Milton Friedman
Categories: Econ
Milton Friedman: Nobel Prize-winner, American economist, and a leader of the Chicago school of economic thought. If you haven’t heard of them, you should feel like a silly-nilly, since Economist magazine called him “the most influential economist of the second half of the 20th century.”
Just what made him so famous? Most of his work was macroeconomics, a popular economic school of thought that opposed the other popular macroeconomic Keynesian school of thought. While Friedman is largely a champion for conservatives (arguing for more deregulation, limited intervention, and free market economics), he, like many other economists in other schools of thought, opposed never-ending money-draining initiatives, like the war on drugs.
Besides being famous for his price theory, he was also famous for his view on inflation and unemployment, and his proposition of a small-and-steady trickle of more money into the economy (increasing the money supply) by the central bank, called “monetarism.” While much of modern U.S. governmental economic policy is based off of Keynesian economics, a lot of policies have also been influenced by Friedman, including the Fed’s response to the financial crisis of 2008.