Friedman, Milton

Milton Friedman (1912–2006) was an American economist and writer best remembered for winning the 1976 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences and as a leading liberal economist. Friedman’s research as an academic focused on monetary history and theory, the complexity of stabilization policy, and consumption function.

After graduating from Rutgers University in 1932, Friedman studied on scholarship at the University of Chicago, a university with which he [Page 619]would be associated for the rest of his life. His first teaching stint at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, ended soon after it began because of mobilization for World War II. During the war Friedman held jobs in various government departments and took a Keynesian view of the economy when he was a Treasury Department spokesman in 1942, ...