That essay is some best Peterson that I have ever read. The only thing that comes close is his description of the trip. We can see already in Peterson the overuse of commas so characteristic of his pseudo-donnish style, reliant as it is on adverbial phrases and worthless subordinate clauses to paper over the utter lack of substantive thought in his writing.
I would be very surprised if he did bring up the Nephite monetary system, though, especially with Brother Friedman, the greatest monetary theorist of the second half of the last century. No less a scholar than Hugh Nibley has assured us of its incomparable brilliance
on page 25 of the first volume of his Book of Mormon lectures:
Hugh Nibley wrote:We find out later that the Nephites designed their own monetary standards and set them up to suit their conditions from time to time. They ended up with an ideal monetary system which is described there. Professor Richard Smith of Harvard, who is a member of the Church, showed it was the most perfect monetary system that could possibly be devised—the most economical, requiring the least number of coins for the greatest number of exchanges and deals. It was a model; it was based on sevens and threes and things you would never expect of a monetary system. But it was a beautiful one.
Mining our memory a bit further, we find something relevant to Friedman's interest and influence on the Federal Reserve's monetary policy on page 251 of lecture 48 (downloadable
here):
Hugh Nibley wrote:I should have brought an article by Richard Smith who is a chemistry professor at Harvard. He analyzed this money system and came up with surprising things. It tells us here that “they altered their reckoning and their measure, according to the minds and the circumstances of the people.” They were not frozen, rigid, unyielding, or unrealistic in their monetary system. It says they changed their money to suit the circumstances and the times. Every nation has different monetary units. The exchange makes possible a lot of shenanigans for money making in the market. But here he says “they altered their reckoning and their measure according to the minds and circumstances of the people, in every generation [ah ha, it’s the Fed they’re fiddling around with now, isn’t it? They change the value and designation of the money as they go], until the reign of the judges, they having been established by king Mosiah.” This was the system established by King Mosiah. Since the new constitution this is what they had done; they had adjusted the money. They had a system which ran in sevens instead of fives and tens; or sixes and twelves, as the English [system] does; or the decimal system as we use it. It ran in sevens, and Richard Smith pointed out it was the best possible system that could be devised. It used the least coins for any necessary transaction. If you want to figure out a system that will use a minimum amount of coins and save you a lot of trouble, this is the system. It’s an almost perfect system, which Joseph Smith devised for his Nephites here [laughter]
What an apologetic goldmine for your hosts, Peterson! Nibley even sarcastically alludes to it at the end of this passage. No society that we have record of before the modern period had attained a level of monetary understanding where the value of money was separated from the value of the metal in the coin. That was hard for policy makers to do even in the 1930s, as Friedman had studied (the reliance on the gold standard, he argued, was one of the drivers of the Great Depression). How could Joseph Smith have known about monetarism? My god, this is like NHM for economists.
With just a bit of effort, Peterson could have made Friedman the first Mormon to win a Nobel (and the only believing Mormon to win one to date). The whole economics department at Chicago and half of that at Princeton could have been LDS by now! My word, with a bit of help from a freshly converted Friedman and Eisenhower's old Secretary of Agriculture, they might have brought Reagan into the Church.
A golden opportunity missed. God gave him a talent, and he buried it.
The Lord's Anointed Mouthpiece on Earth meeting the President of the LDS Church in the 1980s