The Dog that Did Not Bark: The Curious Case of Lloyd Mints, Milton Friedman, and the Emergence of Monetarism

2021 ◽  
Vol 53 (4) ◽  
pp. 633-672
Author(s):  
Harris Dellas ◽  
George S. Tavlas
Keyword(s):  
Monetary Economics ◽  
University Of Chicago ◽  
Substantial Role ◽  
Milton Friedman ◽  
Standard Assessment ◽  
The Cross ◽  
The University ◽  
Cross Fertilization ◽  
The Way

Evidence about Lloyd Mints’s role in the development of monetary economics at the University of Chicago has proven elusive, with the result that Mints has long been considered a peripheral figure at Chicago. We provide evidence showing that the standard assessment of Mints’s standing in Chicago monetary economics—and in American monetary economics more broadly—is deficient. In light of (1) the originality and the breadth of his monetary contributions, (2) the cross-fertilization of his thinking with that of Milton Friedman, and (3) the way Mints’s original contributions helped shape part of Friedman’s framework and were pushed forward by Friedman, we argue that, far from being a peripheral figure in the development of Chicago monetary economics, Mints played a more substantial role than has been previously thought in the emerging Chicago monetary economics of the late 1940s and early 1950s.

scholarly journals “The Initiated”: Aaron Director and the Chicago Monetary Tradition

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
George S. Tavlas
Keyword(s):  
Monetary Economics ◽  
University Of Chicago ◽  
Milton Friedman ◽  
The University ◽  
First Time ◽  
The Relationship

Aaron Director taught at the University of Chicago from 1930 to 1934 and from 1946 to 1967. 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 played in the development of those stages and to 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 transmitor of Simons’s ideas to Friedman.

Going Empirical

2018 ◽  
pp. 117-136
Author(s):  
Ivan Moscati
Keyword(s):  
Laboratory Experiment ◽  
Marginal Utility ◽  
University Of Chicago ◽  
American Psychologist ◽  
Milton Friedman ◽  
Econometric Approach ◽  
The University

Chapter 7 discusses two early attempts to measure utility empirically. In 1926, Norwegian Ragnar Frisch applied an econometric approach to measure the marginal utility of money. Following a suggestion from economist Henry Schultz, in 1930, American psychologist Louis Leon Thurstone conducted a laboratory experiment to elicit the indifference curves of an individual. Notably, both Frisch and Thurstone intended measurement in the unit-based sense. Most commentators of the 1930s and early 1940s judged the assumptions underlying both Frisch’s and Thurstone’s utility measurements highly problematic and therefore remained skeptical about the significance of their respective measurements. Moreover, after the mid-1930s and the completion of the ordinal revolution, most utility theorists lost interest in measuring utility in a more than ordinal sense. Among the most vocal critics of Thurstone’s experiment were W. Allen Wallis and Milton Friedman, then two young economists and statisticians who had studied at the University of Chicago.

Putting Fundamentalism to Work

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Harrington Watt
Keyword(s):  
American Academy ◽  
University Of Chicago ◽  
The University ◽  
The Way

This introductory chapter considers the analyses of fundamentalism that were produced by a group of scholars associated with the highly influential Fundamentalism Project, which was sponsored by the American Academy of Arts and Science and housed at the University of Chicago in the late 1980s and early 1990s. These analyses are among the most sophisticated interpretations of fundamentalism that have ever been presented. Writer Karen Armstrong relied on them heavily as she was formulating her ideas about fundamentalism, as have many other writers and scholars. The influence the Fundamentalism Project has exerted on the way Americans think about fundamentalism is almost impossible to exaggerate. But for all its influence, the Fundamentalism Project was an odd enterprise in several important respects.

Revising The Response to Industrialism: Changes in Perspective over Forty Years, 1955–1995

2004 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-14
Author(s):  
Samuel P. Hays
Keyword(s):  
Progressive Era ◽  
American History ◽  
Gilded Age ◽  
University Of Chicago ◽  
History Of ◽  
The University ◽  
University Of Chicago Press ◽  
The Way

When I retired in 1991 my first project was to revise The Response to Industrialism, which covered the years from 1877 to 1914. These, of course, are the years we call the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era. When the University of Chicago Press asked if I would undertake a revision as part of their desire to update several books in the History of American Civilization Series, I readily agreed. I did so with some instinctive understanding that much about the book would undergo revision, but just what I did not have clearly in mind. Much had changed in the profession, and much had changed in the way I thought about that period in American history. As I worked my way through the first edition the details of those changes became more clear. And so I prepared an introduction to the revision that outlined for the reader just what had changed in my thinking over those forty years.

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