Milton Friedman

Friedman, Milton

(1912–  ) economist; born in New York City. He is one of the most publicly familiar U.S. economists through his economics column in Newsweek and his television series "Free to Choose." His intellectual achievements are highly esteemed, especially his analysis of inflation and the role of monetary policy, his permanent income theory of consumption, and the concept of a "natural rate of unemployment." He helped form "the Chicago School" of economic thought during his years at the University of Chicago (1948–79) and also served as an adviser to presidential candidate Barry Goldwater, President Richard Nixon, and the Reagan administration. He received the Nobel Prize in economics (1976).

The Cambridge Dictionary of American Biography, by John S. Bowman. Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1995. Reproduced with permission.

The following article is from The Great Soviet Encyclopedia (1979). It might be outdated or ideologically biased.

Friedman, Milton

 

Born July 31, 1912, in Brooklyn, N. Y. American economist. Representative of the Chicago school of bourgeois political economy.

Friedman graduated from Rutgers University in 1932 and received a doctorate from Columbia University in 1946. He has also received several honorary doctor of laws degrees. Since 1948 he has been a full professor of economics at the University of Chicago. Friedman served as an economics adviser to President R. Nixon from 1971 to 1974.

Friedman is the leader of the monetarist trend in bourgeois political economy, and his major work has been concerned with the theory and practice of monetary circulation. He has propounded a monetary theory of national income and a new variant of the quantity theory of money. Friedman’s concept, which reflects the interests of the most conservative circles of the monopolistic bourgeoisie, is characterized by an overexaggeration of the role of money, which exerts, in his opinion, a determining influence on the level of economic activity. As an opponent of Keynesian-ism, Friedman considers that free enterprise and the spontaneous mechanism of the capitalist market can ensure the normal course of reproduction without extensive interference by the state in the economy. The state’s function, according to Friedman, should be limited to regulating the amount of money in circulation. Friedman won a Nobel Prize in 1976.

WORKS

Essays in Positive Economics. Chicago, 1953.
Capitalism and Freedom. Chicago, 1962.
Dollars and Deficits. New York, 1968.
The Counter-Revolution in Monetary Theory. London, 1970.
Money and Economic Development. New York, 1973.

REFERENCES

Usoskin, V. M. Teorii deneg. Moscow, 1976. Chapter 3.
Seligman, B. Osnovnye techeniia sovremennoi ekonomicheskoi mysli. Moscow, 1968. Chapter 7.
Milton Friedman’s Monetary Framework: A Debate With His Critics. Edited by R. J. Gordon. Chicago-London, 1974.

A. A. KHANDRUEV

The Great Soviet Encyclopedia, 3rd Edition (1970-1979). © 2010 The Gale Group, Inc. All rights reserved.