Milton Friedman wasn't a futurist, he was an economist and as far as predictions made about the economy, he was spot on. Why? Because the underlying mathematics of economics do not change. What was true in Adam Smith's time is true today; competitive markets are dynamic and self-correcting. Governments are not. Why? Because governments generally seek long term solutions to short term problems, often creating more problems in the long run.
I have to dissent on long term solutions to short-term problems. It's short lived solutions to get votes (a very temporal thing), where the "solution" doesn't end.
A survey of economists put Milton Friedman as the #2 responsible for the Great Recession. People who subscribed to his views didn't see it coming. He's also responsible for the disaster economics by his Chicago boys and their meddling in Russia which led to the rise of Putin. I really have to shake my head when I see people praising him. He represents libertarian ideals which have lead to more and more income inequality, and indirectly to a war in Ukraine.
He was awarded the Nobel prize for PROVING the Fed caused the great depression, since then the Fed have ADMITTED THEMSELVES that they caused the great depression
When the Club of Rome report came out, with its computer model, I was a kid and read about it in my Science Digest magazine. They suggested we might all be dead by 2000. I asked my Dad (a physical chemist) and he introduced me to the term "garbage in, garbage out". And now I'm a professional computer programmer. :-)
The thing I like the most about Friedman is that he answers very simple/essential questions about economics that most people don't understand but they pretend to do
He was just a realist - working with what we have in the present. Not trying to rattle the status quo too much or too fast. And btw In his later interviews he said abolishing the FED would be his solution for better future. His views are important stepping stone.
he right. You had coal, it was replaced by cheaper oil, today you have cheap natural gas replacing more expensive oil. Innovation is the mother of economic progress.
Wow what a great man3.30 he reads about coal he just added the word oil he was reading from a text from 1865 about England's dependency on coal, what a great man
Right lol and then said he got it wrong..so did he predict something or not. Yeah sorry Libertarians I was once like you but Milton is just either not bright or worse a shill for these ideas. Maybe life isn't one ideology...
Fukushima was triggered by a natural disaster, modern reactors don't just blow up randomly. In fact, it's becoming increasingly safer every year. Fossil and hydro power did more harm to the environment than nuclear ever could, renewables aren't that great either when brought to scale.
Fukushima alarmism is a joke. It did no such thing. The most radioactive fish caught had 25,000 becquerels per kilogram. A fish you'd eat then would contain about 9,000 becquerels of radiation, though I'm not sure that's proper phrasing. That is what your body is pumping out every second. That fish is no more radiactive than the person you're standing next to. It's not nothing, but if you ate that person, you surely would worry about 500 other things than potential radiation poisoning. Any amount of radiation has potential to kick start a cancer clump, but the lasting impact of Fukushima is small because the ocean is so big, and I laugh at alarmists in California bringing their geiger counters to the beach screaming OMG 6 BECQUERELS OF CESIUM LISTEN TO THIS" when a cubic meter of ocean water naturally measures about 36,000 becquerels of radiation.
What about waste yes it solves the climate change problem but waste is real. Also look how long it takes for it to decay too long. Wind and solar may have to be the future.
@@monsterhunter445 the waste is extremely compact and easy to keep away from people. You can just bury it with decent competence and the problem goes away. The decay time is incredibly short if you ask a mountain. Solar and wind are not really stand-alone energy sources, they're natgas fuel savers.
The US nuclear industry had 30 accidents per year. They had deregulation. You blame government regulation, but the nuclear industry forced that regulation upon itself. The oil industry is heavily subsidized when compared to the nuclear industry. It's time to subsidize the nuclear industry.
Until I read Julian Simon, I too was afraid we'd run out of energy, having been taught such my whole life (I grew up in the 1970s). Nice to hear someone else (Friedman) was on the same page as Simon, saying the same things at the same time.
I'm an Austrian Econ buddy, i've read most treatises and books by most major economists, like it or not the Fed did cause the Great Depression, you seem to think he believed the Fed 'didn't do enough' when for most of his career was spent explaining how the Fed caused the great depression by their monetary policy
Quite right. People always misattribute Friedman's advice regarding the Federal Reserve. He stated very clearly that it should be abolished, *but*, given that it should exist, it should maintain a steady supply of money relative to the size of the economy and population, so that there is no extreme deflation, such as during the depression, or extreme inflation. He talks about this extensively on his Free to Choose series.
I have been to India as well, and I agree they have a long way to go. But what do you think causes massive food shortages in the first place? Have you ever wondered why, in the modern day, even when there is a drought in Indiana, no one starves? It is because within the U.S., the states are barred from imposing trade restrictions on each other. As for Britain, it was at the peak of its prosperity when it abolished the corn laws and had essentially free trade.
Ingenuity is what is not finite. There is a finite amount of material resources, but it is the ability to access them and to use them to best utilize them that continues to evolve. That is ingenuity.
most of his monetary policies are completely consistent with the era before the Fed which was "Free Banking," which we all want. If you ever get near "A Monetary History of the US," you'll see that JP Morgan ran the clearing house and provided the emergency loans to prevent bank failures in financial crashes before 1913. Although Bernanke has gone way over the top with the QE's, the emergency loans (not TARP, the 9 trillion) saved us from disaster as did JP Morgan in 1907 and previous crashes.
I think you didn't read what I said. He did say that, but he said that was a policy Central Banks should follow. He DID advocate closing the Fed. It is part of Chicago School Economics. Thomas Sowell, a leader and student of Friedman advocates closing the Fed. That was the policy he assigned to the Fed. That doesn't mean he supported a FED.
I know that's not what we want, TARP was a mistake. Where we part ways is that the Federal Reserve is to play the role that clearing houses had played before the Fed. Emergency loans exist regardless of whether there's a Fed or not. One thing most of us agree on is competing currency or free banking as the best means to manage to money supply, but if there were no fed, the loans would have come from Loyd Blankthein instead of JP Morgan or Ben Bernanke.
