United StatesWho was Milton Friedman?
Milton Friedman was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1912 to immigrant parents and studied at Rutgers, Chicago and Columbia. He taught at the University of Chicago from 1946 to 1977, where he became the leading figure of the Chicago school of monetary economics, and then moved to the Hoover Institution at Stanford. With Anna Schwartz he wrote A Monetary History of the United States (1963). With his wife Rose Friedman he wrote Capitalism and Freedom (1962) and Free to Choose (1980), which accompanied a television series. He received the 1976 Nobel Prize in economic sciences and died in 2006.
Political views
Argued that in the long run faster growth of the money supply raises prices but has little effect on output, the core idea of monetarism.
Source: econlib.orgAdvocated a negative income tax and education vouchers in Capitalism and Freedom as alternatives to existing welfare and school systems.
Source: econlib.orgOpposed the military draft and served on the presidential commission that recommended an all-volunteer armed force.
Source: hoover.orgSupported freely floating exchange rates, a view he traced to studying European economic integration for the Marshall Plan in 1950.
Source: nobelprize.orgEmphasized the preservation and extension of individual freedom as the main theme of his public policy writing.
Source: hoover.orgArgued with Edmund Phelps that unemployment returns to its prior level once people adjust to higher inflation, challenging the stable trade-off then assumed.
Source: econlib.orgWorked as an informal economic adviser to presidential campaigns in 1964, 1968 and 1980 while consistently declining full-time positions in Washington.
Source: nobelprize.org
Legacy
Friedman's monetarism and his case for markets influenced central banks and governments from the late 1970s, and he advised Barry Goldwater, Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. Supporters credit him with explaining the role of money in inflation and the Great Depression and with ideas such as school choice and the volunteer military. Critics argue that strict money supply targets worked poorly in practice and that his advocacy of deregulation and lower taxes contributed to rising inequality.