Some Chicago Boyz know each other from student days at the University of Chicago. Others are Chicago boys in spirit. The blog name is also intended as a good-humored gesture of admiration for distinguished Chicago School economists and fellow travelers.
Tom Watson Jr, longtime head of IBM, writes (in his autobioraphy) about his personal encounter with McCarthyism in the 1950s:
There was a moment when I truly thought IBM was going to lose its shot at defense work because of the kind of window blinds I had in my office.
On March 19, 1908, the Ford Model T was announced. Although the car would not begin shipping until September of that year, the response to the announcement was enthusiastic. One agent wrote, “we have rubbed our eyes several times to make sure we were not dreaming,” and another exclaimed, “It is without doubt the greatest creation in automobiles ever placed before a people, and it means that this circular alone will flood your factory with orders.”
From City Journal:
“Pinochet had no clue about economics,” Lüders recalls, “and our country was in a desperate situation.” But when Pinochet asked Friedman, who had helped mold Chicago’s economics department, to provide solutions for hyperinflation, the great economist proposed just the right cure: monetary control. Harshly criticized in the U.S. for his “collaboration” with the dictator, Friedman responded by asking whether he should have let the patient—the Chilean economy—die instead.
Lüders admits that he and his fellow academics relished the chance to devise a new economic model on a blackboard and observe the results. At first, those results weren’t much to brag about. In the early 1980s, external shocks, capital flight, declining prices for copper (the main Chilean export at the time), and excessive trust in the market’s self-correcting mechanisms caused many glitches—and a severe recession.
Beginning in 1985, however, the more pragmatic Hernán Büchi, who served as finance minister under Pinochet, helped correct the errors through tighter control of capital flows into and out of the country. Though he holds a degree from Harvard, Büchi is still deemed a Chicago boy in a land where that city’s name has become a generic term for free-market economists. “The economic solutions we provided for Chile had nothing extraordinary about them,” Lüders says. “We privatized the companies, which had been nationalized by the Socialist Allende regime. We stabilized the currency. We opened the borders to trade. The strong Chilean tradition of entrepreneurship took over from there.”
(Thanks to Val Dorta for the link.)
Now he’s responsible for ignorant teenagers:
… President Bush’s education law, No Child Left Behind, has impoverished public school curriculums by holding schools accountable for student scores on annual tests in reading and mathematics, but in no other subjects.
Really, what are these people going to do when Utopia fails to arrive next January 20th? What happens when you think all the world’s problems (and solutions) come from the White House?
Dan sent me a box of books around Christmas time. One of the books was Passchendaele: The Untold Story
At about the same time in the news I saw articles about the passing of the last living German WW1 war veteran. Even though it is not necessarily rational, it seems odd to me as events pass into history with no living representatives; to some extent WW1 is as far back as the Civil War.