The Milton Friedman Institute
Levitt and Warsh have both commented on some of the issues surrounding the announced institute. I have a couple issues of my own. One is that ousting the university’s bookstore from its current location would be a shame. It does a great job of capturing the essence of the university’s culture in a nice little basement bookstore. When people ask if they will like it at Chicago, you can bring them there and have them ask themselves if they could live there for four years. Question answered.
More seriously, anything that increases the teaching capacity of the university is a good move. The university has been attempting to increase the student body for some time but has not made serious moves to increase its teaching capacity. I was sold on the university’s small classes, which basically did not exist for the fields I went into. Unfortunately, nothing about the press release for the MFI indicate anything about using it to increase the teaching capacity of the economics department. Thus, I have a great deal of sympathy for arguments that funds should be used to expand teaching resources throughout the university. For example, the Law, Letters, and Society program recently (about 4 years ago) had to start a lottery and then an application process for the concentration, a first for any of the undergraduate programs.
The undergraduate economics program plays (or at least, played) an even more exciting game with the initial concentration sequence. Knowing that about 5 people will withdraw from each of their classes before the end of the ’shopping’ period, which lasts about 1/3 of the course, the department will overbook most of the classes. This leaves about 10 students unregistered and having to attend multiple classes with different professors and different homework assignments until enough people drop that they are able to get their registration slip signed. Given the intensity of the quarter system at Chicago, this is a ridiculous game and a heavy burden on the students who simply pre-registered later than others. An easy fix is an increase in teaching capacity to meet student demand.
As for the name, I find it mildly annoying. I cannot think of, or find, any department or program in the social sciences division that is named after anyone, though certain names come to mind when thinking about various programs. I do not like institutionalizing specific scientists because the entire idea of science is that the young show the old where they made their mistakes. Naming institutions after them does not lend credence to that idea and culture. Thus, my first preference would to have a name that does not reference a specific person.
Obviously a second dimension of the naming issue is that Friedman was a highly controversial public figure with whom many people had serious disagreements. Moreover, his publicity comes from work which did not extend directly from his high quality research programs, but rather from his philosophical and political views. This certainly creates a distraction through the controversy and seems to deepen the issues of the previous paragraph, especially because of the very fuzzy line that exists between economic policy and political beliefs. In the end, I do not care so much about the name. I will be more concerned about the quality of research coming out of the program, which is quite likely to be top notch.
