He just used the WORD "thermostat" once, in an article.
And his use of the word was unrelated to the concept presented in the blog post (which is not Friedman's but older and which nobody calls "Friedman's thermostat" except the author of the blog post).
Here's an analogy for the situation:
David Pogue writes and article titled "The perfect gadget for Christmas", which is simply a review of 10 hot current gadgets.
Then, 30 years later, some blogger writes "How come nobody knows "Pogue's Perfect Gadget" theory? You know the one that says that when you put a cat inside a gadget's enclosure with a quantum based poisoning device the cat's state is both dead and alive?"
He then goes to admit that idea: is not Pogues, it was found earlier, and nobody calls it that -- all the while complaining why people don't know it by his made up name "whereas they do some other Pogue's articles".
Let's get the obvious out of the way: The thermostat concept is an analogy. In Friedman's original article, it's being used to describe money supply targeting [not real thermostats].
Nick Rowe is abstracting away some of the specifics of Friedman's article, but he's talking about the same concept : how active targeting of one measure can achieve desirable changes in another one while still showing no/little correlation between the two.
Rowe is also applying that abstraction to another concrete example: the pedals in a car driving in a hilly area.
No he didn't.
He just used the WORD "thermostat" once, in an article.
And his use of the word was unrelated to the concept presented in the blog post (which is not Friedman's but older and which nobody calls "Friedman's thermostat" except the author of the blog post).
Here's an analogy for the situation:
David Pogue writes and article titled "The perfect gadget for Christmas", which is simply a review of 10 hot current gadgets.
Then, 30 years later, some blogger writes "How come nobody knows "Pogue's Perfect Gadget" theory? You know the one that says that when you put a cat inside a gadget's enclosure with a quantum based poisoning device the cat's state is both dead and alive?"
He then goes to admit that idea: is not Pogues, it was found earlier, and nobody calls it that -- all the while complaining why people don't know it by his made up name "whereas they do some other Pogue's articles".
The whole blog post smells crank to me...