Academics From The United States

"Fifty years ago Kurt Gödel... proved that the world of pure mathematics is inexhaustible. No finite set of axioms and rules of inference can ever encompass the whole of mathematics. Given any finite set of axioms, we can find meaningful mathematical questions which the axioms leave unanswered. This discovery... came at first as an unwelcome shock to many mathematicians. It destroyed... the hope that they could solve the problem of deciding by a systematic procedure the truth or falsehood of any mathematical statement. ...Gödel's theorem, in denying ...the possibility of a universal algorithm to settle all questions, gave... instead, a guarantee that mathematics can never die. ...there will always be, thanks to Gödel, fresh questions to ask and fresh ideas to discover."

"If a 'religion' is defined to be a system of ideas that contains unprovable statements, then Gödel taught us that mathematics is not only a religion, it is the only religion that can prove itself to be one."

"The more I think about language, the more it amazes me that people ever understand each other at all."

"Secondly, even disregarding the intrinsic necessity of some new axiom, and even in case it has no intrinsic necessity at all, a probable decision about its truth is possible also in another way, namely, inductively by studying its "success." Success here means fruitfulness in consequences, in particular in "verifiable" consequences, i.e. consequences verifiable without the new axiom, whose proofs with the help of the new axiom, however, are considerably simpler and easier to discover, and make it possible to contract into one proof many different proofs. The axioms for the system of real numbers, rejected by the intuitionists, have in this sense been verified to some extent, owing to the fact that analytic number theory frequently allows one to prove number-theoretical theorems which, in a more cumbersome way, can subsequently be verified by elementary methods. A much higher degree of verification than that, however, is conceivable. There might exists axioms so abundant in their verifiable consequences, shedding so much light upon a whole field, and yielding such powerful methods for solving problems, (and even solving them constructively, as far as that is possible) that, no matter whether or not they are intrinsically necessary, they would have to be accepted at least in the same sense as any well-established physical theory."

"The meaning of the world is the separation of wish and fact. Wish is a force as applied to thinking beings, to realize something. A fulfilled wish is a union of wish and fact. The meaning of the whole world is the separation and the union of fact and wish."

"Ninety percent of [contemporary philosophers] see their principal task as that of beating religion out of men's heads. … We are far from being able to provide scientific basis for the theological world view."

"Religions are, for the most part, bad-but religion is not."

"There are other worlds and rational beings of a different and higher kind. The world in which we live is not the only one in which we shall live or have lived."

"I like Islam, it is a consistent idea of religion and open-minded."

"The formation in geological time of the human body by the laws of physics (or any other laws of similar nature), starting from a random distribution of elementary particles and the field is as unlikely as the separation of the atmosphere into its components. The complexity of the living things has to be present within the material [from which they are derived] or in the laws [governing their formation]."

"Either mathematics is too big for the human mind, or the human mind is more than a machine."

"But every error is due to extraneous factors (such as emotion and education); reason itself does not err."

"The completeness theorem, mathematically, is indeed an almost trivial consequence of Skolem 1923a. However, the fact is that, at that time, nobody (including Skolem himself) drew this conclusion (neither from Skolem 1923a nor, as I did, from similar considerations of his own)."

"To every ω-consistent recursive class κ of formulae there correspond recursive class signs r, such that neither v Gen r nor Neg (v Gen r) belongs to Flg (κ) (where v is the free variable of r)."

"The one man who was, during the last years, certainly by far Einstein's best friend, and in some ways strangely resembled him most, was Kurt Gödel, The great logician. They were very different in almost every personal way — Einstein gregarious, happy, full of laughter and common sense, and Gödel extremely solemn, very serious, quite solitary, and distrustful of common sense as a means of arriving at the truth. But they shared a fundamental quality: both went directly and wholeheartedly to the questions at the very center of things."

"The key insight of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations is misleadingly simple: if an exchange between two parties is voluntary, it will not take place unless both believe they will benefit from it. Most economic fallacies derive from the neglect of this simple insight, from the tendency to assume that there is a fixed pie, that one party can gain only at the expense of another."

"The combination of economic and political power in the same hands is a sure recipe for tyranny."

"What country in the world today engages in the most extreme anti-Semitic persecution? The Soviet Union. It’s not an accident, because if you have a society with concentrated power, if you have a collectivist society, it’s going to be in a position to exercise the preferences and prejudices of its rulers. Moreover, it’s going to have an incentive to do so, because it’s going to need a scapegoat and it will choose some group like the Jews or the blacks to be the scapegoat."

"Friedman, go home! Friedman, go home! Long live the people of Chile! Freedom! Stop the capitalism!"

