FRIEDMAN, THE DEBATER.

FRIEDMAN, THE DEBATER. I pointed out yesterday that Milton Friedman had a great deal of influence on the change of opinion in the seventies and eighties that concluded that controlling the money supply was the best way to fight inflation. Friedman was also very influential in promoting free market ideas because not only was he a great economist, but he was also a great debater. This article by Paul Krugman, who, it is safe to say, disagreed often with Milton Friedman, acknowledges that Friedman helped move the world of economics “a long way in Friedman’s direction.” This is partly because Friedman loved to argue. I once had the good fortune to attend a debate on macroeconomics between Milton Friedman and Franco Modigliani, both future winners of the Nobel Prize in economics. They each spoke as fast as anybody I have ever known, in perfect paragraphs, interrupting each other as soon as the other paused for breath. People seemed to think afterwards that Friedman had probably won—not on the merits because they went too fast for graduate students to keep up—but because Modigliani was a chain smoker (in the seventies people smoked in classrooms) and every time he paused to inhale, Friedman got in another argument.