Establishment economists saw the Goldwater team as extreme outsiders

Evidence

The group attracted signifi cant public attention because of a perceived disregard for orthodoxy in its members’ approach to economic policy. “Professor Friedman, a monetary expert, may be more extreme on many issues than Senator Goldwater himself,” an article in the New York Times reported. Newspapers interpreted the absence of a number of prominent members of Eisenhower’s Council of Economic Advisers— including Paul McCracken, Henry Wallach, and the chairman, Arthur F. Burns— as a sign that the Goldwater team’s radicalism had generated little academic support. Friedman was represented as the leader of a dissident band of policy intellectuals who were generating proposals that fell far outside the economic mainstream. — Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion, 505

Categorization

• XREF: Echoes the outsider/stronghold framing of Chicago economics earlier in the book; shows that in 1964, free-market economics was still widely regarded as beyond the mainstream.
• SEED: Angle: how a movement’s intellectual center went from ‘dissident band’ to orthodoxy within two decades — the Goldwater defeat as the turning point that forced repositioning.