Really, you cannot make it up. The law, business, and economics faculties at the University of Chicago decide to name a new research institute after Milton Friedman, one of the greatest economists of the 20th century. Not exactly controversial, right?
Wrong. At today’s universities, economists who who help us understand the creation of wealth are not wanted, and certainly are not honored. So, as The New York Times reports today, other elements at the University of Chicago are protesting the proposed Freidman center because the honor “could be interpreted as a wholesale endorsement of Friedman’s free-market ideology.”
According to chaps like Bruce Lincoln, a professor of divinity, Friedman’s free-market polices are suspect because . . . well, because they were adopted by people like Ronald Reagan. Q., presumably, E.D. I note that Lincoln, according to his own faculty web site, “has a notoriously short attention span and has also written on a wide variety of topics, including Guatemalan curanderismo, Lakota sun dances, Melanesian funerary rituals, Swazi kingship, the Saint Bartholomew’s Day massacre, Marco Polo, professional wrestling, and the theology of George W. Bush.” (Let’s see: do you suppose that book on President Bush approves of the President’s “theology”? What do you think? Take your time.)
Query: is Bruce Lincoln the sort of person you would turn to for intelligent opinion about economics? “Critics,” says Times, believe that Friedman’s policies benefitted the rich but “caused severe hardships throughout the developing world”–an assertion for which no evidence is adduced (which is not surprising, since it Friedman’s policies actually helped make the world immeasurable richer over the last few decades).
Here’s a lesson that I wish the Bruce Lincolns of the world would absorb: Capitalism is about the creation of wealth; socialism is about the redistribution of wealth. Milton Friedman spoke up for the former and perceived the manifold dangers of embracing the latter. It’s a pity that Bruce Lincoln & at least 100 other University of Chicago professors are so “disturbed” at the prospect of honoring Milton Friedman at his own university that they have petitioned the president of the university to convene the entire faculty to debate the proposal. I wish some genius would contrive a system whereby Professor Lincoln and his high-minded peers could live under the economic system they say they favor, leaving the rest of us to enjoy the fruits of an economic system that actually works.
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15 Comments
Paul:This account of faculty wisdom at good old UC will help you to understand, Roger, why during my forty-four years as an academic, from lowly (new assistant professor)to higly (provost, institute director, confidant of big donors and legislators),the kind of drug I wanted most often to take (but didn’t) was a good anti-emetic (e.g., Compazine).
Jul 12, 2008 - 8:34 am airth10:I am not a socialist but I have socialist tendencies, like universal health coverage. And by what I see in the countries that do have it, for the most part, the practice of medicine works better than in the US and the costs are lower, and life expectancy is longer. I thus believe in a mixed economy in which aspects of capitalism and socialism are mixed and balance each other. And this type of governance is what is generally emerging around the world, including the US, albeit kicking and screaming all the way.
I appreciate and believe in some of Milton Friedman’s ideas. (He fashioned himself and acted as a counterbalance to socialist thinking, hence some of extreme ideas so as to get his ideas across.) And they would probably all work if the conditions were always right. One thing he believed is that if you have a free and open market in anything the facts and information about it would also have to be free and open. This is something that did not occur in the ’subprime market’ and thus the calamity surrounding it. The information and facts surrounding subprime loans and their derivatives was not honest or upfront. Instead much of the facts and reality about them were manipulated by Wall Street and thwarted by the administration.
Friedman realized that a measure of consumer protection had to be in place to keep markets honest and mutually beneficial. He knew that the unfetter markets were not on their own the ‘hole grail’ because of human weakness and failures. This is something the present administration in Washington forgot or failed to see and in the process has made the economy worse because it blindly believe that free markets could solve everything.
Jul 12, 2008 - 8:42 am Cedric:100 out of over 2000 faculty; about a 5% stupid factor for the University as a whole isn’t too bad.
For the University of Chicago, in the past quarter of a century there have been 16 Nobel Prize winners in Economic Sciences, and one in Literature.
The website for the University of Chicago presents a timeline of the “History of the Division of the Humanities.” In the past 25 years four items are listed: (1) a 2002 endowment of $5 million from a 1965 MBA recipient and wife who funded “Fellowships in Humanities”; (2) establishment in 1996 of a “Center for Gender Studies”; (3) a 1991 Pulitzer Prize for Music for Symphony; and (4) founding in 1991 of a humanities institute “to consider the changing notions of a liberal education and… for the critical examination of ideas and free-ranging argument among scholars and the public.” Isn’t that a hoot?