Yes, predictions are hard, but some got it eerily close. watch?v=Y0pPfyYtiBc But, because the future is so difficult to predict, that gives reason to allow decentralized markets to work, rather than have a centralized "national plan" for things like energy. It is because markets are dynamic and self-evolving that allows them to best adapt to new conditions, whether it be shortages or new discoveries.
"open markets are very short sighted looking for a quick return hence may not be best for this." According to whom? Gas pipelines can take years to complete and years more to become profitable. Consumer electronics is one of the least regulated, least subsidized industries, yet look how much cell phones have improved over the last 30 years. And TVs, Audio, Computers, Cameras, home video systems and so on. Competition, not centralized control, brings down prices and raises quality.
Last comment on this...What the free market would have done should be crystal clear in a broad sense. If there were no Fed, a large clearing house association would have loaned failing banks money. Unfortunately we have a Fed, and we are stuck with those constraints for now. Although the Fed may not have done so as efficiently as the free market would have, it was much better that we did something rather than nothing right after. I do disagree with QE's buying bad assets, that is a major problem
hey, we got to 2020 now and in ths future we are able to generate more power than needed to start the fusion, but we have yet to discover a way to harvest that energy. We are getting closer each year so I predict that by the year 2035 the first fusion energy reactor with harvestable energy will be created, but in a very inefficient way, then with exponential growth we will have far better reactors around the world by 2045
Energy prices have increased, but so has inflation. OPEC screws with the market all the time, and back home, regulations uneven taxes and uneven subsidies distort prices immensely. One example is President Obama signing higher tariffs for Chinese solar panels, meaning the domestic price for solar rise, rather than fall as all unsubsidized and openly traded electronics do. A lack of market mechanisms keeps prices relatively high and innovation relatively low.
Bulbs that don't burn out already exist and have existed for years. They are called LEDs, but the price is not currently lower than Tungsten bulbs. By the way, just because a patent for something exists, doesn't mean that it works. There are patents for "free energy" machines, many of which you can see "working" on youtube.
Here is the irony with these kinds of programs; ethanol, solyndra, insulation etc. even when they "work", they divert funds from where they would have otherwise gone and they raise the overall cost of doing things because the government bureaucracy that oversees the matter must also be paid on top of whatever it is they are trying to do. It's a mis-allocation of funds, which distort prices and demand.
Their losses shouldn't be paid by taxpayer dollars, clearing houses had currency reserves.Banks want to keep a stable money supply, its in their best interest and in all of out best interests for that matter. If we let the banks fail like during the Depression, the accompanying deflation would force the price of real wages way up, reducing labor supply drastically and lead to 20+% unemployment. I had a hard time with this too, but I recognized its consistent with what the freemarket actually did
If the equipment isn't free, then neither is the electricity that comes from it. I'm amazed how many people still claim that Tesla somehow invented "free" energy. He did nothing of the kind, he found a way to transmit electricity without wires, which George Westinghouse did not like because there was no feasible way to meter it. The generation, the transmission and reception infrastructure would all still have to be paid for and maintained.
"so to avoid the problems associated with an ageing population we must have an increasingly higher number of younger people?" No one has suggested anything of the sort. It simply means retirement and entitlements must be modified to reflect the changing demographics. The difference with a doctor talking about smoking is that he is using specific proven statistical probability, Malthus was using broad, unproven mathematical models.
Teflon was discovered by accident in 1938. Like many of NASAs "inventions", they were really adaptations from pre-existing technology, such as velcro and power tools.
I think what Friedman was doing was explaining that there WERE things the Fed COULD have done, which is why he always said "The Federal Reserve in it's CURRENT STATE yadayada" in fairness with a centralized banking system and a monopoly fiat currency you are always going to have problems, and in fairness to Friedman there are moves the Fed could have taken to prevent the depression once they had started the ball rolljg
Campfires and car engines are most certainly not the same principle. Although combustion occurs in both, the purpose of a campfire is to create heat and light and is generally stationary. In an internal combustion engine, the purpose is to create controlled explosions to drive non-stationary parts; the heat created is just a byproduct and the light is not used at all.
"'fuck it, no point planning for tomorrow." That isn't the case at all. No one can know what resources are available better than the boots on the ground. The government moves at a snail's pace, at the behest of special interests, not market interests. The open market can better adjust to changing information because players in the market have financial incentive to do so, prices are set which convey information on scarcity and abundance.
Yes but his ideas lead us to that conclusion. You read Friedman then Hayek then Hazlitt then Mises and eventually you encounter Rothbard :) His ideal world was without the FED (when asked about his ideal world) but it doesn't mean he should have skipped the present situation. You can't jump from socialism to anarcho capitalism over night and survive it in real world.
Because coal is cheap and plentiful. Whale oil is expensive and rare. We still use the former and have abandoned the latter. And petroleum works even better for cars and planes, while natural gas is better for home heating. This falls exactly within the framework of what Friedman was saying.
Milton Friedman was AGAINST the Fed. BUT, BECAUSE IT EXISTED, he believed it should follow an inflationary policy, since that is the only good thing it could do by existing. What made the Great Depression so awful was that a third of the money supply was lost, and it was the Fed's duty to control the money supply. Please don't confuse Milton Friedman for someone who supported the Fed's existence. He really did not.
The real world can be modeled by pure equations. That doesn't mean they are in closed form or very easy to understand equations. The world is messy and complicated. Things only follow exponential scaling in computers. The real world follows logistical scaling.
"But the free market would have have a vested interest in preventing this as it shrinks your market every bulb you sell." Until a competitor comes along with a better product that people like. People didn't stop using whale oil because they loved whales, but because Kerosene was cheaper, and then light bulbs replaces kerosene.
They stopped using whale oil because whale population crashes made whale oil more expensive than kerosene. Can't make cheap whale oil when there aren't any commercial numbers of whales left...
