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| ⚫ | |SHORT DESCRIPTION=American economist, public intellectual, nobel laureate |
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| ⚫ | |PLACE OF BIRTH=[[Brooklyn]], [[New York City]], [[New York]], [[United States of America]] |
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| ⚫ | |PLACE OF DEATH=[[San Francisco, California]], [[United States of America]] |
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{{Infobox_Scientist |
{{Infobox_Scientist |
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| name = Milton Friedman |
| name = Milton Friedman |
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| ⚫ | |SHORT DESCRIPTION=American economist, public intellectual, nobel laureate |
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| ⚫ | |PLACE OF BIRTH=[[Brooklyn]], [[New York City]], [[New York]], [[United States of America]] |
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| ⚫ | |PLACE OF DEATH=[[San Francisco, California]], [[United States of America]] |
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[[ar:ميلتون فريدمان]] |
[[ar:ميلتون فريدمان]] |
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Milton Friedman
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|---|---|
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| Born | July 31 1912 |
| Died | November 16 2006 |
| Nationality |  American |
| Alma mater | Rutgers University University of Chicago Columbia University |
| Known for | Monetarism Permanent income hypothesis Critique of Phillips curve |
| Awards | John Bates Clark Medal
File:Nobel.svg Nobel Prize in Economics |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Economics |
| Institutions | Hoover Institution (1977-2006) Univ. of Chicago (1946-1976) |
| Doctoral advisor | Simon Kuznets |
| Doctoral students | Gary Becker Tom Campbell Thomas Sowell |
Milton Friedman (July 31 1912 – November 16 2006) was an American economist and public intellectual who made major contributions to the fields of macroeconomics, microeconomics, economic history and statistics while advocating laissez-faire capitalism. In 1976, he was awarded the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel (known informally as the "Nobel Prize in Economics") for his achievements in the fields of consumption analysis, monetary history and theory and for his demonstration of the complexity of stabilization policy.[1]
According to The Economist, Friedman『was the most influential economist of the second half of the 20th century…, possibly of all of it.』[2] In his 1962 book Capitalism and Freedom, he advocated minimizing the role of government in a free market as a means of creating political and social freedom. In his television series Free to Choose, which aired on the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) in 1980, Friedman explained how the free market works, emphasizing that its principles have shown to solve social and political problems that other systems have failed to adequately address. It was later released as a book, co-authored with his wife, Rose Friedman. The book was widely read, as were his columns for Newsweek magazine. His writings were circulated underground behind the Iron Curtain before it fell in 1989. [3]
In statistics, he devised the Friedman test. His political philosophy, which Friedman himself considered more classically liberal, stressing the advantages of the marketplace and the disadvantages of government intervention shaped the outlook of American conservatives and libertarians.
The 1980s were a watershed decade for the acceptance of Friedman's ideas. His views of monetary policy, taxation, privatization and deregulation informed the policy of governments around the globe, especially the administrations of Ronald Reagan in the United States and Margaret Thatcher in the United Kingdom. His ideas were studied throughout the world, and played a major role in the transformation of China's economy.
Friedman was born in New York City to a working-class family of Jewish immigrants from Austria-Hungary, more specifically from Bergsaß/Beregszász (Berehove) in modern Ukraine. He was the fourth and last child, and first son, of Sarah Ethel Landau (1892-?) and Jeno Saul Friedman. His sisters are: Tillie F. Friedman (1919-1992); Helen Friedman (1920-?); and Ruth Friedman (1921-?).[4] After his father's death the family moved to Rahway, New Jersey, and he was educated at Rutgers University (B.A., 1932) and at the University of Chicago (M.A., 1933). He was strongly influenced by Jacob Viner at Chicago, as well as Frank Knight and Henry Simons. He was unable to find academic employment, and working for the New Deal was "a lifesaver." He approved of "many early New Deal measures as appropriate responses to the critical situation", especially the job creating relief agencies WPA, CCC, and PWA[5]. However, he generally disapproved of government programs, especially those that control prices, which he saw as an essential signaling mechanism that help resources go to where they are most valued. Later, in Monetary History of the United States he would argue that the Great Depression was caused by government mismanagement of the money supply. He taught briefly at the University of Wisconsin, but encountered anti-Semitism in the Economics department and went back to government service.
