Milton Friedman · Economics & Business
Free Market Economics
1912, Brooklyn, New York, USA — 2006, San Francisco, California, USA
United States (University of Chicago)
Milton Friedman was an American economist and statistician who received the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1976 for his research on consumption analysis, monetary history and theory, and the complexity of stabilization policy.
Origins and early life
Milton Friedman was born in Brooklyn on 31 July 1912, the youngest of four children and the only son of Sára Ethel Landau and Jenő Saul Friedman, Jewish working-class immigrants from Beregszász in Carpathian Ruthenia, then Hungary and now Berehove in Ukraine; they had come to the United States in their early teens and kept a dry goods store.
Work and career
The family moved soon after to Rahway, New Jersey. He became, with George Stigler, the intellectual leader of the Chicago school of economics, which set itself against the Keynesian consensus of the mid-century. His argument was that what people spend depends on the income they expect over a lifetime rather than this year's pay packet, and that inflation is above all a monetary matter — that governments cannot buy lasting employment with rising prices.
He wrote the monetary history of the United States with Anna Schwartz and argued the case for economic freedom to a wide public in Capitalism and Freedom and the television series Free to Choose. He received the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1976. He died on 16 November 2006.
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Source: Nobel Prize Economics 1976
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Free Market Economics
Source: Nobel Prize Economics 1976
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