There is no source of energy replacement. Rather addition. Even if he is right on the long term view, in the light of latest developments (global rivalries and environmental impact from human activities), it won’t be a walk in the park in the near future I believe. Let’s see how it goes and let’s meet in 10 years time
In the next 10 years, rich countries will continue to waste huge sums of money on worthless "renewables" and export their industries to meet arbitrary climate goals. Asia will increase coal consumption as needed to fulfill all the imported industries. At some point, Asia will transition to advanced nuclear as Indonesia is poised to do. Then they will lead in that technology and eventually export it to the previously rich countries. Hopefully, the energy crisis in Europe will accelerate Indonesia's advanced nuclear project with Thorcon Power.
Listen to the talk again. He is not saying that one specific form of fuel will be used over another, he is saying that market forces through the price system produce the cheapest form of fuels available. When the costs become to high, this sends signals to either produce more, or to find alternatives. As long as coal is cheaper than the alternatives, it will probably be used. Nuclear, as good as it can be, is currently too expensive.
Not all of Britain's colonies were treated equally. For instance Hong Kong and Singapore were more or less left alone, and they prospered and continue to prosper. The more the British, like any other government, tinkers with the local economy, the less prosperity there will be. But even at the peak of the empire, Government expenditures were much lower to GDP than they are today, with a much less vibrant economy.
"A triumph for humanity" Drilling and sniffing cold, dry rocks. What a victory. 2.5 billion dollars for cold, dry rocks. The steam engine, cheap steel, electricity and flushing toilets...THOSE are Triumphs. No one is going to live longer because we figured out the mineral composition of martian soil. The starving kid in Africa doesn't much care about the amount of ice locked in the poles. The farmer in Kansas could have used that tax money he paid, instead to upgrade his equipment.
Well wind and sun do Not run out. I am completely amazed how much money peolpe spend on energy. Tesla proved it to be free. With the right eqipment it is free. There are off-grid people heating with grids of tin cans and charging their batteries with wind-powered treadmill motors. Free.
What limits supply and distorts demand? I submit that, primarily, it is governments. Take ethanol...the US has a lot of corn, makes sense right? So it was subsidized for years. Except that after all was said and done it was discovered that ethanol cost more fuel on net than it made, plus raised food prices. It was so much of a bust that even environmental groups who once championed it, later lobbied to get rid of the ethanol subsidies. And that is just one example.
And, by the way, there is no free market in energy. A new civilian nuclear reactor has not been built in the U.S. since the 1970s, despite better technology and vast uranium resources. Not to mention, what happens to the companies that were relying on cheap chinese solar panels? How do they and their customers adjust to the sudden jump in price? They were not "protected", yet they potentially lose their jobs just as an uncompetitive supplier can lose to competition.
I'm a fan of M. Friedman as well. I'm unaware of any odd or incorrect thinking on monetary policy on his part. What about his opinions on monetary policy do you take issue with?
The point regarding natural resources and agriculture and national incomes is very important, especially coming from an Indian. An entire industry of shrieking righteousness and sanctimony has cropped up around one Angus Maddison’s book about how eastern countries, particularly India and China, were “looted” out of their wealth by invading colonialists. He uses historic national income figures to provide his point. Without a hint of reflection or inquiry, politicians esp. in India have jumped on to the bandwagon that this “proves” that “the British looted India”. This is what these numbskulls miss. At the time the British first came to India and much into the 1750s, most economic value anywhere was generated in farms. And as farm technology was mostly similar across the world, what differentiated national output, and with that national incomes, was the number of hands available to do the work. Places like India and China obviously had more people than Europe, as a result of which their larger output (gross, not per capita) reflected the disparities in population numbers. Out comes the Industrial Revolution, and things change almost immediately. Agriculture began to contribute progressively lower and lower levels of percentage of national output; with labour shifting to higher-value industrial production. Today, agriculture accounts for less than 5% of economic value added in the US. India and China were caught unawares at this; their large populations were still (and in the case of India, are still) predominantly engaged in agriculture. The only thing which these narrative-twisters can count on to fuel their argument is the historic accident of the onset of the Industrial Revolution coinciding with the (modern European) colonialism of Asia. India and China were far from the European countries’ first colonies. India’s and China’s modern poverty is entirely due to their failure to industrialise adequately (which has been remedied somewhat in today’s China) and the gap between the fortunes of the people in India and those in the West (the cause of considerable angst and envy in India) can entirely be jotted down to the disparities in industrialisation. It is sad that some of the supposedly brightest minds in India, such as Shashi Tharoor, peddles this flawed victimhood narrative to score political points. Maybe he is not that bright. But they fall for his RP English.
You dont understand efficiency. Its like recycling. Recycling Aluminum cans make sense, but glass and paper do not because it takes more energy to recycle than it does to make a new one. But instead, what does government do? Very often it paints everything with the same broad brush regardless of cost. The market, while imperfect, doesn't do generally do this, and when it does, it does it with ITS OWN RESOURCES.
Because markets are more efficient. Take cattle for example. Everything, from the blood to the bones to the meat to the skin, is used. And yes, some things are designed to be replaced, so what? They are replaceable because there is an abundance, when there is scarcity, then things are designed differently. Where is the innovation in public schools? Where is the "efficiency" in AMTRAK or the Pentagon?
By the way, what has NASA innovated lately? Its a cold war relic. When they landed Curiosity everyone was carrying on like they had solved cold fusion, but they have been landing probes on Mars since 1976. And what have they found? Mars is cold, dry and windy...the same thing they discovered decades ago. How many breakthroughs have they had on the ISS? All the footage I ever see is astronauts giggling as they chase floating M&Ms. But thank god they invented memory foam!
No, the World Wide Web was developed at CERN, which is not the same as the Internet, as run largely by TCP/IP. And so what if the Soviets put a man in space? The Nazis built great rockets too. But at the end of the day, where dd those systems lead? The USSR also had a personal computer...what happened to it? Where did it go? A government can develop all the technology it wants; if there is no market mechanisms to drive innovation, it stagnates.