In 1941-43, Friedman worked for the federal government, becoming an adviser to high Treasury officials. As a spokesman for the Treasury in 1942 he advocated a Keynesian policy of taxation, and indeed helped develop the payroll withholding system of income tax payments. Friedman worked at the Treasury Department during World War II and played an important role in designing the United States withholding tax system.[6] Before 1942, there was no withholding system; those wealthy enough to pay income taxes did so in one lump sum on March 15 of the following year.
In his autobiography, he comments on "how thoroughly Keynesian I was then."[7] As Friedman grew older his views changed and in 2006 said, "You know, it's a mystery as to why people think Roosevelt's policies pulled us out of the Depression. The problem was that you had unemployed machines and unemployed people. How do you get them together by forming industrial cartels and keeping prices and wages up?"[8]
Before the late 1940s, Friedman focused mostly on statistical and econometric issues in his research, as exemplified by his dissertation on Income from Independent Professional Practice published with co-author and thesis advisor Simon Kuznets, (1945). The latter work anticipates his permanent income hypothesis and hypothesizes that professional licensing affects the supply of services.
Columbia University awarded him a Ph.D. in 1946. He then served as Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago 1946-76, where he helped build a close-knit intellectual community that produced a number of Nobel Prize winners, known collectively as the Chicago School of Economics. He spent the academic year 1953-54 as a Visiting Fellow at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. In 1976, he won the Nobel Prize in Economics "for his achievements in the fields of consumption analysis, monetary history and theory and for his demonstration of the complexity of stabilization policy." From 1977, Friedman was affiliated with the Hoover InstitutionatStanford University. In 1980, Free to Choose aired on PBS. This ten-part series preceded the book by the same name. In 1988 he received the National Medal of Science and Presidential Medal of Freedom. Milton Friedman is today known as one of the most influential economists of the 20th century.[9]
Friedman's son is the philosopher and economist David D. Friedman.
Milton Friedman died at the age of 94 in San FranciscoonNovember 16 2006ofheart failure.[10] [11]
Friedman was best known for reviving interest in the money supply as a determinant of the nominal value of output, that is, the quantity theory of money. Monetarism is the set of views associated with modern quantity theory. Its origins can be traced back to the 16th century School of Salamanca or even further but Friedman's contribution is largely responsible for its modern formulation. He co-authored, with Anna Schwartz, A Monetary History of the United States (1963), which sought to examine the role of the money supply and economic activity in U.S. history. A striking conclusion of their research was one regarding the role of money supply fluctuations as contributing to economic fluctuations. Or, as a Federal Reserve official (Ben Bernanke) expressed it on the occasion of Friedman's 90th birthday in 2002: "Regarding the Great Depression. You're right, we did it. We're very sorry." Several regression studies with David Meiselman in the 1960s suggested the primacy of the money supply over investment and government spending in determining consumption and output. These challenged a prevailing but largely untested view on their relative importance. Friedman's empirical research and some theory supported the conclusion that the short-run effect of a change in the money supply was primarily on output but that the longer-run effect was primarily on the price level.
Friedman was the leading proponent of the monetarist school of economic thought. He maintained that there is a close and stable link between inflation and the money supply, mainly that the phenomenon of inflation is to be regulated by controlling the amount of money poured into the national economy by the Federal Reserve Bank; he rejected the use of fiscal policy as a tool of demand management; and he held that the government's role in the guidance of the economy should be severely restricted. Friedman wrote extensively on the Great Depression, which he called the "Great Contraction," arguing that it had been caused by an ordinary financial shock whose duration and seriousness were greatly increased by the subsequent contraction of the money supply caused by the misguided policies of the directors of the Federal Reserve. "The Fed was largely responsible for converting what might have been a garden-variety recession, although perhaps a fairly severe one, into a major catastrophe. Instead of using its powers to offset the depression, it presided over a decline in the quantity of money by one-third from 1929 to 1933.... Far from the depression being a failure of the free-enterprise system, it was a tragic failure of government."[12] Friedman also argued for the cessation of government intervention in currency markets, thereby spawning an enormous literature on the subject, as well as promoting the practice of freely floating exchange rates. Friedman's macroeconomic theories were soon displaced. His close friend George Stigler explained, "As is customary in science, he did not win a full victory, in part because research was directed along different lines by the theory of rational expectations, a newer approach developed by Robert Lucas, also at the University of Chicago."[13]
Friedman was also known for his refinement of the consumption function, the permanent income hypothesis (1957), which Friedman himself referred to as his best scientific work.[14] Other important contributions include his critique of the Phillips curve and the concept of the natural rate of unemployment (1968). Each of these has implications for the effect of monetary and fiscal policy on output in the short run and the long run.
