born July 31, 1912, Brooklyn, N.Y., U.S.
U.S. economist.
Friedman studied at Rutgers and Columbia before joining the faculty of the University of Chicago in 1946. There he became the leading U.S. advocate of monetarism . He oversaw the economic transition in Chile after the overthrow of Salvador Allende . In the 1980s his ideas were taken up by Pres. Ronald Reagan and Britain's Margaret Thatcher . His many books include A Theory of the Consumption Function (1957) and Capitalism and Freedom (1962), both with his wife, Rose Friedman, and A Monetary History of the United States, 1867–1960 (1963) and Monetary Trends of the United States and the United Kingdom (1981), with economist Anna Schwartz. He received the Nobel Prize in 1976.