly Friedman’s “advocacy of market alternatives to ill-conceived policy initiatives.” Among the “ill-conceived policy initiatives” that have figured in Friedman economics are public schools, national parks, consumer and worker protections, social security, subsidies for higher education, grants to scientists and artists, professional licensing and, in general, welfare measures that privilege economic fairness or equity. The abolition of these would be so many sequiturs of economic arguments. Never mind that when Friedman’s Platonic Ideas of free-market virtues are put into practice, as in Chile and the US, they have too often generated a systemic orgy of competitive greed—whose remedies, ironically, entail counter-measures of nationalization.
In a curiously analogous context, likewise involving the reduction of cultural values to material interests, Jean-Paul Sartre criticized a certain version of Marxism for adopting a method “identical with the Terror in its inflexible refusal to differentiate.” Stripped of historical contexts, social relations and biographical particularities, persons are reduced to conscious forms of economic functions. Here, then, is a pertinent warning about intellectual structures of inhumanity. It raises the question of whether the economics of Milton Friedman, in denying the social values and relations of compassion, equality, solidarity and community for the dubious effects of unrestrained self-interest will ever be able shake its historic association with state terror in South America. Or will the creation of a Milton Friedman Institute involve the University and us all in the same scandal? Will we all become “Chicago Boys”?
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