The Economist stayed away from the ideas of Milton Friedman who has been “treated a bit like a secular saint in policy discussions,” according to Noah Smith. So Smith decided to venture into classical economics-heresy land and “grade” Friedman’s macroeconomic ideas in what’s possibly one of the most interesting and controversial economics blog posts of the year. Smith gave Friedman D’s for the ideas of money growth targeting and that fiscal policy can’t stabilise economies. Overall, Smith rates Friedman’s macroeconomic policy at a C+, saying his “macro ideas were enormously influential, and probably made very crucial points at the time they were introduced. However, they suffer from one fatal flaw: They are macro ideas. Macroeconomics does not easily yield its truths to the probing mind, given uninformative data and the complexity of the thing. Plus, it’s likely that big structural changes make it such that the discipline has few eternal verities – what describes the economy well in 1976 might have little to do with the events of 2016.”