Milton Friedman: A Guide to His Economic Thought [Audio Cassette]

Eamonn Butler (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 1997

The first systematic study of the significance of the ideas of Milton Friedman--one of the great economists of the 20th century. 7 cassettes.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Eamonn Butler is director of the Adam Smith Institute, rated one of the world's leading policy think-tanks. He has degrees in economics, philosophy and psychology, gaining a PhD from the University of St Andrews in 1978. During the 1970s he worked on pensions and welfare issues for the US House of Representatives, and taught philosophy in Hillsdale College, Michigan, before returning to the UK to help found the Adam Smith Institute.

Eamonn is author of books on the pioneering economists F A Hayek, Ludwig von Mises and Adam Smith. He is also co-author of Forty Centuries of Wage and Price Controls, and of a series of books on intelligence testing.

Eamonn contributes to the leading UK print and broadcast media on current issues, and his recent popular books The Best Book on the Market, The Rotten State of Britain and The Alternative Manifesto have attracted considerable attention.

--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Product Details

• Audio Cassette
• Publisher: Blackstone Audiobooks (August 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0786104562
• ISBN-13: 978-0786104567
• Product Dimensions: 9.6 x 6.8 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #6,328,560 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Friedman 101., August 29, 2003

By 

Junglies (Morrisville, NC United States) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: Milton Friedman: A Guide to His Economic Thought (Paperback)

I was drawn back to Eamonn Butler's 1985 book while working my way through the latest venture by Brian Snowdon and Howard Vane. Almost twenty years after the publication it still seems as fresh as ever and should still be considered the best introductory work about Milton Friedman particularly for the student.

Given the advances in macroeconomics which have taken place since the 1970s, an era now fading away thankfully into distant memory, it is not surprising that concerns about money continue to dominate the debate. World events, such as deflation in Japan and the tremendous efforts by Federal Reserve Governor Greenspan to prevent such an occurrence in the United States, continue to place the Friedman analysis and theory at the centre of the ongoing discussion.

This magnificent little book has at it's centrepiece Friedman's work on Monetary Theory. Butler, writing from the position of a fellow free-marketeer does an outstanding job restraining his infectious free market self to provide an exemplary elucidation of Milton Friedman's writings and how they overcame sustained attack from the Keynesian orthodoxy to establish themselves as a counter-revolution. He does not assume much prior knowledge of the reader but seeks to establish with remarkable clarity Friedman's position and how he got there. He certainly does real justice to the nature of the attacks and examines their arguments carefully. Fairness is a good description of his approach. He is not afraid to bring in criticism from the Austrian school to show that attacks on Friedman's work are not only from the left.

In the latter sections of the book he also looks at Friedman's position as a free marketeer and some of the policy proposals he has made and also in the final chapter, which for me was the most interesting he looks at some of the methodological issues generated by Friedman.

One is reminded of the remark attributed to Popper that a theory which explains everything explains nothing when reading this chapter. Butler robustly defends Friedmans theorizing based on empirical evidence and casts aside the majority of objections to this approach. he chides those who make their models more and more complex to include new developments and candidly criticizes those economists who talk among themselves in the rarified realms of abtruse reasoning. As John Lennon once said, 'life is what happens when you are busy making other plans'. There is one issue where Butler concurs that Friedman's theory is open to attack and that is on the question of adjustment costs involved in relative price changes as a result of a monetary diturbance.

I am not convinced that the final chapter should not have been the first but it certainly fits nicely into the logic of the book that Eamonn Butler has written so well.

This is a book that is enthusiastically recommended for any student of economics or even just an interested reader. Should also be required reading for anyone going into public service for the first time but then so should much of Eamonn Butler's other work which comes from the Adam Smith Institute.