scholarly journals Retrospectives: Cost-Push and Demand-Pull Inflation: Milton Friedman and the “Cruel Dilemma”

2018 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 195-210 ◽  
Author(s):  
Johannes A. Schwarzer
Keyword(s):  
Phillips Curve ◽  
Full Employment ◽  
Presidential Address ◽  
The Other ◽  
Price Stability ◽  
Inflation Expectations ◽  
Milton Friedman ◽  
Economic Association ◽  
Policy Objectives ◽  
The 1950S

This paper addresses two conflicting views in the 1950s and 1960s about the inflation-unemployment tradeoff as given by the Phillips curve. Many economists at this time emphasized the issue of a seemingly unavoidable inflationary pressure at or even below full employment. In contrast, Milton Friedman was convinced that full employment and price stability are not conflicting policy objectives. This dividing line between the two camps ultimately rested on fundamentally different views about the inflationary process: For economists of the 1950s and 1960s cost-push forces are responsible for the apparent conflict between price stability and full employment. On the other hand, Friedman, who regarded inflation to be an exclusively monetary phenomenon, rejected the notion of ongoing inflationary cost-push pressures at full employment. Besides his emphasis on the full adjustment of inflation expectations, this rejection of cost-push theories of inflation, which implied a decoupling of the two previously perceived incompatible policy objectives, was the other important element in Friedman's attack on the Phillips curve tradeoff in his 1967 presidential address to the American Economic Association.

scholarly journals A NEGLECTED INCONSISTENCY IN MILTON FRIEDMAN’S AEA PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS

2016 ◽  
Vol 38 (1) ◽  
pp. 105-112 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Forder
Keyword(s):  
Phillips Curve ◽  
Presidential Address ◽  
American Economic Association ◽  
Milton Friedman ◽  
Economic Association

Milton Friedman (1968)—his famous Presidential Address to the American Economic Association—contains an elementary error right at the heart of what is usually supposed to be the paper’s crucial argument. That is the argument to the effect that during an inflation, changing expectations shift the Phillips curve. It is suggested that the fact of this mistake and of its having gone all but unnoticed are points of historical interest. Further reflections, drawing on the arguments of Forder (2014), Macroeconomics and the Phillips Curve Myth, are suggested.

scholarly journals The wrong track also leads someplace: Milton Friedman's presidential address at 50

2018 ◽  
Vol 6 (4) ◽  
pp. 517-532 ◽  
Author(s):  
Servaas Storm
Keyword(s):  
Phillips Curve ◽  
Presidential Address ◽  
Aggregate Demand ◽  
Financial Fragility ◽  
American Economic Association ◽  
Structural Forces ◽  
Long Run ◽  
Economic Association ◽  
The Right ◽  
Do So

Milton Friedman's presidential address to the American Economic Association holds a mythical status as the harbinger of the supply-side counter-revolution in macroeconomics – centred on the rejection of the long-run Phillips-curve inflation–unemployment trade-off. Friedman (seconded by Edmund Phelps) argued that the long run is determined by ‘structural’ forces, not demand, and his view swept the profession and dominated academic economics and macro policymaking for four decades. Friedman, tragically, put macroeconomics on the wrong track which led to disaster: secular stagnation, rising inequality, mounting indebtedness, financial fragility, a banking catastrophe and recession – and no free lunches. This is Friedman's legacy. We have to unlearn the wrong lessons and return macroeconomics to the right track. To do so, this paper shows that Friedman's (and Phelps's) conclusions break down in a general model of the long run in which productivity growth is endogenous – aggregate demand is driving everything again, short and long.

The Riksbank Endows a Nobel Prize

2019 ◽  
pp. 89-106
Author(s):  
Avner Offer ◽  
Gabriel Söderberg
Keyword(s):  
Interest Rates ◽  
Nobel Prize ◽  
Full Employment ◽  
The United States ◽  
Central Banks ◽  
The Other ◽  
Price Stability ◽  
Low Interest Rates ◽  
The One ◽  
Unintended Outcome

This chapter shows how the Swedish economy during the mid-twentieth century aided in the formation of a Nobel Prize in economics. During the 1950s, the forces of sound money in Sweden had become restive. When inflation began to rise, the choice appeared to be between full employment and housebuilding on the one side, or price stability on the other. The Nobel Prize was an indirect and unintended outcome of this dilemma. Unlike most central banks between the wars, the Riksbank was the bank of Parliament and belonged to the nation. After the war, low interest rates were imposed by government on the bank (as in the United States and Britain). In Sweden, the main reason was to keep housing credit cheap. The central bank was made to purchase government and mortgage bonds.

scholarly journals What was the message of Friedman’s Presidential Address to the American Economic Association?

