Question

Write a biographical post about 20th Century Economist Milton Freidman.

Answer 1

Milton Friedman is the most influential free-market economist of the twentieth century. He was born in New York City in 1912. He attended Rutgers University, where he was awarded his B.A. At the age of twenty, he went on to earn his M.A. University of Chicago in 1933 and Columbia University in 1946. In 1951 Friedman got the John Bates Clark Award recognizing economists under the age of forty for outstanding achievement in economics. In 1976, he received the Nobel Prize in Economics for "his accomplishments in the fields of market research, monetary history and theory, and for his explanation of the importance of stabilization policy." Previously, he worked as a consultant to President Nixon and was president of the American Economic Association. In 1967, Friedman has been a senior research fellow at the Hoover Institute at Stanford University since he retired from the University of Chicago in 1977. His 1957 seminal work, The Theory of Consumption Function, took the Keynesian view that individuals and households change their consumption expenses to match their current income. Friedman has shown that, indeed, people's annual consumption is a function of their predicted lifetime earnings.  In Capitalism and Democracy, Friedman liberated the study of market economy from his ivory tower and brought it down to earth. He called for, among other items, a national army, free market exchange rates, the elimination of physician licenses, negative income tax, and college vouchers. He called for, among other items, a volunteer army, free market exchange rates, the elimination of physician licenses, and negative income tax. While his book did not sell well, many of the young people who read it were inspired to study economics themselves. His ideas travel across the world with Free to Choose. This book gave a houshold name to the Friedman.Friedman's solution to inflation problems and short-term volatility in jobs and real GDP was a so-called money supply law. If the Federal Reserve Board were forced to raise the money supply at the same rate as the rise in real GDP, it argued, inflation would vanish. Friedman's monetarism came to the fore when he and Anna Schwartz co-authored US monetary history in 1963. They claim that the Great Depression was the product of the Federal Reserve's ill-conceived monetary policies. While much of his pioneering research has been done on price theory — a theory that describes how prices are calculated in individual markets — Friedman is widely known for monetarism. Defying Keynes and much of the academic establishment of the time, Friedman provided evidence to revive the principle of the quantity of money — the notion that the price level depends on the supply of money. In Studies in the Quantity Theory of Money, published in 1956, Friedman concluded that, in the long run, growing monetary inflation is increasing costs, but has little or no impact on production. In the short run, he concluded, the increase in money supply contributes to an increase in jobs and production, and the decrease in money supply has the opposite effect. Throughout the 1960s Keynesians — and mainstream economists in general — had assumed that the government was faced with a stable long-term trade-off between unemployment and inflation — the so-called Phillips Curve. In this opinion, by rising demand for goods and services, the government could permanently reduce unemployment by allowing higher inflation ratesBut, in the late 1960s, Friedman (and Edmund Phelps of Columbia University) questioned this view. Friedman concluded that, as soon as people adapt to the higher inflation rate, unemployment will increase again. To hold unemployment indefinitely lower, he said, it would take not only a higher rate of inflation, but an ever-increasing rate of inflation.  By its variety of topics and the magnitude of ideas, Friedman not only laid the cornerstone of contemporary economic thought, but also constructed a whole building. This is all about Milton Friedman's biographical post.