There is no such thing as free and "renewable" energy is new exception. Green power generally requires a large amount of capital costs. Profits are not seen until later in the project life, by which time the technology may be obsolete so risk on investment is large. You refer to the fact that many renewables have smaller operating costs and no fuel costs but that does not mean they are free. If they were, utility companies would not have to charge more to provide "green" energy.
As for protectionism, no, I will not concede that protectionism is better "in the big picture". It just so happens that protectionism is bad economic policy AND bad moral policy. However, protectionism does benefit the few at the expense of the many. For instance, sugar quotas. watch?v=fGOj8kBpsD4 If protectionism worked, resource rich & "self reliant" India under Nehru should have been extremely prosperous, while resource poor Hong Kong should be extremely poor, but the opposite is true.
So what? Government tinkering isn't going to magically create any more oil than there already is. But when the price is screwed with either directly or with quotas, taxes and subsidies, there is a distortion of the facts. New ideas cannot develop properly if they are being developed with inaccurate market information. When the true price of a thing is known, it is better understood where to invest (if anywhere) in new technology.
no, u wrong. look at US electricity production by percentage. coal, coal, coal for a hundred years, and for a hundred more to come. . until someone figures out fusion, nothing can beat coal.
The population growth rate is slowing, and nations like China, Russia, Japan, Brazil and much of western Europe are faced with a leveling, and possibly a future population decline. This brings up a very serious problem, particularly in China and Japan, because soon there wont be enough young people to support the old. Nevertheless, the Malthusian doom and gloom population bomb predictions have not panned out at all.
While I agree that man can come up with new and exciting ways to solve problems in the world, the notion that oil and coal are infinite is wrong. Freedman talks about the cataloging of those resources as an exercise in futility, but it really wasn't. The Cataloging of oil and gas was conducted by the companies that extracted them, not by the economist. We now have a very good understanding of how much is left in the ground. How we get around that problem does need the free market though.
6 people that would not have died otherwise. That might seem like small potatoes to you, but Nixon resigned over a 3rd rate break-in and nobody died. How's that for comparative integrity. In any case, why should the taxpayers who already had adequate insulation be financially responsible for those who don't?
Yet we consume much more resources today than ever before. Need more information to contrast with what Friedman is saying. He was somewhat wrong about deregulation, which led to the recession of 2008. Some of us are very greedy and prone to blow up the system, so some regulations should curb bad behavior.
Carlos Prada Deregulation didn’t cause the recession. Government intervention did. The only reason Wall Street didn’t care about what they were doing was because they knew the government would bail them out. Lesser government size would’ve never caused the recession, something that Friedman advocated to (less government).
This is a very narrow view of the scope of resources that should be considered when assessing a non zero and positive growth environment. If we could have considered and costed impacts to the environment such as reduction in fish stocks, species extinction, global warming and the resultant impact, etc most growth to date would not be economically viable. As a species we are future eaters, our technology has short circuited feedback mechanisms that would normally have controlled our impact on natural global mechanisms.
This talk doesn't deal with environmental issues. Nowhere did Milton say we should just burn fuel as much as we want and as recklessly as we can. Try to get prejudice out of your system.
We aren't dependent on natural resources? What a joke. Pretty sure computer programmers still eat natural resources. All those sectors become non existent without food (a natural resource). This guys a modern incarnation of the chiefs of Easter island calling for more trees to be cut down. There is always more until there isn't.
@@matt385 All of them, listen to the talk a bit closer. We are much more efficient with the resources we have through technology which makes us less dependent. Right now we have enough energy resources to last the entire world billions of years through substitution which he also talked about. Substituting uranium and thorium for coal, oil, and natural gas. At some point, we will make that switch but right now we simply choose not to for a host of reasons.
your car engine is only mildly more advanced than a caveman gathering wood for a campfire; it's in fact the same damn principle. . and you can turn coal into liquid fuel--the germans did that during wwii because they had to--no oil. this isn't his field, and he should have stayed out of it. doesn't know enough.
While I haven't sought out his view on climate change in particular, he has expressed the view that taxing pollution is a reasonable function of government. So if he was in line with climate theory he probably would have advocated for some kind of "Carbon Tax" but would have detested plans such as the "Green New Deal" (especially considering he was opposed to the original New Deal).
No person denies climate except possibly these idiots who think they can control it building windmills. Climate has changed for 500m+ years. We live in the quaternary ice age btw so the hysteria over very small warming is utterly bizarre for a tropically evolved ape that can't bear cold.
@@patrickobrian9669 doubtful, he'd have seen the net economic benefits of co2 to agricultural yields so would have certainly opposed something so utterly ridiculous as taxing plant food.
Milton Friedman wasn't a futurist, he was an economist and as far as predictions made about the economy, he was spot on. Why? Because the underlying mathematics of economics do not change. What was true in Adam Smith's time is true today; competitive markets are dynamic and self-correcting. Governments are not. Why? Because governments generally seek long term solutions to short term problems, often creating more problems in the long run.
Love this...7 years later
I have to dissent on long term solutions to short-term problems. It's short lived solutions to get votes (a very temporal thing), where the "solution" doesn't end.
A survey of economists put Milton Friedman as the #2 responsible for the Great Recession. People who subscribed to his views didn't see it coming. He's also responsible for the disaster economics by his Chicago boys and their meddling in Russia which led to the rise of Putin. I really have to shake my head when I see people praising him. He represents libertarian ideals which have lead to more and more income inequality, and indirectly to a war in Ukraine.
He was awarded the Nobel prize for PROVING the Fed caused the great depression, since then the Fed have ADMITTED THEMSELVES that they caused the great depression
When the Club of Rome report came out, with its computer model, I was a kid and read about it in my Science Digest magazine. They suggested we might all be dead by 2000. I asked my Dad (a physical chemist) and he introduced me to the term "garbage in, garbage out".
And now I'm a professional computer programmer. :-)
The thing I like the most about Friedman is that he answers very simple/essential questions about economics that most people don't understand but they pretend to do
He was just a realist - working with what we have in the present. Not trying to rattle the status quo too much or too fast.
