The fundamental reason for the different policy rules advocated by Henry Simons and Milton Friedman was the different weights given by the two economists to data construction and analysis for the purpose of developing testable hypotheses, respectively, according to a new paper by Bank of Greece Monetary Policy Council member George Tavlas.

In his paper, In old Chicago: Simons, Friedman and the development of monetary-policy rules, Tavlas argues that although both rules shared the objective of