Milton Friedman on Poverty and development
Industrial progress, mechanical improvement, all of the great wonders of the modern era have meant relatively little to the wealthy. The rich in Ancient Greece would have benefited hardly at all from modern plumbing: running servants replaced running water. … They would have welcomed the improvements in transportation and in medicine, but for the rest, the great achievements of Western capitalism have redounded primarily to the benefit of the ordinary person. These achievements have made available to the masses conveniences and amenities that were previously the exclusive prerogative of the rich and powerful.
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Milton Friedman, “Free to Choose” (1980), Ch. 5 “Created Equal”, pp. 147–148. https://miltonfriedman.org/quotes/industrial-progress-mechanical-improvement-all-great-wonders-1980
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He also said
What kind of society isn’t structured on greed? … So the problem of social organization is how to set up an arrangement under which greed will do the least harm. It seems to me that the great virtue of capitalism is that it’s that kind of system. Because under capitalism, the power of any one individual over his fellow man is relatively small.
Interview with Milton FriedmanInterview, 1973, Playboy, February 1973; reprinted in There’s No Such Thing as a Free Lunch (Open Court, 1975), p. 31Checked against the sourceFind the bookIn the past century a myth has grown up that free market capitalism—equality of opportunity as we have interpreted that term—increases such inequalities, that it is a system under which the rich exploit the poor. Nothing could be further from the truth. Wherever the free market has been permitted to operate, wherever anything approaching equality of opportunity has existed, the ordinary man has been able to attain levels of living never dreamed of before. Nowhere is the gap between rich and poor wider, nowhere are the rich richer and the poor poorer, than in those societies that do not permit the free market to operate.
Context. From Free to Choose (1980), the book he wrote with Rose Friedman to accompany their television series, in the chapter “Created Equal”, which sets equality of opportunity, which they favor, against equality of outcome. “Such inequalities” are the inequalities of income and wealth between rich and poor.
Keynes believed that economists (and others) could best contribute to the improvement of society by investigating how to manipulate the levers actually or potentially under control of the political authorities so as to achieve desirable ends, and then persuading benevolent civil servants and elected officials to follow their advice. The role of voters is to elect persons with the right moral values to office and then let them run the country.
Context. From his essay on John Maynard Keynes, written for the volume of commentaries accompanying a 1989 German facsimile edition of Keynes’s General Theory (1936) and published in English by the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond in 1997. He sets this view against his own: that economists should study which political institutions lead self-interested officials to serve the public interest, as Adam Smith showed the market leads self-interested individuals to do.
John Maynard KeynesJournal article, 1997, Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond, Economic Quarterly, vol. 83, no. 2 (Spring 1997), pp. 1 to 23; first published in German translation in 1989, in the commentaries accompanying a facsimile edition of the General Theory (Verlag Wirtschaft und Finanzen, Düsseldorf)., p. 21Checked against the sourceRead the original
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