Milton Friedman Biography Quotes 35 Report mistakes

Early Life and Education
Milton Friedman was born in 1912 in Brooklyn, New York, to Jewish immigrants from Central Europe and grew up in Rahway, New Jersey. A strong student with an early taste for mathematics, he entered Rutgers University during the Great Depression and graduated in 1932. At Rutgers he encountered economics through teachers such as Arthur F. Burns, who encouraged him to pursue graduate work. The combination of mathematical training and a fascination with real economic problems would later shape his empirical style and policy orientation.

After Rutgers, Friedman moved to the University of Chicago, earning an MA in 1933 and encountering an intellectual circle that became central to his life. He studied with Frank Knight, Jacob Viner, and Henry Simons, and formed enduring friendships with peers including George J. Stigler. In Chicago he also met Rose Director, who would become his intellectual partner and spouse. He later completed his PhD at Columbia University after the Second World War, consolidating early research on income and professional earnings.

Early Career and Wartime Work
In the 1930s Friedman worked as a researcher for the National Resources Committee, helping build the consumer expenditure surveys that informed the measurement of the cost of living. He collaborated with Simon Kuznets at the National Bureau of Economic Research, producing work on the incomes of professionals that he would revise and publish after the war. During World War II he served in the Statistical Research Group at Columbia, contributing to applied problems of weapon testing and operations analysis in a team that included scholars such as W. Allen Wallis. He also spent time at the U.S. Treasury, where war finance and taxation sharpened his interest in how policy rules affect incentives and macroeconomic stability.

University of Chicago and the Chicago School
In 1946 Friedman joined the faculty of the University of Chicago, where he taught until 1977. Chicago in those decades became synonymous with rigorous price theory and skepticism of expansive government intervention. Alongside George Stigler and later colleagues such as Gary Becker and Ronald Coase, Friedman helped articulate what became known as the Chicago School. He taught generations of students, insisting on clear predictions, empirical testing, and an appreciation of how markets coordinate dispersed information. Thomas Sowell studied with him and later credited Friedman for shaping his economic thinking, while Robert E. Lucas Jr. found in Friedman's work a platform for his own macroeconomic innovations.

Scholarship: Consumption, Money, and Policy
Friedman made seminal contributions across multiple fields. In Essays in Positive Economics (1953) he defended a predictive, testable approach to economic theory. A Theory of the Consumption Function (1957) introduced the permanent income hypothesis, arguing that households smooth consumption over time based on expected lifetime resources rather than current income alone. This insight reoriented empirical macroeconomics and influenced later work on expectations.

His monetary research revived and recast the quantity theory of money. With Anna J. Schwartz he coauthored A Monetary History of the United States, 1867-1960 (1963), which painstakingly documented the central role of monetary forces in American business cycles. Its most famous chapter, The Great Contraction, contended that Federal Reserve failures magnified and prolonged the Great Depression. In A Program for Monetary Stability (1959) and later essays, Friedman argued for simple, transparent policy rules, notably a fixed k-percent growth rate for the money supply, as a way to avoid discretionary errors.

In his 1968 presidential address to the American Economic Association, The Role of Monetary Policy, he introduced the natural rate of unemployment and an expectations-augmented Phillips curve, warning that attempts to exploit short-run tradeoffs would yield only higher inflation without lasting employment gains. Edmund Phelps developed related ideas independently, and together their work reshaped macroeconomic policy debates worldwide.

Public Engagement and Policy Influence
Friedman relished public debate and policy design. He argued early for the legalization of flexible exchange rates, which many countries later adopted. He proposed a negative income tax to provide income support while preserving work incentives, ideas that helped inform income maintenance experiments in the United States. He became a leading advocate of school vouchers, arguing that choice and competition would raise educational quality. With Rose Friedman he wrote Capitalism and Freedom (1962), a book that linked economic liberty to political liberty and articulated proposals ranging from deregulation to abolishing occupational licensing barriers. The couple reached a wider audience with Free to Choose (1980), a PBS television series and a companion book that brought their arguments to households around the world.

He also played a role in ending conscription in the United States. Serving on the Gates Commission under President Richard Nixon, Friedman argued for an all-volunteer force and famously debated General William Westmoreland on the ethics and economics of the draft. His longtime public exchange with Paul Samuelson in the pages of Newsweek introduced millions to clashing ideas about macroeconomics and the proper role of government.

Debates, Students, and Colleagues
Friedman's professional life unfolded through vigorous debate with contemporaries and engagement with younger scholars. He disagreed with postwar Keynesian models of fine-tuning, yet he drew on John Maynard Keynes's emphasis on expectations and uncertainty while critiquing policy overreach. He worked closely with Anna Schwartz at the National Bureau, and his collegial ties with George Stigler stretched back to graduate school. Gary Becker expanded the Chicago style into human capital and the economics of the family, while Robert Lucas Jr. advanced the rational expectations revolution partly by contesting and extending themes in Friedman's stabilization analysis. Later, Federal Reserve scholar Ben Bernanke publicly acknowledged the importance of Friedman and Schwartz's interpretation of the Depression, underscoring how their historical work influenced modern central banking.

Chile Controversy and Global Influence
In the mid-1970s Friedman visited Chile, offering lectures and policy advice focused on inflation stabilization and market reforms. His brief meeting with Augusto Pinochet and support for policies associated with the so-called Chicago Boys, including economists such as Sergio de Castro, generated controversy that persisted for decades. Friedman maintained that he opposed repression and that expanding economic freedom could enable political liberalization. The episode highlighted enduring questions about the relationship between economic advice, political regimes, and the moral responsibilities of economists.

Later Years, Awards, and Legacy
Friedman received the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences in 1976 for his work on consumption analysis, monetary history and theory, and for demonstrating the limits of stabilization policy. In 1977 he moved to the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, where he continued research and commentary. With Rose he coauthored Tyranny of the Status Quo in 1984 and their joint memoir Two Lucky People in 1998. In 1996 they established the Milton and Rose D. Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice, advancing school choice initiatives that echoed themes from Capitalism and Freedom.

Over time, many of his policy prescriptions moved from the margins toward the mainstream, including the preference for rules-based monetary policy, floating exchange rates, and skepticism about permanent inflation-unemployment tradeoffs. Central banks adopted practices that reflected lessons he championed, and debates he sparked continued to shape research agendas long after his retirement.

Personal Life
Milton Friedman married Rose Director in 1938. She was an economist in her own right and his closest collaborator for more than six decades. They had two children, including David D. Friedman, who also became a noted economist and legal scholar. Friends and colleagues often remarked on Milton's clarity, wit, and willingness to test ideas against evidence, traits that animated his teaching as well as his public advocacy.

Friedman died in 2006 in California. He left behind a body of work that changed how economists approach data, how central banks conduct policy, and how citizens think about liberty and the state. Through his scholarship, teaching, and public engagement, and through the efforts of colleagues and students such as Anna Schwartz, George Stigler, Gary Becker, Thomas Sowell, and Robert Lucas Jr., his influence became woven into the fabric of modern economic thought and policy.

Our collection contains 35 quotes who is written by Milton, under the main topics: Witty One-Liners - Ethics & Morality - Wisdom - Freedom - Science.

Other people realated to Milton: John Kenneth Galbraith (Economist), Murray Rothbard (Economist), Edward Levi (Public Servant), John Stossel (Journalist), Mark Skousen (Economist)