Suchergebnisse

Milton Friedman and David Meiselman's 1963 article, "The Relative Stability of Monetary Velocity and the Investment Multiplier in the United States, 1897–1958," was one of the most influential studies to come out of the Keynesian-monetarist debates of the 1960s and 1970s. The gestation of the article, however, is shrouded with considerable inaccuracy and ambiguity. I use archival materials to provide a more accurate chronological ordering of the gestation of the article than has hitherto been available. I show that the gestation was subject to considerable delays. I provide reasons that explain why a long-promised follow-up paper was never completed and why a book sequel to Friedman's 1956 Studies in the Quantity Theory of Money, planned as a co-edited work shortly after the appearance of the Friedman and Meiselman 1963 article, was not published until 1970 and was edited by Meiselman alone.

AbstractMilton Friedman claimed that Jacob Viner's views in the early 1930s on (a) the monetary origins of the Great Depression and (b) the need of expansionary open-market operations established a linkage between the 1930s Chicago monetary tradition and Friedman's monetarist economics. I show that Viner's views on those issues and on such issues as the retention of the gold standard, money-financed versus bond-financed deficits, 100 percent reserves, the usefulness of cost cutting to combat the Depression, and rules-versus-discretion differed fundamentally from a core group of Chicagoans. I conclude that Viner's views were not representative of the Chicago tradition.

Aaron Director taught at the University of Chicago from 1930 to 1934 and from 1946 to 1965. Both periods corresponded to crucial stages in the development of Chicago monetary economics under the leaderships of Henry Simons and Milton Friedman, respectively. Any impact that Director may have had in the development of those stages and on the relationship between the views of Simons and Friedman has been frustrated by Director's lack of publications. I provide evidence, much of it for the first time, showing the important role played by Director in the development of Chicago monetary economics, including his role as a transmitter of Simons's ideas to Friedman.

There has long been a presumption that the price-level stabilization frameworks of Irving Fisher and Chicagoans Henry Simons and Lloyd Mints were essentially equivalent. I show that there were subtle, but important, differences in the rationales underlying the policies of Fisher and the Chicagoans. Fisher's framework involved substantial discretion in the setting of the policy instruments; for the Chicagoans the objective of a policy rule was to tie the hands of the authorities in order to reduce discretion and, thus, monetary policy uncertainty. In contrast to Fisher, the Chicagoans provided assessments of the workings of alternative rules, assessed various criteria—including simplicity and reduction of political pressures—in the specification of rules, and concluded that rules would provide superior performance compared with discretion. Each of these characteristics provided a direct link to the rules-based framework of Milton Friedman. Like Friedman's framework, Simons's preferred rule targeted a policy instrument.

Offers a response to David Laidler's article "More on Hawtrey, Harvard and Chicago", in this issue. Asserts that the unique Chicagoan quantity‐theory of the early 1930s embodied a policy framework which left it immune from the Keynesian revolution and contained important linkages with Friedman's views in its business‐cycle analysis and policy positions. Claims that this tradition explains why Chicago (and not Harvard) originated the monetarist counter‐revolution.