Brad DeLong wonders whether we haven't reached the End of the Milton Friedman Era. I imagine so. The fall of the Soviet Union has degraded the need for Friedman's vision, and it takes a very stubborn mind to gaze at our society and decide the problems are an excess of regulation and an absence of roaring capitalism. But even if we've reached the of Friedman's era, I don't think there's a particular vision that's acting as successor. Communism created a market for a similarly sharp counter-perspective, and as communism has exited stage far left, the market for definitional ideologies has largely dissolved. Politics, at least for now, purports to be abut solving people's problems, not giving them something -- as opposed to someone -- to believe in.
