News » November 17, 2008

‘Chicago Boys’ Home

University of Chicago professors protest school’s planned ‘Milton Friedman Institute’

By Adrián Bleifuss Prados

Milton Friedman was honored by President George W. Bush on his 90th birthday in May 2002 in Washington D.C.

Many professors fear that the MFI would resemble the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, a right-wing think tank attached to a respectable university.

In the wake of the massive Wall Street meltdown, laissez-faire economic theories seem increasingly quaint. But the University of Chicago wants to keep the flame of neoliberalism alive.

In May, the university announced plans to honor the late economist Milton Friedman by establishing the Milton Friedman Institute (MFI). Friedman — who died in 2006 — taught at the University of Chicago from 1946 to 1976, and was one of the leading lights of the right-leaning “Chicago School” of economics.

However, more than 100 faculty members have signed a petition objecting to the MFI. The group of dissenting professors calls itself the Committee for Open Research on Economy and Society (CORES). CORES will make its case against the MFI at a faculty senate, a rarely held assembly of the entire faculty to be held this fall.

Yali Amit, a professor in the Departments of Statistics and Computer Science and one of the petition’s signers, cites several broad objections to the proposed institute. The most basic complaint involves the MFI’s name. According to Amit, Friedman, the Nobel laureate and accomplished technical economist, “cannot be disentangled from Milton Friedman, the right-wing ideologue.”

As an academic, Friedman promoted monetarism, a school of thought that advocates limiting the government’s role in the economy to the central bank’s control of the money supply. He also helped shape the current understanding of the relationship between inflation and unemployment, and the phenomenon known as stagflation — inflation plus stagnant economic growth. However, it was Friedman’s career as a right-wing, anti-government pundit that made him renowned.

One of his main principles was that free-market capitalism is the handmaiden of liberal democracy. But the most famous implementation of Friedman’s ideas occurred in Chile, under the jackboots of the brutal military dictatorship that seized power in 1973. Although he expressed perfunctory opposition to the regime’s human rights abuses, Friedman met with its leader, Gen. Augusto Pinochet, and lectured in Chile during the years of oppressive military rule. Several prominent Friedmanites — known as the “Chicago Boys” — took key positions in the Pinochet government.

Friedman’s association with Pinochet is one aspect of his career that troubles members of CORES. Many professors also fear that the MFI would resemble the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, a right-wing think tank attached to a respectable university. The Hoover has been the home to such questionably distinguished scholars as former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, Reagan-era Attorney General and Iran-Contra conspirator Ed Meese, and talk radio host Laura Ingraham.

“Anything that would even vaguely resemble the Hoover would be deeply troubling,” says Bruce Lincoln, a professor of the history of religion at the Divinity School, and a vocal critic of the MFI.

The University of Chicago administration denies that the center’s work will be ideological. But according to language in the original proposal, “the intellectual focus of the institute would reflect the traditions of the Chicago School … [including Friedman’s] critical analysis of monetary policy, and his advocacy for market alternatives to ill-conceived policy initiatives.”

A related concern is that the MFI could become a fundraising tool specifically targeting persons and institutions with a material interest in promoting Friedman’s political agenda. The money for the proposed institute — a staggering $200 million — is to be raised almost exclusively by corporations and wealthy individuals. According to the MFI’s website, persons donating $1 million will become lifelong members of the Milton Friedman Society and will “provide the Institute’s scholars with connections to leaders in business and government.”

Adding insult to injury, the Friedman Institute will occupy what is currently the Chicago Theological Seminary’s historic main building. In a letter to the University of Chicago Magazine, an alumnus suggested that the institute might be re-christened the “Friedman Seminary for Divine Economics,” since the neo-Gothic landmark will be trading one theology for another.

• Help In These Times publish more articles like this. Donate today!
• Subscribe today and save 46% off the newsstand price!

• subscribe to print magazine

• stay in touch with our email newsletter

  Subscribe to our regular weekly e-mail newsletter. It's packed with updates on recent and upcoming stories, events, campaigns and things every progressive should be informed about.

   

• email this article to a friend

  Your Name Your Email Recipient Email

  Personal message Thought you might be interested in this article from In These Times.

   

  Please help us prevent spam by verifying the word you see in the image above

  Send to multiple recipients. Just separate each email address with a comma.

