Friedman Facts.com

University of Chicago professors Gary Becker (economics) and Richard Posner (law) comment in separate posts on their Becker-Posner blog. Both posts are worth a thorough read.

Excerpt from Posner:

Economics is a highly competitive academic field, and piety toward distinguished predecessors is not the path to academic success. It is odd that the opponents of the Friedman naming should think that economists, of all people, would subordinate career motives to loyalty to Friedman’s memory or the “Chicago School” (especially young economists for whom Friedman is just a name). If the religion professor who is leading the movement against the naming is right that “Friedman’s over”–that the current economic crisis has consigned Friedman, along with Greenspan, to the dustbin of economic history–he should have no fear that the new Institute will be biased in favor of Friedman’s views. If a physics institute were named after Albert Einstein, would the institute’s researchers reject quantum theory?

Excerpt From Becker:

A university names an Institute after a former professor because of 1) his contributions to the university, 2) his contributions to scholarship or science, and 3) his intellectual honesty and character. On all three grounds I believe Milton Friedman eminently deserves having this Institute bear his name.

…

His main direct contribution to the University of Chicago was as an absolutely superb teacher, by far the best teacher I ever had. He opened my eyes and that of other students, including Eugene Fama, James Heckman, Robert Lucas, and Lester Telser, and George Tolley, all faculty members at the University of Chicago, to how to use economic analysis to understand the real economic world. Both in the classroom, and as a supervisor of doctoral dissertations, he was a blunt and trenchant critic of shoddy analysis, both theoretical and empirical. I along with others took a lashing from him when he thought we did some analysis badly. The effectiveness of his teaching alone could merit having an Institute in his name at our university.

Many honors have recognized his enormous contributions to economic science. Equally important is that these have endured. A simple measure of that endurance is the large number of citations to his scientific work that still appear in the top economic journals. Only one or two other economists of his generation share this distinctive measure of longer run impact of their scientific work.

(emphasis is mine in both excerpts)