"Friedman came to Yale once and gave a talk called "Yale versus Chicago in Monetary Theory" before a house of 500 people. [...] It was quite interesting. I didn't get much involved at all in public, but we had a small private session afterwards. The thing I remember most about the occasion was that there was a very earnest, well-meaning graduate student who stood up at the big meeting and asked Friedman politely: "In your mode, money is the basic concept, and yet, you haven't ever told us exactly what money is conceptually. Could you help us understand it now?" Friedman cut the guy down in the withering way he can do by telling him that he didn't understand scientific methods. He said Newton didn't have to tell what gravity was; he only had to tell what it does. The same applied to money. That illustrates Friedman's methodology of positive economics which I think has done great damage. [...] You see that in Lucas, too. Their idea is the as-if methodology in which it is not a question whether the assumptions are realistic, but whether the results derived from the assumptions are consonant with the facts of observation. My reaction is that we are not so good at testing hypotheses so that we can give up any information we have at whatever stage of the argument. The realism of assumptions does matter. Any evidence you have on that, either casual or empirical, is relevant."

"While Friedman never really appreciated the limitations of the market, he was a forceful critic of government. Yet history shows that in every successful country, the government had played an important role. Yes, governments sometimes fail, but unfettered markets are a certain prescription for failure."

"In his early research, Galbraith attempted to explain what had brought on the Great Crash of 1929 – including the role of the stock market's speculative greed fed by (what would today be called) irrational exuberance. Friedman ignored speculation and the failure of the labor market as he focused on the failures of the Federal Reserve. To Friedman, government was the problem, not the solution."

"All the way back, I thought about the fact that I would be held responsible for what was said in that lecture, even though I never heard it. Thereafter, I was always in my seat when Milton Friedman walked in to give his lecture. On a term paper, I wrote that either (a) this would happen or (b) that would happen. Professor Friedman wrote in the margin: "Or (c) your analysis is wrong." "Where was my analysis wrong?" I asked him. "I didn't say your analysis was wrong," he replied. "I just wanted you to keep that possibility in mind.""

"Under Milton Friedman’s influence, the free-market ideology shifted toward unmitigated laissez-faire. Whereas earlier advocates had worried about the stringent conditions that were needed for unregulated markets to work their magic, Friedman was the master of clever (sometimes too clever) arguments to the effect that those conditions were not really needed, or that they were actually met in real-world markets despite what looked a lot like evidence to the contrary. He was a natural-born debater: single-minded, earnestly persuasive, ingenious, and relentless. My late friend and colleague Paul Samuelson, who was often cast as Friedman’s opponent in such jousts, written and oral, once remarked that he often felt that he had won every argument and lost the debate. As for relentlessness: Professor Friedman came to my department to give a talk to graduate students in economics. The custom was that, after the seminar, the speaker and a small group of students would have dinner together, and continue discussion. On one such occasion I went along for the dinner. The conversation was lively and predictable. I had a long drive home, so at about ten o’clock I excused myself and left. Next morning I saw one of the students and asked how the rest of the dinner had gone. “Well,” he replied, “Professor Friedman kept arguing and arguing, and after a while I heard myself agreeing to things I knew weren’t true.” I suspect that was not the only such occasion."

"As far as Friedman's arguments are concerned, I always thought that he sang two tunes. In the economic profession, he was absolutely reasonable. I could find no distinction between his modern quantity theory of money and eclectic Keynesian economics. But in writing for Newsweek, he argued a hard monetarism, as against the soft monetarism of the "modern quantity theory." In hard monetarism, velocity is constant and nothing but the money supply matters for nominal GNP. I thought that was just factually wrong."

"Everything reminds Milton of the money supply. Well, everything reminds me of sex, but I keep it out of the paper."

"Everybody loves to argue with Milton, particularly when he isn't there."

"Today we see how utterly mistaken was the Milton Friedman notion that a market system can regulate itself... Everyone understands now, on the contrary, that there can be no solution without government. The Keynesian idea is once again accepted that fiscal policy and deficit spending has a major role to play in guiding a market economy. I wish Friedman were still alive so he could witness how his extremism led to the defeat of his own ideas."

"It’s that the profession has gone very much to the right ideologically. And guess who was the most important person responsible for that … it was Milton Friedman, not Friedrich Hayek."

"There is as an unearthly, mystical element in Friedman's thought. The mere existence of a stock of money somehow promotes expenditure. But insofar as he offers an intelligible theory, it is made up of elements borrowed from Keynes."

"As a libertarian, Mr. Friedman advocated legalizing drugs and generally opposed public education and the state's power to license doctors, automobile drivers and others. He was criticized for these views, but he stood by them, arguing that prohibiting, regulating or licensing human behavior either does not work or creates inefficient bureaucracies."

"I don't give a good goddamn what Milton Friedman says. He's not running for re-election!"

"He's very influenced by Savage and by this Bayesian way of thinking about probabilities. So when I talk about people "knowing" a probability, he just can't reach that language."

"One thing all of us admired about Friedman's book on consumption was the way Friedman integrated the aggregate time-series evidence and cross-sectional survey evidence. He gave a unified explanation of very different samples in a single theoretical model."

"Friedman was the big influence here. [...] Friedman is a really gifted teacher plus a superb economist. He spent almost all his time on applying economics. He would start with some real world situation, some quote from newspaper, some Wall Street Journal editorial, some sentence. And then he would try and get into a class discussion."

"Friedman is the right's Chomsky. Non-experts (can) rarely appreciate the depth of their academic contributions."