• Reader Comments

  What are think tanks for?

  http://etd.library.pitt.edu/ETD/available/etd-08192005-162045/
  “The Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit public policy organizations constituted by section 501c3 of the U.S. Tax Code (“think tanks”, TTs or “tanks”) monitor and adjust governance norms and networks by using research, analysis, and advocacy to structure discourse about social problems and solutions among multiple elites and in the popular imagination.”

  TTs exist for myth-making. Here again, our hubris leads us into catastrophe.

  “America is center-right!” the Right began whining on November 5.  And now we add, “The horrible noise you hear is not Friedman’s mythical free market crashing all around you.”

  The horrors of Friedmanism trace right back to UC, and now someone wants to honor the Dr. Frankenstein of economics with a permanent myth-making lab.

  No matter what evidence accrues, the social Darwinian myth remains the same: Ayn Rand is god, Friedman can do no wrong, and the way forward is to redouble our efforts along the path to disaster.

  Naomi Klein nailed it on The Colbert Report

  http://www.democracynow.org/2008/10/3/headlines#11
    Klein: Yes. Here’s another example of disaster capitalism. After Hurricane Katrina, this is the classic example.

    Colbert: I remember it. I remember it. Yeah?

    Klein: I was in New Orleans. I was working on this book at the time. The city was still underwater. Richard Baker, the Republican congressman, says, “We couldn’t clean out the public housing projects, but God did.” They used a horrible disaster to push through this preexisting agenda that hey had. They don’t believe in public housing. You know what they believe in? ....What they believe in is getting poor people into houses they can’t afford, so that their friends can speculate on the money, and then they can bail them out.

  Feudalism, not democratic republicanism, cries out with every move of BushRoveCheneyCo; the conversion of our Common Weal into private property in the context of a holy war.

  http://www.democracynow.org/2008/10/6/naomi_klein
  In the 1950s, there was great concern at the State Department about the fact that Latin America, then as now… was moving to the left. There was concern about what they called the “pink economists,” the rise of developmentalism, import substitution, and, of course, socialism….

  So, this plan was cooked up—it was between the head of USAID’s Chile office and the head of the University of Chicago’s Economics Department—to try to change the debate in Latin America, starting in Chile, because that’s where developmentalism had gained its deepest roots….

  And so, the Chicago Boys were born. And it was considered a success, and the Ford Foundation got in on the funding. And hundreds and hundreds of Latin American students, on full scholarships, came to the University of Chicago in the 1950s and ‘60s to study here to try to engage in what Juan Gabriel Valdes, Chile’s foreign minister after the dictatorship finally ended, described as a project of deliberate ideological transfer, taking these extreme-right ideas… and transplanting them to Latin America. That was his phrase—that is his phrase.[End Klein]

  “Feudalism in this sense is… based on the relation between lords and the peasants who worked their own land and that of the lord. The peasants owed labour service to the lords, who provided military protection and also had extensive police, judicial, and other rights over the peasants… Feudalism came to encompass all aspects of social organization and was characterized as a system that was both oppressive and hierarchical.” [Ency Brit Std Ed Chicago: 2008]

  Posted by knowbuddhau on Nov 17, 2008 at 3:52 PM

  Ken Silverstein, here quoting James Pethokoukis of U.S. News & World Report (a double major in Soviet politics and American history…) adds another attempt at myth-making to the list:

  http://www.harpers.org/archive/2008/11/hbc-90003866
  If history is any guide at all, voters may still be terribly cranky about the economy when they cast their ballots on Nov. 6, 2012 and thus likely choose the 45th president of the United States — be it Mitt Romney, Sarah Palin, Bobby Jindal or some other Republican without “Bush” for a last name. Once again a “change” election for an impatient America. The same bad economy that doomed John McCain in 2008 will have sunk Obama, as well.

  http://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/19/opinion/19GOUL.html?pagewanted=2&ei=507 70&en=5510fa49043dcc2f&ex=1227157200
  The implications of this finding cascade across several realms… The social meaning may finally liberate us from the simplistic and harmful idea, false for many other reasons as well, that each aspect of our being, either physical or behavioral, may be ascribed to the action of a particular gene “for” the trait in question.