And btw
In his later interviews he said abolishing the FED would be his solution for better future.
His views are important stepping stone.
he right. You had coal, it was replaced by cheaper oil, today you have cheap natural gas replacing more expensive oil. Innovation is the mother of economic progress.
Wow what a great man3.30 he reads about coal he just added the word oil he was reading from a text from 1865 about England's dependency on coal, what a great man
Right lol and then said he got it wrong..so did he predict something or not. Yeah sorry Libertarians I was once like you but Milton is just either not bright or worse a shill for these ideas. Maybe life isn't one ideology...
@kev3d: Nuclear is inherently extremely cheap. Excessive government regulation has made it expensive.
Fukushima was triggered by a natural disaster, modern reactors don't just blow up randomly. In fact, it's becoming increasingly safer every year. Fossil and hydro power did more harm to the environment than nuclear ever could, renewables aren't that great either when brought to scale.
Fukushima alarmism is a joke. It did no such thing. The most radioactive fish caught had 25,000 becquerels per kilogram. A fish you'd eat then would contain about 9,000 becquerels of radiation, though I'm not sure that's proper phrasing. That is what your body is pumping out every second. That fish is no more radiactive than the person you're standing next to. It's not nothing, but if you ate that person, you surely would worry about 500 other things than potential radiation poisoning.
Any amount of radiation has potential to kick start a cancer clump, but the lasting impact of Fukushima is small because the ocean is so big, and I laugh at alarmists in California bringing their geiger counters to the beach screaming OMG 6 BECQUERELS OF CESIUM LISTEN TO THIS" when a cubic meter of ocean water naturally measures about 36,000 becquerels of radiation.
What about waste yes it solves the climate change problem but waste is real. Also look how long it takes for it to decay too long. Wind and solar may have to be the future.
@@monsterhunter445 the waste is extremely compact and easy to keep away from people. You can just bury it with decent competence and the problem goes away. The decay time is incredibly short if you ask a mountain. Solar and wind are not really stand-alone energy sources, they're natgas fuel savers.
The US nuclear industry had 30 accidents per year. They had deregulation. You blame government regulation, but the nuclear industry forced that regulation upon itself. The oil industry is heavily subsidized when compared to the nuclear industry. It's time to subsidize the nuclear industry.
Until I read Julian Simon, I too was afraid we'd run out of energy, having been taught such my whole life (I grew up in the 1970s). Nice to hear someone else (Friedman) was on the same page as Simon, saying the same things at the same time.
I'm an Austrian Econ buddy, i've read most treatises and books by most major economists, like it or not the Fed did cause the Great Depression, you seem to think he believed the Fed 'didn't do enough' when for most of his career was spent explaining how the Fed caused the great depression by their monetary policy
Amazing insight
I agree Amazing
what a great man , wow
Quite right. People always misattribute Friedman's advice regarding the Federal Reserve. He stated very clearly that it should be abolished, *but*, given that it should exist, it should maintain a steady supply of money relative to the size of the economy and population, so that there is no extreme deflation, such as during the depression, or extreme inflation. He talks about this extensively on his Free to Choose series.
I have been to India as well, and I agree they have a long way to go. But what do you think causes massive food shortages in the first place? Have you ever wondered why, in the modern day, even when there is a drought in Indiana, no one starves? It is because within the U.S., the states are barred from imposing trade restrictions on each other. As for Britain, it was at the peak of its prosperity when it abolished the corn laws and had essentially free trade.
Good point, tks for the reply, and good call on the source for my question, :)
Ingenuity is what is not finite. There is a finite amount of material resources, but it is the ability to access them and to use them to best utilize them that continues to evolve. That is ingenuity.
most of his monetary policies are completely consistent with the era before the Fed which was "Free Banking," which we all want. If you ever get near "A Monetary History of the US," you'll see that JP Morgan ran the clearing house and provided the emergency loans to prevent bank failures in financial crashes before 1913. Although Bernanke has gone way over the top with the QE's, the emergency loans (not TARP, the 9 trillion) saved us from disaster as did JP Morgan in 1907 and previous crashes.
Where to download audio of Milton Friedman lectures?
I think you didn't read what I said. He did say that, but he said that was a policy Central Banks should follow.
He DID advocate closing the Fed. It is part of Chicago School Economics. Thomas Sowell, a leader and student of Friedman advocates closing the Fed.
That was the policy he assigned to the Fed. That doesn't mean he supported a FED.
I know that's not what we want, TARP was a mistake. Where we part ways is that the Federal Reserve is to play the role that clearing houses had played before the Fed. Emergency loans exist regardless of whether there's a Fed or not. One thing most of us agree on is competing currency or free banking as the best means to manage to money supply, but if there were no fed, the loans would have come from Loyd Blankthein instead of JP Morgan or Ben Bernanke.
Search LFTR! Liquid Flouride Thorium Reactor.
Search TACOS.
Yes, predictions are hard, but some got it eerily close. watch?v=Y0pPfyYtiBc But, because the future is so difficult to predict, that gives reason to allow decentralized markets to work, rather than have a centralized "national plan" for things like energy. It is because markets are dynamic and self-evolving that allows them to best adapt to new conditions, whether it be shortages or new discoveries.
Why this guy is so fucking happy and always smiling?
"open markets are very short sighted looking for a quick return hence may not be best for this." According to whom? Gas pipelines can take years to complete and years more to become profitable. Consumer electronics is one of the least regulated, least subsidized industries, yet look how much cell phones have improved over the last 30 years. And TVs, Audio, Computers, Cameras, home video systems and so on. Competition, not centralized control, brings down prices and raises quality.