Friedman's essay "The Methodology of Positive Economics" (1953) set the epistemological course for his own subsequent research and to a degree that of the Chicago School of Economics. There he argued that economics as science should be free of value judgments for it to be objective. Moreover, a useful economic theory should be judged not by its descriptive realism (hair color, etc.) but by its simplicity and fruitfulness as an engine of prediction.
Friedman also supported various libertarian policies such as decriminalization of drugs and prostitution. In addition, he headed the Nixon administration committee that researched the possibility of a move towards a paid/volunteer armed force, and played a big role in the abolition of the draft that took place in the 1970s in the U.S. He would later state that his role in eliminating the draft was his proudest accomplishment.[15] He served as a member of President Reagan's Economic Policy Advisory Board in 1981. In 1988, he received both the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the National Medal of Science. He said that he was a libertarian philosophically, but a member of the U.S. Republican Party for the sake of "expediency" ("I am a libertarian with a small l and a Republican with a capital R. And I am a Republican with a capital R on grounds of expediency, not on principle.") But, he said, "I think the term classical liberal is also equally applicable. I don't really care very much what I'm called. I'm much more interested in having people thinking about the ideas, rather than the person."[16]
Friedman made headlines by proposing a negative income tax to replace the existing welfare system and then opposing the bill to implement it because it merely supplemented the existing system rather than replace it. In recent years, Friedman devoted much of his effort to promoting school vouchers that can be used to pay for tuition at both private and public schools, saying, "What is needed in America is a voucher of substantial size available to all students, and free of excessive regulations." His idea was that vouchers would allow private schools to compete with the public school monopoly.
In 2005, Friedman and more than 500 other economists called for discussions regarding the economic benefits of the legalization of marijuana.[17]
Michael Walker of the Fraser Institute and Friedman hosted a series of conferences from 1986 to 1994. The goal was to create a clear definition of Economic freedom and a method for measuring it. Eventually this resulted in the first report on worldwide economic freedom, Economic Freedom in the World. These annual report has since provided data for numerous peer-reviewed studies and has influenced policy in several nations.
Friedman allowed the Cato Institute to use his name for its Milton Friedman Prize for Advancing Liberty in 2001. His wife Rose, sister of Aaron Director, with whom he founded the Milton and Rose D. Friedman Foundation for School Choice, served in the international selection committee. Friedman's son, David D. Friedman, has carried on his tradition of arguing in favor of free markets, but to a further extreme, advocating anarcho-capitalism.
At a ceremony celebrating Friedman's achievements, Alan Greenspan said "There are many Nobel Prize winners in economics, but few have achieved the mythical status of Milton Friedman."[18]
According to Harry Girvetz and Kenneth Minogue, Friedman was co-responsible with Friedrich von Hayek for providing the intellectual foundations for the revival of classical liberalism in the 20th century.[19]
Milton Friedman deliverd a speech entitled "The Chinese Economic Reform" in 1988 to Chinese students and scholars in the San Francisco Bay Area. The taped speech was hand-delivered to Zhu Rongji, the architect of the Chinese Economic Reform.
Friedman once said "if you want to see capitalism in action, go to Hong Kong". He believed the Hong Kong economy is the best example of a laissez-faire capitalism economy.
One month before his death, he wrote the article Hong Kong Wrong - What would Cowperthwaite say? in the Wall Street Journal, criticizing Donald Tsang, Chief Exective of Hong Kong, for abandoning "positive noninterventionism". [20] Tsang later said he was merely changing the slogan to "big market, small government", where small government is defined as less than 20% of GDP.
