Even the arch-speculator Myron Scholes appeared. The central themes of economic theory, including markets and market structure, competition and monopoly, efficiency and equity, and the business cycle, were to be found only in sessions devoted to narrowly defined applied cases. Reading through paper titles, one finds no mention of John Maynard Keynes, Adam Smith, or Karl Marx, or even of Paul Samuelson or Milton Friedman. Radicals and Keynesians, on the other hand, appeared only on panels organized separately, by an alphabet soup of splinter associations. Of course they don't want to discuss ideas .
Inflation is everywhere and always a monetary phenomenon .
This dictum is the most famous single thought associated with Milton Friedman. It was once, briefly in the early 1980s, the driving philosophy of the Federal Reserve. Its architect, and many of his students, have won the Nobel Prize. But in practice, monetarism has been completely, silently abandoned. Monetarism as such is, today, an academic dead letter.