Last comment on this...What the free market would have done should be crystal clear in a broad sense. If there were no Fed, a large clearing house association would have loaned failing banks money. Unfortunately we have a Fed, and we are stuck with those constraints for now. Although the Fed may not have done so as efficiently as the free market would have, it was much better that we did something rather than nothing right after. I do disagree with QE's buying bad assets, that is a major problem
We have figured out fusion but it takes way more energy than we can produce from it yet
hey, we got to 2020 now and in ths future we are able to generate more power than needed to start the fusion, but we have yet to discover a way to harvest that energy. We are getting closer each year so I predict that by the year 2035 the first fusion energy reactor with harvestable energy will be created, but in a very inefficient way, then with exponential growth we will have far better reactors around the world by 2045
Energy prices have increased, but so has inflation. OPEC screws with the market all the time, and back home, regulations uneven taxes and uneven subsidies distort prices immensely. One example is President Obama signing higher tariffs for Chinese solar panels, meaning the domestic price for solar rise, rather than fall as all unsubsidized and openly traded electronics do. A lack of market mechanisms keeps prices relatively high and innovation relatively low.
Bulbs that don't burn out already exist and have existed for years. They are called LEDs, but the price is not currently lower than Tungsten bulbs. By the way, just because a patent for something exists, doesn't mean that it works. There are patents for "free energy" machines, many of which you can see "working" on youtube.
The price mechanism is more accurate and reliable than any government economic plan.
Here is the irony with these kinds of programs; ethanol, solyndra, insulation etc. even when they "work", they divert funds from where they would have otherwise gone and they raise the overall cost of doing things because the government bureaucracy that oversees the matter must also be paid on top of whatever it is they are trying to do. It's a mis-allocation of funds, which distort prices and demand.
Their losses shouldn't be paid by taxpayer dollars, clearing houses had currency reserves.Banks want to keep a stable money supply, its in their best interest and in all of out best interests for that matter. If we let the banks fail like during the Depression, the accompanying deflation would force the price of real wages way up, reducing labor supply drastically and lead to 20+% unemployment. I had a hard time with this too, but I recognized its consistent with what the freemarket actually did
If the equipment isn't free, then neither is the electricity that comes from it. I'm amazed how many people still claim that Tesla somehow invented "free" energy. He did nothing of the kind, he found a way to transmit electricity without wires, which George Westinghouse did not like because there was no feasible way to meter it. The generation, the transmission and reception infrastructure would all still have to be paid for and maintained.
"so to avoid the problems associated with an ageing population we must have an increasingly higher number of younger people?" No one has suggested anything of the sort. It simply means retirement and entitlements must be modified to reflect the changing demographics. The difference with a doctor talking about smoking is that he is using specific proven statistical probability, Malthus was using broad, unproven mathematical models.
Teflon was discovered by accident in 1938. Like many of NASAs "inventions", they were really adaptations from pre-existing technology, such as velcro and power tools.
What do you think of Paul Krugman?
I think what Friedman was doing was explaining that there WERE things the Fed COULD have done, which is why he always said "The Federal Reserve in it's CURRENT STATE yadayada" in fairness with a centralized banking system and a monopoly fiat currency you are always going to have problems, and in fairness to Friedman there are moves the Fed could have taken to prevent the depression once they had started the ball rolljg
I love this
give it 1000 years and let's talk again
Campfires and car engines are most certainly not the same principle. Although combustion occurs in both, the purpose of a campfire is to create heat and light and is generally stationary. In an internal combustion engine, the purpose is to create controlled explosions to drive non-stationary parts; the heat created is just a byproduct and the light is not used at all.
"'fuck it, no point planning for tomorrow." That isn't the case at all. No one can know what resources are available better than the boots on the ground. The government moves at a snail's pace, at the behest of special interests, not market interests. The open market can better adjust to changing information because players in the market have financial incentive to do so, prices are set which convey information on scarcity and abundance.
Yes but his ideas lead us to that conclusion.
You read Friedman then Hayek then Hazlitt then Mises and eventually you encounter Rothbard :)
His ideal world was without the FED (when asked about his ideal world) but it doesn't mean he should have skipped the present situation.
You can't jump from socialism to anarcho capitalism over night and survive it in real world.
Because coal is cheap and plentiful. Whale oil is expensive and rare. We still use the former and have abandoned the latter. And petroleum works even better for cars and planes, while natural gas is better for home heating. This falls exactly within the framework of what Friedman was saying.
Milton Friedman was AGAINST the Fed. BUT, BECAUSE IT EXISTED, he believed it should follow an inflationary policy, since that is the only good thing it could do by existing.
What made the Great Depression so awful was that a third of the money supply was lost, and it was the Fed's duty to control the money supply.
Please don't confuse Milton Friedman for someone who supported the Fed's existence. He really did not.
What is avoided like a plague is monopoly power has overruled every clean and abundant substitute for fossil fuels the past 110 years.
The real world can be modeled by pure equations. That doesn't mean they are in closed form or very easy to understand equations. The world is messy and complicated. Things only follow exponential scaling in computers. The real world follows logistical scaling.
"But the free market would have have a vested interest in preventing this as it shrinks your market every bulb you sell." Until a competitor comes along with a better product that people like. People didn't stop using whale oil because they loved whales, but because Kerosene was cheaper, and then light bulbs replaces kerosene.
They stopped using whale oil because whale population crashes made whale oil more expensive than kerosene. Can't make cheap whale oil when there aren't any commercial numbers of whales left...
There is no source of energy replacement. Rather addition. Even if he is right on the long term view, in the light of latest developments (global rivalries and environmental impact from human activities), it won’t be a walk in the park in the near future I believe. Let’s see how it goes and let’s meet in 10 years time
In the next 10 years, rich countries will continue to waste huge sums of money on worthless "renewables" and export their industries to meet arbitrary climate goals. Asia will increase coal consumption as needed to fulfill all the imported industries. At some point, Asia will transition to advanced nuclear as Indonesia is poised to do. Then they will lead in that technology and eventually export it to the previously rich countries.
Hopefully, the energy crisis in Europe will accelerate Indonesia's advanced nuclear project with Thorcon Power.
