“Galbraith was a very, very good writer, but he was not a very good economist. His economic history is entertaining, but it is not theoretically sound, and his major theories, captured in The New Industrial State, were almost comically wrong. The book was being proven incorrect by history virtually as he wrote it. His tirades against advertising, much beloved by current critics of consumer culture, were backed by no research or empirical data, and still aren’t. I love his books, and highly recommend them, but he was not a major economist. Milton Friedman, on the other hand, was as successful inside the academy as outside it. His Monetary History of the United States, and associated work, revolutionised monetary policy, removing it from the clutches of the Keynesians. You can thank Milton Friedman for the fact that our central banks no longer hand us double-digit inflation in a fruitless quest for permanently higher output levels. While his work has since been refined, and his push for quantity targeting has largely been abandonned, he remains central to modern monetary policy. His permanent income hypothesis has made similar contributions to consumption theory. His students have also expanded the boundaries of human knowlege in significant ways, particularly Gary Becker, another Nobel-prize winner…Anyone who would compare the Nobel prize-winner to JKG [John Kenneth Galbraith] as an economist can only have a gaping hole in their economic education”. –Megan McArdle, on the legacy of Milton Friedman