2017 ◽  
Vol 42 (2) ◽  
pp. 523-541 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Forder
Keyword(s):  
Phillips Curve ◽  
Presidential Address ◽  
American Economic Association ◽  
Policy Rules ◽  
Economic Association

Abstract It is widely accepted that the importance of Friedman’s Presidential Address to the American Economic Association lies in its criticism of policy based on the Phillips curve. However, it is argued here that a reading of the text does not support such a view, and this and other considerations suggest that any such aim was far from Friedman’s mind in 1967. His objective was the quite different one of making a case for policy ‘rules’ rather than ‘discretion’.

scholarly journals Political Economy of Fiscal Policy in Pakistan

2003 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-23
Author(s):  
M. Abdul Mateen Khan
Keyword(s):  
Economic Growth ◽  
Full Employment ◽  
Underdeveloped Country ◽  
The State ◽  
Price Stability ◽  
Short Term ◽  
Role Of The State ◽  
Policy Objectives ◽  
Term Performance

In an underdeveloped country, the state regulates not only the short- term performance of the economy but also its path of development. Such an overwhelming role of the state derives its justification from the very nature of underdevelopment itself. Economics and economists are usually concerned with policy, with a view to determining as to what policies are appropriate in a given economic situation to attain policy objectives such as economic growth, full employment, price stability, redistribution of income and wealth. But adopted policies are often not the policies that economists recommend as the best or even the second best.

Alive Still

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cathy Curtis
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Modern Art ◽  
Severe Form ◽  
The Other ◽  
Left Hand ◽  
Right Hand ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
Village Voice

In 1942, at age twenty, after a vision-impaired and rebellious childhood in Richmond, Virginia, Nell Blaine decamped for New York. Operations had corrected her eyesight, and she was newly aware of modern art, so different from the literal style of her youthful drawings. In Manhattan, she met rising young artists and poets. Her life was hectic, with raucous parties in her loft, lovers of both sexes, and freelance design jobs, including a stint at the Village Voice. Initially drawn to the rigorous formalism of Piet Mondrian, she received critical praise for her jazzy abstractions. During the 1950s, she began to paint interiors and landscapes. By 1959, when the Whitney Museum purchased one of her paintings, her career was firmly established. That year, she contracted a severe form of polio on a trip to Greece; suddenly, she was a paraplegic. Undaunted, she taught herself to paint in oil with her left hand, reserving her right hand for watercolors. In her postpolio work, she achieved a freer style, expressive of the joy she found in flowers and landscapes. Living half the year in Gloucester, Massachusetts, and the other half in New York, she took special delight in painting the views from her windows and from her country garden. Critics found her new style irresistible, and she had a loyal circle of collectors; still, she struggled to earn enough money to pay the aides who made her life possible. At her side for her final twenty-nine years was her lover, painter Carolyn Harris.

Informed Consent: Ezenwa–Ohaeto between Past and Future Uses of Pidgin

Matatu ◽  
2006 ◽  
Vol 33 (1) ◽  
pp. 115-134 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chantal Zabus
Keyword(s):  
Informed Consent ◽  
First Language ◽  
West African ◽  
The Other ◽  
Wole Soyinka ◽  
The West ◽  
West African Coast ◽  
African Coast ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
The One

The essay shows how Ezenwa–Ohaeto's poetry in pidgin, particularly in his collection (1988), emblematizes a linguistic interface between, on the one hand, the pseudo-pidgin of Onitsha Market pamphleteers of the 1950s and 1960s (including in its gendered guise as in Cyprian Ekwensi) and, on the other, its quasicreolized form in contemporary news and television and radio dramas as well as a potential first language. While locating Nigerian Pidgin or EnPi in the wider context of the emergence of pidgins on the West African Coast, the essay also draws on examples from Joyce Cary, Frank Aig–Imoukhuede, Ogali A. Ogali, Ola Rotimi, Wole Soyinka, and Tunde Fatunde among others. It is not by default but out of choice and with their 'informed consent' that EnPi writers such as Ezenwa–Ohaeto contributed to the unfinished plot of the pidgin–creole continuum.

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