Lynne Kiesling
For you KP readers who don’t eat, sleep and breathe electricity policy, this new blog called Adam Smith Lives! might be more to your taste. Written by Sandra Peart, a historian of economic thought, it is a good read that puts a lot of great shape and nuance on the history of economic ideas. She’s got some thoughtful and engaging post-Katrina posts about sympathy and its expression in human action and in economic writing and theory. A must read site.
That Adam Smith “lives” is of course good news.
But it’s odd, to me, that the fact Milton Friedman lives is not more widely appreciated.
The inventor of income tax withholdings, the earned income tax credit (“negative income tax”) the monetary theory of inflation .. remember him?
Still spouting and recommending ideas, too. School vouchers, pension reforms, health insurance systems …
It’s as if Einstein were still alive working on new ideas in high energy physics — and the Department of Energy was ignoring him. It’s as if Robert Frost were still alive and doing recordings for a “rap” label, and the literary and music critics were ignoring him. It’s as if Henry Kissenger were …
Well, scratch that last bit.
Anyhow. I wish I could get the local PBS affiliate to back off the Bob Dylan and 1960’s retrospectives and infomercials for Suzy Orrman so we could enjoy a run “Free to Choose” again.