In the last two years, University of Chicago economists have received a Nobel Prize “for laying the foundations of mechanism design theory,” a Presidential Medal Of Freedom for helping to “improve the standard of living for people around the world,” and a Bradley Prize for Outstanding Achievement “for pioneering work in the fields of economics and human behavior.” The Economics Department website in explaining the success of the “Chicago School” boldly states: “The unifying thread in all this is not political or ideological but methodological, the methodological conviction that economics is an incomparably powerful tool for understanding society.” Indeed this powerful tool is being applied to not only business, but to an examination of art, creativity, crime and racial discrimination, and therein lies the seeds of discontent and jealousy.
In the Department of Economics there are 34 faculty plus four emeritus, another 8 visiting faculty and post-doctorate fellows plus 14 associated faculty from the Graduate School of Business or Harris Graduate School of Public Policy Studies for a total of 60. There are 21 Departments in the Division of Humanities. In a single department, English, there are 54 faculty vs 60 for the Department of Economics. Yet the achievements of only one are far reaching and have received worldwide acclaim.
The signatories of the protest letter roughly breakdown according to these departments:
28 History including Art History and History of Religion
16 Anthropology
16 English, Linguistics or Comparative Literature
12 Near Eastern, East or South Asian, Japanese, Turkish or Archaelogy Studies
8 Political Science
8 Sociology, Human Rights, Gender Studies, Humanities or Comparative Human Development
6 Classics, Philosophy, Ethics or Romance Languages
4 Math & Computer Science
2 Music or Visual Art
1 “Distinguished Service Professor” No Department
A breakdown by title reveals:
48 Professors
25 Associate Professors
11 Assistant Professors
3 Lecturers
2 No title listed
1 Visiting Assistant Professor
1 Visiting Professor
11 Emeritus/ Emerita
0 Nobel Prize Winners
0 Pulitzer Prize winners
0 Presidential Medal of Freedom Winners
0 National Humanities Medal Winners
The letter with signatories may be found at :
Jul 12, 2008 - 1:21 pm Avital Pilpel:http://www.naomiklein.org/shock-doctrine/resources/faculty-letter-mfi
Apart from the relative achievements of the Department of Economics and the entire Division of Humanities, I am struck by fact that two visiting professors signed the document. I guess they were needed to get over 100.
>>>>>100 out of over 2000 faculty; about a 5% stupid factor for the University as a whole isn’t too bad.
If experience is any guide, out of the 100, 3 idiots from pseudo-departments like “gender studies” and “human development research” actually wrote the letter, and they badgered and annoyed the 97 historians, philosophers, etc. into signing:
“OKAY! I’ll sign it! Anything! Just please–not ANOTHER two-hour lecture about the evils of late-capitalism anti-feminist corporate-oligarchy racist enviornment destroying imperialist McWorld!!!”
P.S.
Reading some of Prof. Lincoln’s work, we find that he is really annoyed with Bush’s attempts to “demonize bin Laden”. He just cannot imagine why Americans might demonize the man. Must be conservative propaganda, or something.
Demonizing Friemdan, on the other hand… now, THAT’S diversity.
Jul 12, 2008 - 4:01 pm Alo Kieavalar:I was going to comment at length on the subject at hand, but once I got to the University of Chicago website and saw that the “average” cost of attending the university was $52,450 (for one year !!), I began to lose interest.
http://collegeaid.uchicago.edu/cost.shtml ,
I was further discouraged by the emphasis placed on “diversity” as a concern of the institution. One of its webpages informs us that the university offers “Workshops, seminars, classes, and brown-bag lunches on working in an increasingly diverse world. Topics include appreciating differences related to race, culture, age, gender, sexual orientation, and ethnicity.”
http://www.uchicago.edu/diversity/workplace.shtml
Such substandard English. It’s always been a “diverse world”. In fact, in many ways the modern world is much less diverse than it used to be. The tendency, especially during that last 50 years, has been towards homogenization rather than diversification of societies, so it is not “an increasingly diverse world” at all.
Further, “Gender”, as has by now often been pointed out, is a grammatical category most often associated with classes of nouns, not with biological considerations such as the male/female dichotomy of most animals.
And what is meant by “sexual orientation”? If what they mean is “sexual DISorientation”, which is what I think they allude to, they should just come out and say so. (Although why THAT should be a subject of university public discourse, brown-bag and all, is beyond me).
Finally, I noticed that U of Chicago is also the home of Martha Nussbaum
http://divinity.uchicago.edu/faculty/nussbaum.shtml
and that Bernardine Dorhn – she of Weathermen fame – is a graduate of the university and of its Law School.
That was too much for me. I shut off the computer and retired.
