Jacob Levy has an update:
Proceeding from the other direction: a search just on Hayek restricted to business, economics, finance, law, linguistics, philosophy, political science, psychology, public policy, and sociology eliminated all the false positives I could find. 9385 . Searching for "milton friedman" in those same disciplines (and as far as I know there's no ambiguity in how to refer to him): 8088.
Now, I don't really think that citation counts are going to do the work Wolfers wants them to do here. But on his terms, Hayek is now out of Larry Summers' company, and into Friedman's.
He also shows that searching for further permutations on Hayek's name, such as adding a space where needed, ups the total number of cites a considerable amount.
I think this whole thing is dumb, but clearly if you only search for last names you will get much higher numbers. So comparing “Hayek” to “Milton Friedman” or “Larry Summers” doesn’t seem valid. Of course, you can’t just search for “Friedman” or “Summers” because they are insuffciently unique.
I think the lesson here is that this isn’t a very meaningful exercise. However, my personal experience is that “Hayek” references do not show up nearly as much as “Friedman” references.
Thanks, matt wilbert, for making the obvious point here. “Last name yields more hits than first name-last name in academic papers” is not a news story. I am absolutely certain that left-wing anti-globalisation academics do not need to disambiguate Friedman by gracing Milton with his first name in their diatribes.
I thought the purpose of this exercise was to measure influence on the field of economics. So shouldn’t we exclude “linguistics, philosophy, political science, psychology,…and sociology,” all of which Jacob Levy includes? For example, what does linguistics have to do with understanding how markets work?
Regardless, citation count is not a very useful exercise in measuring the impact on economic theory anyway. Consider person-to-person discussions that many economists do now and did way back when, in the form of seminars and the like. Those had a profound impact on economic understanding, even if they weren’t in a “paper form” that could be cited.
The last-name-only search is the final thing I do. In between I just add permutations about how Hayek’s name is formatted. As far as I know Friedman doesn’t suffer from similar ambiguities. Keynes does, and adding permutations to Keynes’ names increases the numbers over those Justin reported. But I was primarily struck by his “Hayek is closer to Summers than to Friedman” conclusion, which seems wrong to me when running comparable searches.
Using comparable search rules, Hayek will always
come far behind Smith, Marx, and Keynes. But I don’t think far behind Friedman, if at all, and I don’t think “closer to Summers than to Friedman.”
As far as the disciplines: since Justin started by searching *all* disciplines, I was just paring back to eliminate as many false positives as I could.
Millian,
Read my comment here. Friedman’s policy prescriptions are out of date and looking silly,
although I shall grant that his defense of flexible exchange rates in the early 1950s had
him out in frong by himself on something that did come about, even if they did not behave
in the way he said they would. Hayek’s ideas on information were seminal and due to him and
only increasing in importance.
Wolfers did:
“This exercise suggests that Larry Summers is more influential than Hayek”
@ Jacob.
Ah. Shoulda looked before opening my trap.
Its just as well, Hayek ought to be regarded as one of the most important 20th century economists. Phyllis Schlafly and Newt Gingrich seem to be less defensible.
Hayek has his own video now. Who wants to read in schools anyhow?
I know that Skinner gets cited a lot in philosophy, but that’s just because he’s used to demonstrate how stupid behaviourism is.
Does Friedman get cited a lot just because people want to say how monetarism doesn’t really work?
I have question for the American readers of this post that didn’t mind to spend time in a nonsense fight: What do you think of your Hugo Chavez violating the Constitution to sign into law a proposal that has not been approved by Congress? Background: a few days ago your Hugo Chavez congratulated President Uribe of Colombia because he accepted a Supreme Court’s ruling that prevented him to be re-elected. Follow-up question: Do you think your Hugo Chavez would accept a Supreme Court’s ruling preventing him to enact as law a proposal that has not been approved according to Congress’ rules?
I agree with the thrust of Barkley’s Hayek-Friedman legator comparison. Hayek will continue to perform many more knowledge functions in social science than Milton Friedman. I try to explore his mixed positive & negative legacy in my book. I reckon school kids could appreciate some of the basic insights if taught well.
It’s a separate issue if young male libertarian hotheads have a shallow appreciation of Hayek’s knowledge functions. Similarly I got the impression Millian could not possibly have read much of or about Hayek. I have a portrait of Marx hanging on my wall (over my shoulder to the right) and respect him greatly even though he got so much wrong. If I want to attack Marxism I might start with Lenin.
