A reminder this is who Massey banned from speaking to students about his career

In a podcast interview on a new economics book, the following exchange occurred:

Binyamin Appelbaum: … If you look around the world, the Central Bank of New Zealand is a great example of this. Their mandate in the 1970s had, like, eight objectives in it. They were responsible for trade balances. They were responsible for the exchange rate. They were responsible for unemployment. They were responsible for all sorts of things; and it was stripped down to just one, which is: Hit an inflation target. That’s sometimes portrayed, by the way – the rise of inflation targeting, which is what emerges in the aftermath of the Volcker era – it was certainly portrayed at the time as a failure of Milton Friedman’s ideas.

I think that’s fundamentally wrong. I think it was his victory in a slightly different form than he anticipated, but the idea that monetary policy was central, that it should be minimalist in its approach, that it should just try to keep things on an even keel was really the core of his idea. By convincing people that that was the proper approach to monetary policy, he gradually changed the approach to central banking around the world.

Russ Roberts: It’s interesting. When I interviewed him [Milton Friedman] in 2006, he attributes the success and triumph of his ideas not to his research, The Monetary History of the United States, this magisterial volume of incredible detail, but rather to the success of Don Brash, the Central Banker of New Zealand, in slaying inflation there and opening the eyes of people to this possibility.

So one of the most influential and important economic and intellectual giants on the last century cites Don Brash as a key to the success of his monetary research.

Yet Massey University thought allowing students to hear from him would be a health and safety risk!