FRIEDMAN, MILTON

born July 31, 1912, Brooklyn, N.Y., U.S. Milton Friedman. American laissez-faire economist, professor at the University of Chicago, and one of the leading conservative economists in the second half of the 20th century. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Economics in 1976. After studying at Rutgers University and the University of Chicago, Friedman received his Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1946 and joined the faculty of the University of Chicago that same year. Friedman became one of the leading American advocates of the monetarist school of economics, which holds that the business cycle is determined primarily by money supply and interest rates rather than by a government's fiscal policy. In Capitalism and Freedom (1962; with his wife, Rose D. Friedman) Friedman argued for a negative income tax, or guaranteed income, to supersede centralized, bureaucratized social welfare services, which in his view are inimical to the traditional values of individualism and useful work. Among his other works, many of which concern the theory of money, are A Monetary History of the United States, 18671960 (1963) and Monetary Trends of the United States and the United Kingdom (1981). Additional reading Eamonn Butler, Milton Friedman (1985), explains his economic theories.