Morning Reading, selected articles of interest from various publications.

How Milton Friedman Saved Chile
Milton Friedman gave Chileans the intellectual wherewithal first to survive the quake, and now to build their lives anew. […]
What Chile did have was intellectual capital, thanks to an exchange program between its Catholic University and the economics department of the University of Chicago, then Friedman’s academic home. Even before the 1973 coup, several of Chile’s “Chicago Boys” had drafted a set of policy proposals which amounted to an off-the-shelf recipe for economic liberalization: sharp reductions to government spending and the money supply; privatization of state-owned companies; the elimination of obstacles to free enterprise and foreign investment, and so on.
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Eulogy for Robert B. Parker by his son, David
We all know of his passion for social justice, civil rights and noblesse oblige, and because these traits are enshrined in his work, it’s easy to take them for granted. But we’ve only to remember how hard-won they were. In building his character, he had to reject the narrow-minded and bigoted conservatism of his parents and his parochial upbringing. A larger life beckoned him. He dared to eat the peach. He rode away from his mundane origins on a kind of daft confidence that allowed him to transform himself as needed but without losing his center. In contrast, I didn’t have to reject his values to build my character. I wanted to be like him.
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