WORLD FAMOUS ECONOMISTS AND THEIR CONTRIBUTIONS - MILTON FRIEDMAN

MILTON FRIEDMAN

      

       1912–2006

·    Milton Friedman was an American economist who received the 1976 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his research on consumption analysis, monetary history and theory, and the complexity of stabilization policy.

·     With George Stigler and others, Friedman was among the intellectual leaders of the second generation of Chicago price theory, a methodological movement at the University of Chicago's Department of Economics, Law School, and Graduate School of Business from the 1940s onward.

·   Several students and young professors that were recruited or mentored by Friedman at Chicago went on to become leading economists; they include Gary Becker, Robert Fogel, Thomas Sowell, and Robert Lucas, Jr.

·    Friedman's challenges to what he later called "naive Keynesian" theory began with his 1950s reinterpretation of the consumption function.

·      In the 1960s, he became the main advocate opposing Keynesian government policies, and described his approach (along with mainstream economics) as using "Keynesian language and apparatus" yet rejecting its "initial" conclusions.

·  He theorized that there existed a "natural" rate of unemployment, and argued that employment above this rate would cause inflation to accelerate.

·   He argued that the Phillips curve was, in the long run, vertical at the "natural rate" and predicted what would come to be known as stagflation.

·  Friedman promoted an alternative macroeconomic viewpoint known as "monetarism", and argued that a steady, small expansion of the money supply was the preferred policy.

·   His ideas concerning monetary policy, taxation, privatization and deregulation influenced government policies, especially during the 1980s. His monetary theory influenced the Federal Reserve's response to the global financial crisis of 2007–08

SOME OF HIS FAMOUS QUOTES

·         There's no such thing as a free lunch.

·        Underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself.

·     If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in 5 years there'd be a shortage of sand.

·       Concentrated power is not rendered harmless by the good intentions of those who create it.

·       Nothing is so permanent as a temporary government program.

·       The government solution to a problem is usually as bad as the problem.

·       Inflation is taxation without legislation.

·    Most economic fallacies derive from the tendency to assume that there is a fixed pie, that one party can gain only at the expense of another.

·      Governments never learn. Only people learn.

·      We have a system that increasingly taxes work and subsidizes nonwork.