Nevertheless, Friedman’s words stand on their own, and I thought that the addition of the quotes worked well with the post. I am not making political statements, because I don’t find them to be appropriate for HN. Peace.
I don't think the claim that he supported Pinochet means he had a direct hand in the coup, it's that he attempted to re-engineer the Chilean economy after the CIA linked plot assassinated the democratically elected socialist president who was attempting to socialize parts of the economy. The free market reforms were a disaster for the people that were only able to be applied under the terms of dictatorship.
>* Nobody spends somebody else’s money as carefully as he spends his own. Nobody uses somebody else’s resources as carefully as he uses his own…
That is definitely not true for me. I actually feel responsibility if it's not my money, while I can let myself off the hook for any personal indiscretion far too easily.
But governments have improved, and improved radically over the years. And the advantages of small groups over individuals are so comprehensive they have been a primary source of evolutionary progress in humans.
I'm not sure Friedman knew what he was talking about.
> But governments have improved, and improved radically over the years.
In the 1960s and early 1970s, there was a sizable research field devoted to trying to help make human organizations function better (it was most of what used to be called "operations research", but went far beyond the for-profit corporation version of this concept).
For reasons I don't understand, that project appeared to almost completely shutdown by the 1980s, and it's hard to find much evidence that it ever existed today.
OR does survive, largely as a study of technical operations, far less social, organisational, or political ones.
The other major similar school was Norbert Wiener's cybernetics, and also systems theory (Jay Forrester/MIT). These took a far broader approach, and were even considered for integration into (and ultimately redefinition of) the social sciences. A fascinating book I have is Alfred Kuhn's The Study of Society: A Unified Approach (1963), which tackles political science, sociology, and economics head on.
Wiener butted heads with the military establishment, in which he'd worked during WWII. Systems Research was closely associated with the Limits to Growth team and Stanford Beer's Project Cybersyn, enacted in Salvador Allende's Chile, and lost when Pinichet (advised by University of Chicago economists) overthrew the government in a coup and assassinated Allende.
Complexity research also was (and sometimes still is) criticised for being vague and nonpredictive. Not entirely without merits. That said there's been something of a resurgence, notably through the Santa Fe Institute.
But the anti-military, Malthusian, and socialist branding has somewhat stuck, and made the approaches if not precisely taboo, highly unpopular at least within mainstream US academia.
OR itself however is a fairly vibrant study and practice, largely by virtue of having avoided the social and political areas. My view is that this has stunted its application even if it's permitted the development and continuation of the field.
Friedman was an economist who worked closely with Reagan, if I recall correctly, I'm not surprised he also liked to trot out a "social security bad" soundbite.
* Governments never learn. Only people learn.
* One of the great mistakes is to judge policies and programs by their intentions rather than their results.
* He moves fastest who moves alone.
* Nobody spends somebody else’s money as carefully as he spends his own. Nobody uses somebody else’s resources as carefully as he uses his own…
* It's always so attractive to be able to do good at someone else’s expense.