  But the deepest ramifications will be scientific or philosophical in the largest sense. From its late 17th century inception in modern form, science has strongly privileged the reductionist mode of thought that breaks overt complexity into constituent parts and then tries to explain the totality by the properties of these parts and simple interactions fully predictable from the parts. (“Analysis” literally means to dissolve into basic parts). The reductionist method works triumphantly for simple systems — predicting eclipses or the motion of planets (but not the histories of their complex surfaces), for example. But once again — and when will we ever learn? — we fell victim to hubris, as we imagined that, in discovering how to unlock some systems, we had found the key for the conquest of all natural phenomena. Will Parsifal ever learn that only humility (and a plurality of strategies for explanation) can locate the Holy Grail?

  The collapse of the doctrine of one gene for one protein, and one direction of causal flow from basic codes to elaborate totality, marks the failure of reductionism for the complex system that we call biology — and for two major reasons.

  First, the key to complexity is not more genes, but more combinations and interactions generated by fewer units of code — and many of these interactions (as emergent properties, to use the technical jargon) must be explained at the level of their appearance, for they cannot be predicted from the separate underlying parts alone. So organisms must be explained as organisms, and not as a summation of genes.

  Second, the unique contingencies of history, not the laws of physics, set many properties of complex biological systems. Our 30,000 genes make up only 1 percent or so of our total genome. The rest — including bacterial immigrants and other pieces that can replicate and move — originate more as accidents of history than as predictable necessities of physical laws. Moreover, these noncoding regions, disrespectfully called “junk DNA,” also build a pool of potential for future use that, more than any other factor, may establish any lineage’s capacity for further evolutionary increase in complexity.

  The deflation of hubris is blessedly positive, not cynically disabling. The failure of reductionism doesn’t mark the failure of science, but only the replacement of an ultimately unworkable set of assumptions by more appropriate styles of explanation that study complexity at its own level and respect the influences of unique histories. Yes, the task will be much harder than reductionistic science imagined. But our 30,000 genes — in the glorious ramifications of their irreducible interactions — have made us sufficiently complex and at least potentially adequate for the task ahead.

  Posted by knowbuddhau on Nov 18, 2008 at 1:33 PM

  The shelf-life of the myths with which we’re being jacked just keeps getting shorter; how long can Friedmanites keep preaching the infallibility of mythical free markets?  No wonder they want their own myth-making lab.

  David Sirota (via Alternet.org; I didn’t find it here on ITT when I searched just now)  relays this beautiful piece of news regarding the “America is center-right” myth.

  http://www.alternet.org/blogs/peek/107397/conservative_think_tank_admits_amer rica_is_a_center-left_nation/
  “The only problem: It isn’t true. Or at least, not anymore.

  “Here’s the stark reality: It is now harder for the Republican presidential candidate to get to 50.1 percent than for the Democrat. My Hoover Institution colleague David Brady and Douglas Rivers of the research firm YouGovPolimetrix have been analyzing data from online interviews with 12,000 people in both 2004 and 2008. It shows an overall shift to the Democrats of six percentage points. As they write in the forthcoming edition of Policy Review, “The decline of Republican strength occurs by having strong Republicans become weak Republicans, weak Republicans becoming independents, and independents leaning more Democratic or even becoming Democrats.” This is a portrait of an electorate moving from center-right to center-left.”

  Sirota then points to the story in the Washington Post:

  http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/11/13/AR20081113035 550.html

  Friedmanism tortured Chile, and much of Latin America, for decades.  Right now, the same disaster capitalists are looting the US Tresaury, and they’re using myths manufactured in think tanks, aka propaganda, to do it.

  This is how we manufacture consent: by machining the human psyche with the products of right-wing think tanks, such as the MFI will be.

  At this rate of busting their myths, we can make the MFI, whose purpose surely will be manufacturing consent for more disaster capitalism as Chile experienced 35 years ago and we are experiencing right now, obsolete before it’s built.

  Posted by knowbuddhau on Nov 18, 2008 at 4:29 PM

• register a new account »Posting Security

  To participate in our forums, please register for a free account.

  Username Password

    Remember me
  

  Retreive lost password »

Also featured The Races to Watch
Citizen Gore Vidal
The View From Ohio

Full contents
Previous issues
Subscribe and save!

Also by Adrián Bleifuss Prados

• Spain to Senegal: Stay Home
  In September 2007, Senegalese television viewers saw the image of a drowned body… morePosted on April 3, 2008
• To a Friend
  (in the style of Pablo Neruda)Posted on July 6, 2005