About Friedman

this book, written in 1953, is one of Friedman's most controversial and influential works.

The writing of this book has something to do with Friedman's early career. After he finished his master's degree, he worked as Henry at the University of Chicago. Schultz's research assistant, engaged in demand analysis. In 1325, he became a member of the National Resources Committee. Since 1937, he has been involved in the work of the National Economic Research Institute.

For economist Friedman, his early career is not impressive. But it contains what some scholars-especially statisticians think is Friedman's most impressive contribution. Detailed analysis of income and expenditure data is the main work of Friedman's early career. Except Kuznets, Mitchell and Burns, it is difficult to find any other famous economist who has been trained by so much practical work in the basic empirical materials of economics. The characteristic of all his work is that the organization of these data contains theoretical development and new methods of sorting out materials.

Many opponents of Friedman laughed at him because of his early background. He was not a pure economist, but a statistician and econometrician at most, including some leftists in China.

But we see that Friedman gave up his lofty position in statistics and econometrics.

in his early career, his contribution to statistics was even more closely related to his firm belief, which was mainly instilled by Mitchell, that is, economics can only exist if it passes the test. Friedman believes that economics should be regarded as an empirical science.

The popular economic theory developed by Robbins at that time believed that the accuracy of the theory could be basically tested by the consistency between hypothesis and fact. But Friedman argued in positive economics Methodology that even if people can explain the empirical correlation of hypothesis in detail, it has nothing to do with the usefulness of judgment theory. Only through the consistency between predictions and facts, the theory will be temporarily accepted or denied. Results-not assumptions-should be the main viewpoint of our scientific activities to understand the real world. This method puts Carl. The new philosophical theory put forward by Popper is applied to economics and its related social sciences.

Friedman's ideas put forward in this book were later interpreted as instrumental methodology of economics, and also included in the extension of American pragmatic philosophy.

This idea is also criticized, but many jokes that satirize economists' disregard for reality have not reduced Friedman's great economic thought. It is still one of the paradigms of contemporary economics.