America Needs A New Milton Friedman

Milton Friedman popularized free market economics during the cold war.  The cold war is over and a lot of things have changed since Friedman's era.  His ideas have gone about as far as they can go.  Republicans like Paul Ryan are stuck in the Friedman era but economic theory has taken a back seat to empirical research on more practical problems.  Noah Smith suggests some the candidates who are more representative of the changes that have taken place in economics and are also able to communicate economic ideas to the public. Paul Krugman, who has a platform in the NYT,  has done a good job of relating current economic thinking about important problems to the public, but the profession has not settled on the best candidate to replace Milton Friedman as the spokesperson for the new economics that is focused on finding solutions to real problems.