Just before he died, he criticised Hong Kong's kindergarten voucher system as "not properly structured".
Friedman's economic ideas were implemented in Chile under the military government of General Augusto Pinochet. It had never happened before (or since) that an economic theory was implemented so rigorously, which gave economics a unique opportunity for scientific research because it can normally not experiment and thus verifyorfalsify its theories.
Friedman visited Chile in 1975 during Pinochet's rule. Invited by a private foundation, he gave a series of lectures on economics. Several professors from the University of Chicago became advisors[citation needed] to the Chilean government and several Ph.D. graduates from the same university – known as "the Chicago boys" – served in Chilean ministries. Friedman met with Pinochet during his visit to Chile, but he did not serve as a formal advisor to the Chilean government or maintain personal contact with Pinochet. He had given a lecture advocating monetarist economics to the Catholic University of Chile. Friedman said that the "the emphasis of that talk was that free markets would undermine political centralization and political control."[21]
In an interview on the PBS program Commanding Heights in 2000, Friedman attributed the demonstrations to communists seeking to discredit anyone with only the slightest connection to Pinochet--such as himself--by opponents he recognized from earlier occasions, adding that "there was no doubt that there was a concerted effort to tar and feather me."[22]
Friedman defended his role in Chile on the grounds that the move towards open market policies not only improved the economic situation in Chile but also contributed to the softening of Pinochet's rule and to the eventual constitutional transition to a democratic government in 1990. He also stressed that the lectures he gave in Chile were the same lectures he later gave in China and other socialist states.[23] In the 2000 PBS documentary The Commanding Heights, Friedman also noted that this criticism was misdirected and missed his main point. Friedman advocated that freer markets led to free people, and that Chile had an unfree economy which led to the military government, which then implemented open economy policies. These policies led to the end of military rule and a "free society".[24]
Friedman visited Iceland in the autumn of 1984, met with prominent Icelanders and gave a lecture at the University of Iceland on the Tyranny of the Status Quo. He participated in a lively television debate August 31st with leading socialist intellectuals, including Ólafur Ragnar Grímsson. When they complained that a fee was charged for attending his lecture at the University and that hitherto lectures by visiting scholars had been free-of-charge, Friedman replied that of course previous lectures had not been free-of-charge in a meaningful sense: There were always costs attached to lectures. What mattered was whether those who attended the lecture, were charged, or those who did not attend. He himself thought that it was fairer that only those who attended, paid. When Friedman was introduced, at a luncheon, to a governor of Iceland’s Central Bank with the words, that this person would become unemployed if Friedman’s theories were implemented in Iceland, Friedman immediately responded: "No, you would not become unemployed. You would only have to move to a more beneficial kind of employment."
Friedman made a great impact on a group of young intellectuals in the Independence Party, including Davíð Oddsson who became Prime Minister in 1991 and began a radical programme of monetary and fiscal stabilisation, ambitious privatisation, reduction of taxes (e.g. the corporate incomes tax from 50% to 18%), the definition of exclusive use rights in the fisheries, abolition of various government funds for aiding loss-making enterprises and liberalisation of currency transfers and capital markets. In 1975, Iceland had the 53rd freest economy in the world, whereas in 2004, it had the 9th freest economy, according to the Economic Freedom Index designed by Canada’s Fraser Institute. According to the index designed by the Heritage Foundation, Iceland has the 5th freest economy in the world. Davíð Oddsson was Prime Minister for thirteen and a half years, to 2004. Geir H. Haarde who followed him as leader of the Independence Party and who is at present Prime Minister, follows the same policies.[25]
Although Friedman never visited Estonia, his book Free to Choose exercised a great influence on the then 32-year-old prime minister of Estonia Mart Laar, who has claimed that it was the only book on economics he had read before taking office. Laar's reforms are often credited with responsibility for transforming Estonia from an impoverished Soviet Republic to the "Baltic Tiger." A prime element of Laar's program was introduction of the flat tax. Laar won the 2006 Milton Friedman Prize for Advancing Liberty, awarded by the Cato Institute.
