Economists have gotten a lot wrong over the course of this pandemic, and long before that, but there is one whose ideas have never looked better: Milton Friedman, the Nobel laureate who died in 2006.
Friedman’s reputation suffered after the Great Recession, as the market forces he so believed in were at fault. Worse yet, after the financial crisis, the U.S. Federal Reserve expanded the money supply dramatically, but the rate of price inflation remained stubbornly low. Monetarism, the theory he is best known for, appeared irrelevant.