Listen to the talk again. He is not saying that one specific form of fuel will be used over another, he is saying that market forces through the price system produce the cheapest form of fuels available. When the costs become to high, this sends signals to either produce more, or to find alternatives. As long as coal is cheaper than the alternatives, it will probably be used. Nuclear, as good as it can be, is currently too expensive.
Not all of Britain's colonies were treated equally. For instance Hong Kong and Singapore were more or less left alone, and they prospered and continue to prosper. The more the British, like any other government, tinkers with the local economy, the less prosperity there will be. But even at the peak of the empire, Government expenditures were much lower to GDP than they are today, with a much less vibrant economy.
"A triumph for humanity" Drilling and sniffing cold, dry rocks. What a victory. 2.5 billion dollars for cold, dry rocks. The steam engine, cheap steel, electricity and flushing toilets...THOSE are Triumphs. No one is going to live longer because we figured out the mineral composition of martian soil. The starving kid in Africa doesn't much care about the amount of ice locked in the poles. The farmer in Kansas could have used that tax money he paid, instead to upgrade his equipment.
And here, in 1978, he says that Natural Gas progresses from Oil.
Well wind and sun do Not run out. I am completely amazed how much money peolpe spend on energy. Tesla proved it to be free. With the right eqipment it is free. There are off-grid people heating with grids of tin cans and charging their batteries with wind-powered treadmill motors. Free.
My comment was "with the right equipment it is free." At this point solar technology should be far enough along to make the equipment cheap.
What limits supply and distorts demand? I submit that, primarily, it is governments. Take ethanol...the US has a lot of corn, makes sense right? So it was subsidized for years. Except that after all was said and done it was discovered that ethanol cost more fuel on net than it made, plus raised food prices. It was so much of a bust that even environmental groups who once championed it, later lobbied to get rid of the ethanol subsidies. And that is just one example.
In what sense?
3:40 he got you Te he he he
And, by the way, there is no free market in energy. A new civilian nuclear reactor has not been built in the U.S. since the 1970s, despite better technology and vast uranium resources. Not to mention, what happens to the companies that were relying on cheap chinese solar panels? How do they and their customers adjust to the sudden jump in price? They were not "protected", yet they potentially lose their jobs just as an uncompetitive supplier can lose to competition.
I'm a fan of M. Friedman as well. I'm unaware of any odd or incorrect thinking on monetary policy on his part. What about his opinions on monetary policy do you take issue with?
The point regarding natural resources and agriculture and national incomes is very important, especially coming from an Indian. An entire industry of shrieking righteousness and sanctimony has cropped up around one Angus Maddison’s book about how eastern countries, particularly India and China, were “looted” out of their wealth by invading colonialists. He uses historic national income figures to provide his point.
Without a hint of reflection or inquiry, politicians esp. in India have jumped on to the bandwagon that this “proves” that “the British looted India”. This is what these numbskulls miss. At the time the British first came to India and much into the 1750s, most economic value anywhere was generated in farms. And as farm technology was mostly similar across the world, what differentiated national output, and with that national incomes, was the number of hands available to do the work. Places like India and China obviously had more people than Europe, as a result of which their larger output (gross, not per capita) reflected the disparities in population numbers.
Out comes the Industrial Revolution, and things change almost immediately. Agriculture began to contribute progressively lower and lower levels of percentage of national output; with labour shifting to higher-value industrial production. Today, agriculture accounts for less than 5% of economic value added in the US. India and China were caught unawares at this; their large populations were still (and in the case of India, are still) predominantly engaged in agriculture.
The only thing which these narrative-twisters can count on to fuel their argument is the historic accident of the onset of the Industrial Revolution coinciding with the (modern European) colonialism of Asia. India and China were far from the European countries’ first colonies. India’s and China’s modern poverty is entirely due to their failure to industrialise adequately (which has been remedied somewhat in today’s China) and the gap between the fortunes of the people in India and those in the West (the cause of considerable angst and envy in India) can entirely be jotted down to the disparities in industrialisation. It is sad that some of the supposedly brightest minds in India, such as Shashi Tharoor, peddles this flawed victimhood narrative to score political points. Maybe he is not that bright. But they fall for his RP English.
Na, man's ingenuity is infinite. The amount of dinosaur juice under your feet is most certainly finite.
You dont understand efficiency. Its like recycling. Recycling Aluminum cans make sense, but glass and paper do not because it takes more energy to recycle than it does to make a new one. But instead, what does government do? Very often it paints everything with the same broad brush regardless of cost. The market, while imperfect, doesn't do generally do this, and when it does, it does it with ITS OWN RESOURCES.
Oops, now I see you wrote more or less the same thing, of course I would notice it after I wrote my comment.
Because markets are more efficient. Take cattle for example. Everything, from the blood to the bones to the meat to the skin, is used. And yes, some things are designed to be replaced, so what? They are replaceable because there is an abundance, when there is scarcity, then things are designed differently. Where is the innovation in public schools? Where is the "efficiency" in AMTRAK or the Pentagon?
By the way, what has NASA innovated lately? Its a cold war relic. When they landed Curiosity everyone was carrying on like they had solved cold fusion, but they have been landing probes on Mars since 1976. And what have they found? Mars is cold, dry and windy...the same thing they discovered decades ago. How many breakthroughs have they had on the ISS? All the footage I ever see is astronauts giggling as they chase floating M&Ms. But thank god they invented memory foam!
No, the World Wide Web was developed at CERN, which is not the same as the Internet, as run largely by TCP/IP. And so what if the Soviets put a man in space? The Nazis built great rockets too. But at the end of the day, where dd those systems lead? The USSR also had a personal computer...what happened to it? Where did it go? A government can develop all the technology it wants; if there is no market mechanisms to drive innovation, it stagnates.
12:46
As I said, and as history demonstrates, he was an economist. Any attempt to paint him otherwise displays profound ignorance.
He did not believe in the Fed, but I think he did believe in controlling the money supply.
The sun has is finite. How do we cure that?
That's not our problem, so chill.
