Chicago Daily Observer

“The Chicago School of Economics” has become shorthand for a no-holds barred free-markets view of the world that borders on the libertarian. At the University of Chicago, Milton Friedman laid the intellectual foundations for the anti-inflation, tax-cutting, small-government policies of President Ronald Reagan and British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.

So in some ways it’s strange that President-elect Barack Obama has been bouncing ideas off Chicago economists and counts some of them as his closest advisers.

It’s a sign of how the world has changed, with many ideas championed by Chicago economists finding greater acceptance. It’s also a sign of how Chicago has changed—though many economists at the university hold that the “Chicago School” was never quite what outsiders deemed it to be.