died November 16, 2006, San Francisco, California
Friedman was one year old when his family moved from Brooklyn, New York, to Rahway, New Jersey, where he grew up. He won a scholarship to Rutgers University, studied mathematics and economics, and earned a bachelor's degree there in 1932. While at Rutgers he encountered Arthur Burns, then a new assistant professor of economics, whom Friedman ultimately regarded as his mentor and most important influence. Burns introduced him to many things, one of which was Alfred Marshall's Principles of Economics, and Friedman later would approvingly quote Marshall's description of economics as an engine for the discovery of concrete truth. Friedman always insisted that the study of economics was not merely a mathematical game and that it should enable one to understand how the real world works.
Friedman continued his economics studies at the University of Chicago (A.M., 1933) and Columbia University (Ph.D., 1946). While at Chicago he took Jacob Viner's price theory course and met his future wife, Rose Director. In 1935 he moved to Washington, D.C., to assist with a consumer budget study for the Natural Resources Committee. Two years later Friedman took a job with the National Bureau of Economic Research in New York City so that he could join Simon Kuznets in studies of income and wealth distribution, in particular the distribution of professional incomes. His findingthat barriers to entry maintained by the American Medical Association helped explain the much higher incomes of physicians relative to other comparable professional groupswas the source of some controversy when it was finally published. In the early years of World War II, Friedman worked at the Department of Treasury in the Division of Tax Research and later for the Statistical Research Group at Columbia University, where he was a member of a team that applied statistical analysis to war research. He also taught for one year each at the Universities of Wisconsin and Minnesota. In 1946 he accepted a position in the economics department at the University of Chicago, which, except for occasional sabbaticals or visiting appointments, would be his academic home for the next 30 years. He became a full professor in 1948, was named the Paul Snowden Russell Distinguished Service Professor of Economics in 1962, and became an emeritus professor in 1983.
At Chicago Friedman taught courses in price theory and monetary economics, and in 1953 he established the Money and Banking Workshopan important forum for faculty members, graduate students working on dissertations in the field, and occasional outside visitors. The workshop became renowned for the presentation and critical appraisal of papers in monetary economics.
In 1947 Friedman attended the opening meeting of the Mont Pèlerin Society, an organization founded by F.A. Hayek and dedicated to the study and preservation of free societies. Friedman would later say that his participation at the meeting marked the beginning of my active involvement in the political process. His multifold involvement included advising Presidents Richard M. Nixon and Ronald W. Reagan on economic policy, participating in various institutes and societies, and writing a regular column from 1966 to 1984 for Newsweek magazine, in which his articles would alternate with those presenting more liberal views on economic matters, by scholars such as Paul Samuelson and Lester Thurow. Friedman's public policy positions included support of flexible exchange rates and a monetary growth rule, the promotion of school vouchers, a balanced budget amendment, and the decriminalization of drugs; he opposed conscription and various forms of price controlsfrom the minimum wage to rent controls.
Friedman's contributions to economic theory are numerous. One of his earliest, described in A Theory of the Consumption Function (1957), was the articulation of the permanent income hypothesis, the idea that a household's consumption and savings decisions are more affected by changes in its permanent income than by income changes that household members perceive as temporary or transitory. The permanent income hypothesis provided an explanation for some puzzles that had emerged in the empirical data concerning the relationship between the average and marginal propensities to consume. It also helped explain why, for example, activist fiscal policy in the form of a tax increase, if perceived as temporary, might not lead to the intended reductions in consumption; instead, the increased tax might be financed out of savings, leaving consumption levels unchanged. This was Friedman's novel finding: if households do not perceive permanent income as changing, they will maintain their established spending patterns.
Friedman's best-known contributions are in the realm of monetary economics, where he is seen as the founder of monetarism and as one of the successors of the Chicago school tradition of economics. In the 1950s macroeconomics was dominated by scholars who adhered to theories promoted by John Maynard Keynes. Keynesians believed in using activist, government-sponsored policy to counteract the business cycle, and they held that fiscal policy was more effective than monetary policy in neutralizing, for example, the effects of a recession. Friedman opposed the Keynesian orthodoxy that money does not matter, instead promoting the view that changes in the money supply affect real economic activity in the short run and the price level in the long run. He stated his case in his introduction to Studies in the Quantity of Money (1956), a collection of articles that had been contributed by participants in the Money and Banking Workshop. This was followed by an empirical article, The Relative Stability of Monetary Velocity and the Investment Multiplier in the United States, 18971958 (1963), coauthored with David Meiselman, in which the stability and importance of the Keynesian multiplier was questioned. The multiplier, forming a link between changes in autonomous expenditure and subsequent changes in national income, is a key element in the Keynesian case for effective and predictable fiscal policy.
In 1963 Friedman published the first of three books he would coauthor with Anna J. Schwartz, A Monetary History of the United States, 18671960. Combining theoretical and empirical analysis with institutional insights, this volume provided an intricately detailed account of the role of money in the U.S. economy since the Civil War. Especially influential was the authors' claim that the Great Depression would have been a typical downturn had it not been for policy errors made by the Federal Reserve.
In 1967 Friedman made another seminal contribution to Keynesian-monetarist debates in his presidential address before the American Economic Association. In it he questioned the validity of another key Keynesian construct, the Phillips curve, which asserted that a stable trade-off exists between the rate of inflation and the unemployment rate. Friedman argued that the trade-off was temporary and depended on workers being fooled by unanticipated inflation into thinking that a rise in their nominal wage was a rise in their real wage, thus inducing them to produce more output. According to Friedman, the only way to reduce unemployment below what he dubbed the natural rate required not a one-time increase but accelerating inflation. The stagflation of the 1970s (literally, a combination of economic stagnation and inflation), impossible in a simplified Keynesian framework, was seen by many as confirmation of Friedman's hypothesis. It was in any event the death knell for the dominance of the Keynesian model in macroeconomics.
In 1976, the year he retired from the University of Chicago, Friedman was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics. In 1977 he became a member of the Hoover Institution in Palo Alto, California. About the same time he began work with his wife, Rose, on Free to Choose, a book extolling the virtues of a free market system that eventually led to a Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) television series and a set of educational videos of the same name. In 1998 the Friedmans published their memoirs, Two Lucky People.
Over the course of his career, Friedman made a number of enduring contributions to the field of economics. He became an articulate spokesman for free markets and free societies in an era when many social scientists disparaged market solutions to social problems. Friedman's collaborative work with Anna J. Schwartz has remained a vital resource for those interested in the monetary history of the United States. Other legacies include Friedman's revival of a monetary approach to macroeconomics and his persistent critique of the Keynesian orthodoxy of his day.
Bruce J. Caldwell