There is no such thing as free and "renewable" energy is new exception. Green power generally requires a large amount of capital costs. Profits are not seen until later in the project life, by which time the technology may be obsolete so risk on investment is large. You refer to the fact that many renewables have smaller operating costs and no fuel costs but that does not mean they are free. If they were, utility companies would not have to charge more to provide "green" energy.
Only takes 4-5 years for ROI with solar nowadays
And here we are in 2021 ready to jump into renewable energies!
... oh, wait! I’m mexican and our government is going back to coal. 😔
Your country is smarter than the US and all of Europe.
As for protectionism, no, I will not concede that protectionism is better "in the big picture". It just so happens that protectionism is bad economic policy AND bad moral policy. However, protectionism does benefit the few at the expense of the many. For instance, sugar quotas. watch?v=fGOj8kBpsD4 If protectionism worked, resource rich & "self reliant" India under Nehru should have been extremely prosperous, while resource poor Hong Kong should be extremely poor, but the opposite is true.
So what? Government tinkering isn't going to magically create any more oil than there already is. But when the price is screwed with either directly or with quotas, taxes and subsidies, there is a distortion of the facts. New ideas cannot develop properly if they are being developed with inaccurate market information. When the true price of a thing is known, it is better understood where to invest (if anywhere) in new technology.
no, u wrong.
look at US electricity production by percentage.
coal, coal, coal for a hundred years, and for a hundred more to come.
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until someone figures out fusion, nothing can beat coal.
Yeah I know, and now that I do know that I am against that part of his philosophy.
The population growth rate is slowing, and nations like China, Russia, Japan, Brazil and much of western Europe are faced with a leveling, and possibly a future population decline. This brings up a very serious problem, particularly in China and Japan, because soon there wont be enough young people to support the old. Nevertheless, the Malthusian doom and gloom population bomb predictions have not panned out at all.
Maybe he thought the Fed could threaten him. Didn't he turn against the Fed towards the end of his life?
nuclear is best.
and coal has been around for hundreds of years, and is still the most used.
What is wrong with his monetary policies?
We are running out of air. Let mandate everyone one breath a year to save our natural air resource. Lol
While I agree that man can come up with new and exciting ways to solve problems in the world, the notion that oil and coal are infinite is wrong. Freedman talks about the cataloging of those resources as an exercise in futility, but it really wasn't. The Cataloging of oil and gas was conducted by the companies that extracted them, not by the economist. We now have a very good understanding of how much is left in the ground. How we get around that problem does need the free market though.
6 people that would not have died otherwise. That might seem like small potatoes to you, but Nixon resigned over a 3rd rate break-in and nobody died. How's that for comparative integrity. In any case, why should the taxpayers who already had adequate insulation be financially responsible for those who don't?
Yet we consume much more resources today than ever before. Need more information to contrast with what Friedman is saying. He was somewhat wrong about deregulation, which led to the recession of 2008. Some of us are very greedy and prone to blow up the system, so some regulations should curb bad behavior.
Carlos Prada Deregulation didn’t cause the recession. Government intervention did. The only reason Wall Street didn’t care about what they were doing was because they knew the government would bail them out. Lesser government size would’ve never caused the recession, something that Friedman advocated to (less government).
Just liked the video to bring it to the 666 mark .. Thought it would be fitting
It's a COW MIDWIFE.
I think Krugman is a technocrat.
Wanting to believe he can part the Red Sea with the right amount of taxpayer's money.
Milton, buddy, you're wrong on this one.
This is a very narrow view of the scope of resources that should be considered when assessing a non zero and positive growth environment. If we could have considered and costed impacts to the environment such as reduction in fish stocks, species extinction, global warming and the resultant impact, etc most growth to date would not be economically viable. As a species we are future eaters, our technology has short circuited feedback mechanisms that would normally have controlled our impact on natural global mechanisms.
This talk doesn't deal with environmental issues. Nowhere did Milton say we should just burn fuel as much as we want and as recklessly as we can. Try to get prejudice out of your system.
We aren't dependent on natural resources? What a joke. Pretty sure computer programmers still eat natural resources. All those sectors become non existent without food (a natural resource).
This guys a modern incarnation of the chiefs of Easter island calling for more trees to be cut down. There is always more until there isn't.
"We aren't dependent on natural resources." He never said that, he said less dependent.
What a stupid comment, he's pointing out the substitution effect.
@@chapter4travels which natural resources are we less dependent on? This is a good faith question.
@@matt385 All of them, listen to the talk a bit closer. We are much more efficient with the resources we have through technology which makes us less dependent. Right now we have enough energy resources to last the entire world billions of years through substitution which he also talked about. Substituting uranium and thorium for coal, oil, and natural gas. At some point, we will make that switch but right now we simply choose not to for a host of reasons.
Ad hominem attack, really?
And not even a close one. Try again.
your car engine is only mildly more advanced than a caveman gathering wood for a campfire; it's in fact the same damn principle.
.
and you can turn coal into liquid fuel--the germans did that during wwii because they had to--no oil.
this isn't his field, and he should have stayed out of it. doesn't know enough.
Ok then at best he's a pragmatist, at worst an incompetent self server.
I wonder if he was a climate denier.
I’m not sure the climate change hoax was so much talked about in his day.
While I haven't sought out his view on climate change in particular, he has expressed the view that taxing pollution is a reasonable function of government. So if he was in line with climate theory he probably would have advocated for some kind of "Carbon Tax" but would have detested plans such as the "Green New Deal" (especially considering he was opposed to the original New Deal).
@@patrickobrian9669 Friedman was way too smart to fall for the climate "CRISIS" hoax.
No person denies climate except possibly these idiots who think they can control it building windmills. Climate has changed for 500m+ years. We live in the quaternary ice age btw so the hysteria over very small warming is utterly bizarre for a tropically evolved ape that can't bear cold.
@@patrickobrian9669 doubtful, he'd have seen the net economic benefits of co2 to agricultural yields so would have certainly opposed something so utterly ridiculous as taxing plant food.