Wednesday, July 18, 2012

Milton Friedman's Quotation Marks

Friedman 'quotes' Neville Keynes (father of Maynard) in Essays in Positive Economics (1953:3):
Keynes distinguishes among  “a positive science  … a body of systematized knowledge concerning what is; a normative or regulative science…[,] a body of systematized knowledge discussing criteria of what ought to be…[,]an art… [,] a system of rules for the attainment of a given end”
What Keynes wrote in The Scope and Method of Political Economy (1890:chapter II):
a positive science may be defined as a body of systematized knowledge concerning what is; a normative or regulative science as a body of systematized knowledge relating to criteria of what ought to be, and concerned therefore with the ideal as distinguished from the actual; an art as a system of rules for the attainment of a given end.
I have already noticed that Friedman uses quotation marks as a bric-á-bric. But this case is not merely a moral faux pas. It strips garmets off his mind..

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