AWARDS: Medal for a Monetarist

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Cult Hero. Since the 1960s, when most economists were committed to the Keynesian view that a balance between inflation and unemployment was best maintained by a "fine tuning" of Government spending levels and other kinds of intervention (including controls), the policymakers have indeed paid more attention to monetary factors. That trend has been reinforced because Keynesian stimulative measures for a while seemed to perform uncertainly during the recent bout with "slumpflation." Many economists still feel that Friedman's following remains more of a cult than a school, but the Federal Reserve Board recently made a bow to Friedmanism by formally setting annual targets for expanding the money supply. In the past, Federal Reserve Chairman Arthur Burns, who taught Friedman when he was a student at Rutgers in the 1930s, remained unconvinced by the monetarists. Now he, like many other economists, seems persuaded that "money matters," at least somewhat, even if they do not fully agree with Friedman that "only money matters."