Milton friedman biography summary examples

Milton friedman theory

Milton Friedman was the twentieth century’s most prominent advocate of free markets. Born in 1912 to Jewish immigrants in New York City, he attended Rutgers University, where he earned his B.A. at the age of twenty. He went on to earn his M.A. from the University of Chicago in 1933 and his Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1946. In 1951 Friedman received the John Bates Clark Medal honoring economists under age forty for outstanding achievement. In 1976 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in economics for “his achievements in the field of consumption analysis, monetary history and theory, and for his demonstration of the complexity of stabilization policy.” Before that time he had served as an adviser to President Richard Nixon and was president of the American Economic Association in 1967. After retiring from the University of Chicago in 1977, Friedman became a senior research fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.

Friedman established himself in 1945 with Income from Independent Professional Practice, coauthored with Simon Kuznets. In it he argued that state licensing procedures limited entry into the medical profession, thereby allowing doctors to charge higher fees than they would be able to do if competition were more open.

His landmark 1957 work, A Theory of the Consumption Function, took on the Keynesian view that individuals and households adjust their expenditures on consumption to reflect their current income. Friedman showed that, instead, people’s annual consumption is a function of their “permanent income,” a term he introduced as a measure of the average income people expect over a few years.

In Capitalism and Freedom, Friedman wrote arguably the most important economics book of the 1960s, making a case for relatively free markets to a general audience. He argued for, among other things, a volunteer army, freely floating exchange rates, abolition of licensing of doctors, a negative income tax, and education v

A champion of the free market and enemy of big government

Introduction

Milton Friedman was an American economist and winner of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. An advisor to both Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, The Economist has described Friedman as “the most influential economist of the second half of the 20th century… possibly of all of it.” His work, published in books including Capitalism and Freedom (1962) and A Monetary History of the United States, 1867–1960 (1963), popularized new ways of thinking about the economy, contradicting the dominant Keynesian thinking of the time.

For all his influence, Friedman was (and remains) a polarizing figure. As a libertarian, he was a staunch defender of the free market, garnering him effusive praise from some corners and withering criticism from others. Still, his ideas have redefined the way people approach business and macroeconomics, as well as how Western societies think about government in general.

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One of the great mistakes is to judge policies and programs by their intentions rather than their results.

– Milton Friedman

About the Authors

Dan Pilat

Dan is a Co-Founder and Managing Director at The Decision Lab. He is a bestselling author of Intention - a book he wrote with Wiley on the mindful application of behavioral science in organizations. Dan has a background in organizational decision making, with a BComm in Decision & Information Systems from McGill University. He has worked on enterprise-level behavioral architecture at TD Securities and BMO Capital Markets, where he advised management on the implementation of systems processing billions of dollars per week. Driven by an appetite for the latest in technology, Dan created a course on business intelligence and lectured at McGill University, and has applied behavioral science to topics such as augmented and virtual reality.

Dr. Sekoul Krastev

Sekoul is a Co-Founder and Ma

Who Was Milton Friedman and What Is Monetarism?

Milton Friedman was a U.S. economist and Nobel laureate known as the most influential advocate of free-market capitalism and monetarism in the 20th century.

At the beginning of his career in the 1950s and 1960s, Friedman’s strong advocacy of monetary policy over fiscal policy and free markets over government intervention was considered radical by the established macroeconomics community. At the time, the field was dominated by the Keynesian position that fiscal policy—government spending and tax policies to influence the economy—was more important than monetary policy—control of the overall supply of money available to banks, consumers, and businesses—and that an interventionist government could moderate recessions by using fiscal policy to prop up aggregate demand, spur consumption, and reduce unemployment.

Key Takeaways

Milton Friedman, one of the leading economic voices of the latter half of the 20th century, popularized many economic ideas that are still important today—most importantly, free-market capitalism and monetarism.
Friedman's economic theories became what is known as monetarism, which refuted important parts of Keynesian economics, a school of thought that was dominant in the first half of the 20th century.
Friedman’s advocacy of monetarism was so effective that he turned the tide of economic thought away from Keynesian fiscal policy toward monetary policy focused on control of the money supply to control inflation.
Over the course of his academic career, Friedman wrote influential articles on the modern economy and published pioneering books that changed the way economics is taught.

In a direct challenge to the Keynesian establishment, Friedman and his fellow monetarists held that governments could foster economic stability by controlling the supply of money that flows into the economy and allowing the rest of the market to fix itself. He argued for a return to the free market,

Milton friedman accomplishments

Milton friedman theory of money

Who Was Milton Friedman?

Milton Friedman was an American economist and statistician who believed in free-market capitalism and was regarded as a leader of the Chicago School of monetary economics.

In 1976, he earned the Nobel Prize in economic sciences for his research on consumption analysis, monetary history and theory, and the complexity of stabilization policy.

Friedman is the author of several books, including Capitalism and Freedom. He was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1988.

Milton Friedman died on Nov. 16, 2006.

Key Takeaways

Milton Friedman was an American economist who advocated for free-market capitalism.
He is the founder of monetarism, an active monetary policy where governments control the amount of money in circulation.
Friedman helped develop income tax withholding during World War II.
Milton Friedman served as the economic advisor to President Richard Nixon and President Ronald Reagan.
He was awarded the 1976 Nobel Prize in economic sciences.

Early Life and Education

Milton Friedman was born on July 31, 1912, in Brooklyn, New York. After earning a bachelor's degree from Rutgers University, Friedman completed a master's degree at the University of Chicago and a Ph.D. at Columbia University,

In 1935, he joined the Natural Resources Committee conducting a consumer budget survey, a position that would later spur his book, A Theory of the Consumption Function.

Income Tax

In 1941, Milton Friedman joined the U.S. Treasury Department, working on wartime tax policy during the first two years of World War II. Friedman once noted that his wife "has never forgiven me for the part I played in devising and developing withholding for the income tax."

As part of a think tank that brought about income tax withholding as a "temporary" measure to help fund the war, Friedman never questioned the necessity of it in wartime, citing "there is no doubt that it would not have been possible to collect