The Economic Theories of Milton Friedman

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The Economic Theories of Milton Friedman

Milton Friedman, like so many great life stories, was the product of a very tough childhood. He was son to a couple of poor immigrants, born on 31 July 1912, in New York, America. At the age of fifteen, Friedman's father died. Despite this, he won a scholarship to both Rutgers University and the University of Chicago, where he achieved a Bachelor of the Arts degree in economics. The very next year he received an MA at Chicago University. He then worked for the National Bureau of Economic Research (from 1937) while teaching at many universities, but it was only at Chicago in 1946 that he was given the title of 'professor of economics'. Thirty years later, in 1976, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for economics, "for his achievements in the field of consumption analysis, monetary history and theory, and for his demonstration of the complexity of stabilisation policy." Through his life, Friedman has published many books, articles in newspapers and periodicals. He has also appeared on radio and television in countless interviews.

Friedman is strictly a monetarist. This means that he believed that inflation was a direct result of growth in the supply of money into an economy. His views differed however, with those of his contemporaries, in the major point that he believed that economic stability could only be reached through non-intervention on behalf of the government. This policy is often known as laissez-faire (French for 'let thin...

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