Milton Friedman Quotes
The argument for collectivism is simple if false; it is an immediate emotional argument. The argument for individualism is subtle and sophisticated; it is an indirect rational argument. And the emotional faculties are more highly developed in most men than the rational, paradoxically or especially even in those who regard themselves as intellectuals.
Friedman, Milton. Introduction. The Road to Serfdom, by F.A. Hayek, 50th Anniversary ed., University of Chicago Press, 1994, p. xvii.
This explains why demagogues usually choose scapegoats or politicians often turn subgroups against each other or find a dangerous enemy that all can hate.
The research to which she referred is known as the “Dunning-Kruger Effect”. See Dunning: Quotation 644022.
Milton Friedman was an American economist and statistician who received the 1976 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his research on consumption analysis, monetary history and theory and the complexity of stabilization policy. With George Stigler and others, Friedman was among the intellectual leaders of the Chicago school of economics, a neoclassical school of economic thought associated with the work of the faculty at the University of Chicago that rejected Keynesianism in favor of monetarism until the mid-1970s, when it turned to new classical macroeconomics heavily based on the concept of rational expectations. Several students and young professors who were recruited or mentored by Friedman at Chicago went on to become leading economists, including Gary Becker, Robert Fogel, Thomas Sowell and Robert Lucas Jr.
