To many, this man changed the face of economics forever. His theories are being taught every day in college campuses across our nation. His philosophy was being preached at a time when fiscal conservatism wasn’t being discussed the way it is in 2009… Milton Friedman would have been 97 today…Finding Dulcinia has the more about the man…
July 31, 2009
In his 94 years of life, Milton Friedman changed the field of modern economics. His teaching at the University of Chicago created a new school of economic thought that continues to thrive.
Milton Friedman was born in New York City on July 31, 1912, to working-class Hungarian Jewish immigrants; he was the youngest of four children and the only boy. Friedman’s parents kept a dry goods store in Rahway, N.J., according to the Academy of Achievement. Although they struggled financially and no member of the family had attended college before, they were determined to send their son to college. Friedman graduated from Rutgers University with a degree in math. He then received a full scholarship from the University of Chicago to study economics.
Friedman had wanted to keep studying math and could have accepted a math scholarship from Brown University. But he accepted the scholarship in economics from the University of Chicago instead. “His choice was inspired by the ongoing Great Depression and his belief that economists could help solve it,” Brian Doherty wrote for Reason Magazine. “That decision guided the rest of Friedman’s career, as his reputation would be forever intertwined with the University of Chicago, the colleagues and students he met there, and the intellectual tradition its economics department came to represent.”
In 1937, Friedman joined the research staff of the National Bureau of Economic Research in New York City. Thanks to his steady salary, he was able to marry fellow economist Rose Director, whom he had met while studying in Chicago.
Friedman received his Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1946. For his doctoral thesis, he used his essay “Income from Independent Professional Practice,” coauthored with Simon Kuznets. In the paper, Friedman argued that “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,” the Concise Encyclopedia of Economics (CEE) reports.
In 1951, he won the John Bates Clark medal, which honors economists younger than 40 for outstanding achievement, according to the CEE. Another essay, “A Theory of the Consumption Function” (1957), provided evidence against the Keynesian view of individual incomes, stating that instead of adjusting their expenditures in response to their current income, consumers’ annual consumption actually reflected their “permanent income,” or “a measure of the average income people expect over a few years,” the CEE reports.
In his 1962 book “Capitalism and Freedom,” Friedman argued in favor of the free market, using terms accessible to the lay reader. The book “Free to Choose” (coauthored with his wife) further outlined Friedman’s economic theories and was “the best-selling nonfiction book of 1980,” CEE notes.
In 1976, Friedman won the Nobel Prize in economics.
Friedman died on Nov. 16, 2006, at age 94. According to BusinessWeek’s Peter Coy, Friedman’s death ended “the greatest rivalry in modern economics”: a 60-year competition between Friedman and the liberal economist Paul Samuelson of MIT. Samuelson said on the day of Friedman’s death, “Milton Friedman was a giant. No 20th-century economist had his importance in moving the American economic profession rightward from 1940 to the present.”
John Scofield's News Blog 