@Manolis – I read Quentin Skinner on political philosophy and the history of the state. But if you mean Burrhus Skinner, surely a disagreement with him does not justify dismissing the entire and massive research output of behavioral psychology?
The American chavez he was talking about is clearly Obama.
Wouldn’t it make more sense to search a citation index (i.e., Social Science Citation Index) rather than a full text mishmash like JSTOR? Mentions are not the same as citations.
Yet another occassion in which I wish the Post-Austrian Economics blog was still around. It had a post arguing that the premier laissez-faire economics school was not the Austrians or Chicago but UCLA (Demsetz in particular).
Bryan Caplan bashes Hayek here, wondering why he couldn’t be more like Milton Friedman!
Millian is simply ignorant, Hayek is popular with people other than libertarians. James Scott takes pains to distance himself from Hayek’s (perceived) politics, but acknowledges his great insight about distributed information (or “metis) in “Seeing Like a State”. I’m not as sure, but I think Jane Jacobs does likewise in “Seeing Like a State”. Larry Summers himself is a member of the big tent of Hayek fans. It might be argued that Hayek’s ideas had much better distillers than Hayek himself who you are better off reading, or even that most of his work is of little value. But that doesn’t mean he should be marginalized to the extent of, say, Murray Rothbard.
Salma Hayek is an order of magnitude more cited than Friedrich Hayek
http://www.googlefight.com/index.php?lang=en_GB&word1=salma+hayek&word2=friedrich+hayek
I don’t know about y’all, and academic papers…but whenever I open a book on a new (or not deeply explored) -to-me econ subject, by a luminary in the sub-field…say Vernon Smith or James Buchanan…the big props in the introduction, and the chief intellectual debt goes to Hayek. I think the other part of the article, in which Nobel speech shout-outs are addressed is pretty important too, when counting influence.
Millian,
The Austrian school was not “exhumed” by young male internet libertarians or by anyone else. It was revived in the early 1970s and coincided with the founding of the modern libertarian movement. So you’re only a quarter century off.
Nor did any mass murdering British PM have anything to do with the Austrian school.
Hayek himself wrote an influential study during this time, _Denationalisation of Money_, which was influential in the Austrian revival.
@ Tom Hynes – Glen Whitman is responsible for the definitive comparison between Salma and F. A. Hayek:
http://www.csun.edu/~dgw61315/dgwhayek.html
@ Barkley – It hardly needs said that I agree with your ranking of Friedman and Hayek. But I wonder if you’re being too rough on Friedman. The Monetary History was very important in persuading people that the Great Depression was more “government failure” than “market failure.” That’s huge. Justly or not, it was that book and not anything by Clark Warburton that persuaded people. His theory of the consumption function taught people how to construct testable macro models. And so on. He did plenty, I think. But, I agree that Hayek was deeper and way more important.
Barkley,
Without commenting on MF, GS or other worthies, I think you take the Nobel Prize in economics far too seriously. I’m still trying to figure out what Krugman did that was worthy of such an award (and in thirty years will anyone care?).
I’ll be adding two more references to Hayek too very soon: one on the sociology of artistic production and one that bridges Hayek’s theory of the brain with his theory of evolution of ethics (both using spontaneous order theory, of course). They’ve been accepted for publication. Just waiting.
Game over: Wolfers identifies Hayek as “a serious influence” on his work .. and Google Scholar pulls up 328 hits for a “Wolfers” and “Hayek” search. More here:
http://hayekcenter.org/?p=2094
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Hayek is vastly overrated. He was basically a welfare-statist, super wishy-washy, his epistemic and methodological views on economics were untenable and his description of economc calculation as a ‘knowledge’ problem is more or less nonsense, and worse, misdirection from the real problem of economic calculation which is that real prices – not any ‘knowledge’ they convey – are impossible without actual private ownership of capital. The whole tangent of ‘Hayekian’ literature rushing around ‘knowledge’ is basically worthless and irrelevant to economic science.
He’s popular precisely because his brand of middle-of-the-road neoliberalism is comfortable to all the vices and prejudices of most democratic-republican institutions and the various social-democrat and neo-conservative types that populate them today. He’s got the reputation of being radical without actually being radical. In terms of his actual doctrines, and the working out of his confused and often content-less constitutional schemes, Hayek was about as ‘libertarian’ as John Stuart Mill; the socialist in him never really left, it just diverted course once Mises debunked central planning.
And his obsession with ‘constructivist rationalism’ is bizarre, hardly anybody actually holds that opinion.
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