Milton Friedman

Milton Friedman frēd´men , 1912-2006, American economist, b. New York City, Ph.D. Columbia, 1946. Friedman was influential in helping to revive the monetarist school of economic thought (see monetarism ). He was a staff member at the National Bureau of Economic Research (1937-46, 1948-81) and was an economics professor at the Univ. of Chicago (1946-82). Much of Friedman's early work is notable for its arguments against government economic controls. His writings dismissed Keynesian theories on consumption, price theory, inflation, distribution, and the money supply (see Keynes, John Maynard ). His most famous empirical work is A Monetary History of the United States, 1867-1960, coauthored with Anna J. Schwartz (1963). The book charts the relationship between general price levels and economic cycles and the government's manipulation of the money supply. Friedman also predicted that the spending associated with government programs would interact with the "natural rate of unemployment" to result in the stagflation of the 1970s. He won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1976 and was an adviser to the Reagan administration in the 1980s. A prolific writer, Friedman also wrote Capitalism and Freedom (1964, rev. ed. 1981), Politics and Tyranny (1985), and Monetarist Economics (1991). With his wife, Rose, he wrote Free to Choose (1981), The Tyranny of the Status Quo (1984), and Two Lucky People: Memoirs (1998). He also was a columnist for Newsweek (1966-84) and a frequent television commentator.

Bibliography: See biography by A. Hirsch and N. De Marchi (1990).

Friedman, Milton (1912– ) US economist. An influential member of the Chicago School of Economics, he supported monetarism as the best means of controlling the economy. His works include: A Monetary History of the United States 1867–1960 (1963), written with Anna Schwartz and a key book in monetary economics; A Theory of the Consumption Function (1957); Essays in Positive Economics (1953); and Capitalism and Freedom (1962). He received the 1976 Nobel Prize in economic science.