Oh, Chicago

As some of you may have heard, a new Milton Friedman Institute is being established at the University of Chicago

Economists to focus on pioneering research in new Milton Friedman Institute
The University of Chicago is establishing a center for path-breaking research in economics to build upon the strengths of economists throughout the University and to honor the contributions of Milton Friedman, considered by many to be the leading economist of the 20th century.

The University’s investment in the Institute will be about $200 million, with half of that amount establishing an operating endowment and the remainder allocated for facilities and other start-up costs. The majority of the funds will be raised in donations from alumni and business leaders around the world.

“The goal of the Institute is to build on the University’s existing leadership position and make the Milton Friedman Institute a primary intellectual destination for economics by creating a robust forum for engagement of our faculty and students with scholars and policymakers from around the world,” said President Robert J. Zimmer. “The Milton Friedman Institute will continue Chicago’s extraordinary tradition of creating new ideas that stimulate the academic world and innovative approaches that influence policy.”

Well, that is not a thrilling thought in the least. And neither for Marshall Sahlins in his Chronicle of Higher Education article

Indeed, given its aims and scope, the Milton Friedman Institute would be the vanguard of an intellectual coup d'état in the academy of the same nature as the one the Chicago Boys helped pull off in Latin America. The two projects come down to one and the same, insofar as the Friedman institute is analogously devoted to making the university safe for free enterprise. By rendering the production of knowledge dependent on the highest financial bidders, the institute would literally transform the university into a free market in ideas — wherein those ideas backed by the most capital will be the most true. That is not intellectual diversity but academic perversity because it fundamentally subverts the disinterested pursuit and dissemination of knowledge for which universities were founded. Nor are such objections relevant only to the Milton Friedman Institute. They would apply equally to a George Soros Institute for the Study of Economy and Society, and as much to a Rabbi Schneerson as to a Louis Farrakhan Center for Religious Studies. If we allow the university to be outsourced to extra-academic, partisan interests, it will become a money-based political economy of truth values.

And some economist bloggers chime in...

What I think is most amusing about the last post is

Sahlins's claims http://www.appropriate-economics.org/materials/Sahlins.pdf that hunter-gatherers lived in "the original affluent society" where all their wants were easily satisfied seemed to me a dishonest evasion of the fact that many people in all societies want to see their grandchildren grow up--and relatively few hunter-gatherers do.

I imagine he has done extensive research on hunter-gatherers. Oh wait, probably not. That part is just ignorance (about life expectancy and work hours). I don't quite remember the exact numbers, but I think life expectancy only returned to pre-agricultural revolution numbers sometime in the last 150 years or so. Anyway, apart from that, I do not see how they just can't GET such an easy and obvious argument. Wants don't just appear in a vacuum. You think everyone, throughout history, woke up wishing they had a BMW and an iPod? But, alas, ideology...

Anyway, I think about the last thing the world needs is a Milton Friedman Institute. About the best thing I can think to say about the guy is he is very consistent. But this and this? Come on! On the other hand, while I agree with Sahlins pointing out about the excessive talk about 'freedom,' I think that is what is behind his view too. It's actually funny, because we do run on a kind of meritocratic ideology, the best ideas, the smartest people survive. Obviously this is not necessarily the case. So the fact that there is a Milton Friedman Institute with a certain ideology is hardly unusual, I think most departments in a University end up being the same kind of thing. We all know there is a pressure to do certain kinds of work that the (completley hypothetical!!!) Department thinks is good (which is because that is the kind of work they have done). But... A MILTON FRIEDMAN INSTITUTE????