Jul 12, 2008 - 10:14 pm Michael Lonie:airth10,
Open your eyes. The only reason Canada’s health system works, even as badly as it does, is because thousands of Canadians can come to the USA every year and get diagnosis or treatment they need without waiting for six months to a few years for it, as they do in Canada. You come across horror stories about that constantly, if you pay attention. Canada is now flirting with a ten month waiting period for maternity beds. A year or two ago a woman with quadruplets had to be flown to Great Falls, Montana to have her babies because that was the nearest place she could find a neonatal intensive care unit for them. It wasn’t just that there was none available in Alberta, there was none available anywhere in the whole of Canada. As Mark Steyn sarcastically put it, you can hardly expect an industrialized, G-8 nation of thirty million to have the sort of medical facilities of a city of 50,000 in the backwoods of Montana.
European health systems achieve their “lower costs” by skimping on care, hiring foreign staff from Third World countries who will work for much less than a native, and rationing care, sort of like triage. In Britain recently the PM ordered that emergency rooms must see all patients within four hours of being admitted. In order to achieve this the staff left patients in ambulances for hours before admitting them to ER, when they still had to wait four hours. The ambulences, of course, were unavailable for further emergency calls while this was going on. Yeah, those nationalized health services are sooooo wonderful. Feh.
Jul 12, 2008 - 10:15 pm Jon Rowe:As a libertarian, I agree with you on this one!
Jul 12, 2008 - 10:17 pm Avital Pilpel:>>>>Canada is now flirting with a ten month waiting period for maternity beds.
(Scratches head) presuming this isn’t a joke, how exactly can the waiting list for maternity beds be longer than nine months?
Jul 12, 2008 - 10:35 pm Roy M:“Capitalism is about the creation of wealth; socialism is about the redistribution of wealth.”
No.
WORK is about the creation of wealth. Capitalism is one way of organising and distributing wealth; socialism is another.
Jul 13, 2008 - 1:52 pm james wilson:Labor is not about the creation of wealth, and has never been. Man is not a laboring animal naturally; without especial incentive, he will work as little as will enable him to sustain life.
Jul 14, 2008 - 6:40 am airth10:The desire for inequality impells men of genius or energy to become a tremendous, if unintended, social force and turn barbarism into civilization.
Smaller men, each according to their character, then choose to admire such men or fear them.
I think there is too much emphasis put on capitalism being about the creation of wealth. Although wealth is essential for greasing the wheels of capitalism, it is about much more. It is more importantly about obtaining resources and the production and distribution of goods in order to sustain and maintain society.
It ranks as it does, as the primer economics system, because it has proven to be the best at sustaining and maintaining a society, through incentives, organization and the cultivation of capital, both financial and human.
Jul 14, 2008 - 7:51 am Avital Pilpel:The reason that so many academics are socialists has nothing to do with their views of, say, capitalism’s injustice to workers in the third world: they have no trouble ignoring far worse outrages, as long as socialist or third-world government perform them, Rather, they hate capitalism since they personally don’t make much money.
There are, mind you, quite a few dedicated humanities professors who are not surprised the study of the humanities isn’t good business, and would agree it probably *shouldn’t* be, either. But such modest, real teachers–who simply care more about the humanities than about making money–are the minority.
The average humanities professor cares little about his chosen field, and still less about truth or the search for it in general. He mostly cares about his own social status as an “intellectual”. (Ever noticed how the good teachers, the ones you remember fondly as passionate about Shakespeare or 18th-century Indian poetry or Hume–or whatever their specialization was– *never* called themselves “intellectuals”, still less “public intellectuals”?)
It eats him up that he lives in such an economic system where his social status, as a “public intellectual”, is less than that of a beginning lawyer. He longs for an economic system where some powerful junta or dictator gives money “to each according to their merit”–since he’s certain he’d then be at the top of the heap, being so full of caring, understanding, openness, multiculturalism, and all the rest of those self-important meritorious attitudes.
In real life, the first thing such a junta does is, usually, to hang all these “public intellectuals” from the lampposts, as a potential revolutionary danger. But these guys know nothing of history.
Jul 15, 2008 - 4:12 am Alex Bensky:“I wish some genius would contrive a system whereby Professor Lincoln and his high-minded peers could live under the economic system they say they favor, leaving the rest of us to enjoy the fruits of an economic system that actually works.”
Someone did, Roger. Unfortunately, those systems fell after the Soviet Union collapsed. But prior to that, Poland, East Germany, and so forth would have no doubt suited Professor Lincoln’s ideals.
Jul 16, 2008 - 5:30 am