Throughout the third quarter of the twentieth century, Friedrich von Hayek (especially) and Milton Friedman (to a certain degree) ensured that the Chicago economics program did not ignore political economy, thus guaranteeing that a suitably cautious and suspicious judgment about the behavior of political markets influenced the overall research agenda of the Chicago School. In this respect, Chicago clearly distinguished itself from all the major Saltwater economics programs where the Keynesian, Arrovian nostrum that government is the impartial servant of the public good was the sine qua non of all economic discourse.
In saying this, by no means do I infer that Chicago’s understanding of the political process was ever close to being sound. Neither Hayek nor Friedman kept abreast of the public choice revolution that emanated from Britain during the late 1940s (Duncan Black), and spread slowly across the United States during the late 1950s and 1960s (Anthony Downs, James Buchanan, Gordon Tullock and Mancur…
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