Milton Friedman and Monetarism

Friedman, Milton - 1912–, American economist, b. New York City, Ph.D. Columbia, 1946. Friedman has been influential in helping to revive the monetarist school of economic thought. 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. 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 the government's manipulation of the money supply. 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.

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

The Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition Copyright© 2004, Columbia University Press. Licensed from Lernout & Hauspie Speech Products N.V. All rights reserved.