"Now, I don’t want to put Friedman on a pedestal. In fact, I’d argue that the experience of the past 15 years, first in Japan and now across the Western world, shows that Keynes was right and Friedman was wrong about the ability of unaided monetary policy to fight depressions. The truth is that we need a more activist government than Friedman was willing to countenance. The point, however, is that modern conservatism has moved so far to the right that it no longer has room for even small concessions to reality. Friedman tried to save free-market conservatism from itself — but the ideologues who now dominate the G.O.P. are beyond saving."

"It’s a tribute to the importance of Friedman’s work that questions about his legacy bear so directly on contemporary policy issues. But for that reason it’s also important not to engage in hagiography. Friedman was a great economist, but like every other great economist in history, he was also wrong about some important things."

"In the long run, great men are remembered for their strengths, not their weaknesses, and Milton Friedman was a very great man indeed—a man of intellectual courage who was one of the most important economic thinkers of all time, and possibly the most brilliant communicator of economic ideas to the general public that ever lived. But there’s a good case for arguing that Friedmanism, in the end, went too far, both as a doctrine and in its practical applications. When Friedman was beginning his career as a public intellectual, the times were ripe for a counterreformation against Keynesianism and all that went with it. But what the world needs now, I’d argue, is a counter-counterreformation."

"Friedman was right, on a very big issue. His insight deservedly raised his prestige and that of the Chicago School of economics to new heights, and gave his earlier, monetarist critique of Keynesianism new respectability. But it is important to realize the limits of what Friedman's analysis of stagflation achieved."

"On the whole, the monetarism for which Friedman first became famous seems clever, brilliantly argued, but shallow—and perhaps even a bit disingenuous. Friedman's writings from that period have the feel of a smart man who knows what he wants to believe looking hard for supporting arguments."

"Milton Friedman may well be the world's best-known economist. He has turned his unprepossessing stature and manner into a trademark persona; a feisty conservative David battling the Goliath of Big Government. But his influence is not merely a matter of skill at propaganda. It rests on the long campaign that he waged against the ideas of Keynesian economics, a campaign that eventually bore fruit in radical changes in both economic ideology and real-world economic policy."

"The basic error, which was widespread long before Friedman and the new monetarism, lies in the assumption that regards the money supply as the source of the demand for goods and services."

"Although Humans are not irrational, they often need help to make more accurate judgments and better decisions, and in some cases policies and institutions can provide that help. These claims may seem innocuous, but they are in fact quite controversial. As interpreted by the important Chicago school of economics, faith in human rationality is closely linked to an ideology in which it is unnecessary and even immoral to protect people against their choices. Rational people should be free, and they should be responsible for taking care of themselves. Milton Friedman, the leading figure in that school, expressed this view in the title of one of his popular books: Free to Choose."

"Friedman argued that the sole duty of a company is to its shareholders, not to the interest of workers and surrounding communities. ...Workers may toil their entire lives, communities may tax themselves to create infrastructure a corporation needs, and vendors may invest their entire fortune to supply the corporation—but none of these parties, Friedman said, has significant legal rights or moral claims. The idea was radical. It was not supported by the development of the law, the regulation of business and the advancement of civilization over thousands of years. But in a surprisingly short time, Friedman's ahistorical thinking has come to dominate society."

"You see, in one respect, Milton Friedman is still a Keynesian, not on monetary theory, but on methodology. Keynes, very much against his own intentions, and it still dominates the economic theory, and Milton Friedman is one of the apostles of macroeconomics, which has the effect that while we completely agree on general economic policy, we wholly disagree on monetary policy, because his theory is based on supposed regularities between statistical magnitudes."

"I don't like criticizing Milton Friedman not only because he is an old friend but because, outside of monetary theory, we are in complete agreement. Our general views on what is desired and what is not are almost identical until we get on to money. But if I told him what I said before, that I very much doubt whether monetary policy has ever done anything good, he would disagree. He personally is convinced that a good monetary policy is a foundation for everything."

"I don't know what monetarism is. If monetarism just means a good old-fashioned quantity theory, of course it has not failed. If it means the particular version of Milton Friedman, I think it has because he imagines that he can achieve — ascertain — a clear quantity relationship between a measurable quantity of money and the price level. I don't think that is possible. In fact, just about 40 years ago in the opening sentences of my book, Prices and Production, I wrote that it would be a great misfortune if people ever cease to believe in the quantity theory of money. It would be even worse ever to believe it literally. And that's exactly what Milton Friedman does."

"His views have had as much, if not more, impact on the way we think about monetary policy and many other important economic issues as those of any person in the last half of the twentieth century."

"The classical support for as-if models in the social sciences stems from the economist Milton Friedman (1953), who, like the psychologist B. F. Skinner, saw little value in modeling cognitive processes. In contrast, our aim is to understand actual decision processes, not only the outcomes. There is a good reason for this. Without modeling the cognitive blade of Simon's scissors, it is utterly impossible to determine in what environments heuristics succeed, that is, their ecological rationality."