FRIEDMAN'S METHODOLOGY OF POSITIVE ECONOMICS: A SOFT READING

In his "Methodology of Positive Economics" Friedman aimed to provide a useful heuristic for working economists and not a sophisticated philosophical analysis. Hence, one should be cautious about reading specific philosophical positions, such as instrumentalism, into it. In the context of its time, it was a plea for a positivistic interplay of theory and observation. On such a reading Friedman's plea for unrealistic assumptions becomes much more defensible, and Friedman's essay is broadly consistent with the methodology that most economists now affirm, at least in principle.     

INTERNATIONAL EVIDENCE ON FRIEDMAN'S THEORY OF THE BUSINESS CYCLE

Milton Friedman's theory of the business cycle implies two empirical regularities tested for here. One regularity is that business cycles are asymmetric: The size of a contraction affects the size of the following expansion, but not vice versa. The second regularity is that a supply-side ceiling to aggregate output limits the size of expansions. Friedman's correlation methods yield only very weak support for the asymmetry hypothesis when applied to real GNP data of eight OECD countries. A time series model with a ceiling component fits the data well for a majority of the countries.