Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: la discussa eredità di Milton Friedman

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/12/books/12milt.html
On Chicago Campus, Milton Friedman’s Legacy of Controversy Continues
By PATRICIA COHEN
Correction Appended
The Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman generated storms of
controversy when he was alive, and he is managing to do the same now,
more than a year after his death. A plan by members of the economics,
business and law faculties at the University of Chicago to honor
Friedman, itsmost famous alumnus, by naming a new research institute
after him has run into opposition from dozens of their colleagues who
are unhappy that the honor could be interpreted as a wholesale
endorsement of Friedman’s free-market ideology.
Some opponents have been so disturbed by the proposal that they have
recently asked the university president, Robert J. Zimmer, and its
provost, Thomas Rosenbaum, to take the unusual step of convening the
entire faculty to debate the issue.
“This is a way to force a discussion,” said Bruce Lincoln, a professor
at the university’s divinity school. “We don’t want to accept this as
a fait accompli.” The last time the entire faculty met, Mr. Lincoln
said, was in 1986 to discuss whether the university should divest its
holdings in South Africa.
Mr. Lincoln was one of the professors who helped organize a faculty
petition that gathered 101 signatures against the new Milton Friedman
Institute and who met with the president and the provost in June to
discuss their grievances.
Mr. Rosenbaum noted that the idea for the institute initially came
from members of the economics and business departments, adding that
the council of the faculty senate, which represents the professors at
Chicago, was also brought into the process. “There’s been a large
amount of faculty input at every stage,” he said.
Although the university is “moving forward with the Friedman
Institute,” Mr. Rosenbaum said, he encouraged opponents to come up
with their own proposals for research into economics and society. “We
take very seriously the notion that for enterprises to be robust, they
have to bubble up from the faculty.”
Faculty supporters of the Friedman Institute are somewhat baffled by
the outcry.
“It’s hard to say what it’s all about,” said John H. Cochrane, a
professor at Chicago’s Graduate School of Business, who served on the
institute’s founding committee, referring to the petition as “drivel.”
“Milton Friedman was probably the greatest economist of the 20th
century,” he said, adding that the proposal describes the center
“pretty explicitly as an economic research institute without a
particular ideology.”
More than 100 professors signed the petition, declaring that they were
“disturbed by the ideological and disciplinary preference implied by
the university’s massive support for the economic and political
doctrines that have extended from Friedman’s work,” and the
implication that Chicago’s faculty “lacks intellectual and ideological
diversity.”
Lars Peter Hansen, an economics professor who was chairman of the
institute’s founding committee, said: “I was a little bit surprised,
because we had taken it to the faculty senate and aired it
thoroughly.” Mr. Hansen said that he was aware that some people might
worry that the institute would be seen as a right-wing research group,
which is why the committee took the time to bring it up.
Opponents have pointed to a passage in the proposal that states:
“Following Friedman’s lead, the design and evaluation of economic
policy requires analyses that respect the incentives of individuals
and the essential role of markets in allocating goods and services. As
Friedman and others continually demonstrated, design of public policy
without regard to market alternatives has adverse social
consequences.”
Friedman, who won the Nobel Prize in economics in 1976, said he
fervently believed the government should stay out of the economy as
much as possible; the group of economists who followed his lead was
called the Chicago School. (The university continues to employ more
than its share of Nobel winners in economics, including Gary S.
Becker, James J. Heckman and Roger B. Myerson.)
But to critics, Friedman’s prescriptions, which were enthusiastically
embraced by the Reagan administration as well as by the International
Monetary Fund and the World Bank in the 1980s and ’90s, caused severe
hardships throughout the developing world. Friedman was also reviled
in some quarters for his association with dictatorial regimes like
that of Gen. Augusto Pinochet in Chile. As an article in The Chicago
Tribune noted, the institute “renews a split on campus about Friedman
himself.”
Mr. Hansen said that the primary connection between Friedman’s
approach and the institute’s is the idea that research ought to be
empirically grounded or based in real-world experiments. “We want the
best research out there,” no matter what someone’s personal views are,
he said.
He made a point of differentiating the new institute, scheduled to
open this fall, from other university-based centers with an
ideological bent, like the conservative Hoover Institution at Stanford
University. “This is a very different model,” Mr. Hansen said.
Mr. Lincoln acknowledged that faculty representatives had been told
about the institute in February but said that the proposal was not
debated or brought up for a vote.
As an opponent of the entire institute, rather than simply its name,
Mr. Lincoln characterized himself on the extreme end of the
opposition. He said he would like to see a research center “much more
committed to free inquiry and a larger debate, and not just grinding
the same ax sharper and sharper.”
The university has set a goal of $200 million for the institute’s
endowment, contributing $500,000 in seed money, with the rest coming
through donations from alumni and business leaders.
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: July 15, 2008
An article on Saturday about opposition to a plan to name a new
research center at the University of Chicago after the economist
Milton Friedman misstated the name of a research organization at
Stanford University. It is the Hoover Institution, not Hoover Institut

 holdings in South Africa.
Cohen che scrive su Friedman, Zimmer & Rosenbaum vs il Rev. Lincoln.
Un sogno bagnato per qualcuno.
Palmiro Pangloss