The Cruel Trick Played by History on Milton Friedman

Well, everyone is talking about this, so...

Paul Krugman wrote a blog post saying that Milton Friedman's influence has been largely forgotten in macro policy debates. Steve Williamson lists a number of ways in which Friedman's influence is central to modern macro. Williamson has the right of it; Friedman's ideas are deeply embedded in the macro theories we use to think about stabilization policy. Furthermore - and Williamson doesn't say this - almost all of our macro policy discussions these days center around Quantitative Easing, a tool popularized, and arguably invented, by Friedman.

Three later posts by Krugman (post 1, post 2, post 3) get it right, I think. Friedman hasn't disappeared from policy discourse; he's disappeared from right-wing policy discourse.