Nick Rowe wrote a post
"There are no Friedmans today, except maybe Friedman himself" which I admit I haven't read.
Rowe declared Milton Friedman the victor of, at least, the macroeconomics debate. Without reading his post, I thought (and commented at Brad Delong's blog) that the battle isn't over and that the other than Friedman forces are currently winning back lost ground. In other words, I agree with Rowe (and an earlier post by DeLong) that Friedman's thought is the main stream of macroeconomics, although it is, oddly, called new Keynesian.
Noah Smith has 5 excellent questions for Nick Rowe.
Do read Smith's post (for one thing he has read Rowe's post).
My comment
As usual, I think this post is excellent (I guess I should save pixels by leaving that part out).
I definitely agree that mentioning Marxists is a bit odd. Marxist economists were marginal in the 70s. I don't think it makes sense to use the same word for Keynesians and Marxists together at all.
I do not recall widespread support for price controls among mainstream left of center economists. I definitely do recall hearing Robert Solow say that, while he doesn't have any strong ideological fixation on free markets, wage and price controls are just bad policy. Here (and always) I think that claims about what was generally said and written should be ruled out of order unless backed by names and citations. I personally recall hearing what Solow said on the topic in a Kennedy School public debate on what to do about high inflation.
Update: Nick Rowe in comments links to Tobin (see next paragraph). My vague recollection of what I heard from economists when I was a biologist does not seem to be reliably intellectual history. I score this one Rowe 1 Waldmann ... hey I was just blogging at my personal blog and I just asked I didn't assert.
Or to put it another way, I am interested in Friedman vs Samuelson, Solow and Tobin.
Actually I have a challenge. Name a Friedman Solow debate which, with the benefit of hindsight, we agree was won by Friedman. I do not think this is easy to do.
I was alive in the 70s although kinda young and not an economist. I remember almost no discussion of wage and price controls after 1973 (when Nixon who was not Galbraith imposed them).
I recall extensive discussion of whether central banks should target interest rates or the money stock. This is a debate which Friedman won, leading to a shift in the late 70s to targetting the money stock, then lost in around 1982. How often do you read about the quantity of money ? How much did it grow in the past year ? Monetarism wasn't just the claim that monetary policy matters, but also the claim that the quantity of money was the key variable, because velocity is stable and predictable. This, the absolutely central aspect of monetarism according to Friedman, seems to have been conveniently forgotten by March 2008 at the latest. Or to put it another way, Friedman and new Keynesians have a lot in common, but also disagree on something Friedman considered extraordinarily important.
Your point 4 is related to your point 1. Rowe defines the left so that universal health insurance and environmental regulation are not leftist. It isn't as if people far to the left of Friedman ranging from Samuelson to Che Guevara are so similar that it is useful to discuss them together. Friedman, however, definitely advocated deregulationa and a sharp reduction of the state which haven't happened. He and Rose Friedman wrote a book called "The Tyranny of the Status Quo" during the Reagan administration. This is not a title for a book written by someone who won the policy debate (you may correctly guess that I haven't read the book).
Finally, you Rowe and I agree that Friedman dominated academic macroeconomics in 2007 with new Keyenesians better labeled Friedmanites. However, there have been some rather shocking new data since then leading to heated debate and making it a very odd time to try to decide who won the debate.
