Posted to the web on: 17 November 2006
Milton Friedman, doyen of free markets, dead at 94
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ICONOCLASTIC Nobel Prize-winning US eco-nomist Milton Friedman died yesterday, aged 94, bringing to an end a professional career dedicated to highlighting the place of freedom in economics.
Friedman, whose ideas greatly influenced the policies of former US president Ronald Reagan and former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher, won the Nobel Prize for economics in 1976.
From 1946-1976 he taught at the University of Chicago, a bastion of free-market thinking, and remained a professor emeritus there. He was the last of the great economists to combine the possession of a household name with the highest professional credentials, and in this respect he was often compared with John Maynard Keynes, whose work he always respected, even though he to some extent supplanted it.
Both admirers and detractors have pointed out that his world view was essentially simple: a passionate belief in personal freedom combined with a conviction that free markets were the best way of co-ordinating the activities of dispersed individuals to their mutual enrichment. Where he shone was in his ability to derive interesting and unexpected consequences from simple ideas.
Part of his appeal lay in his willingness to tell home truths that had occurred to others who dared not utter them. Friedman would then go on, however, to defend these maxims against the massed forces of economic correctness; and in the course of those defences he, almost unintentionally, added to know-ledge.
Those who wanted to write him off as a right-wing Republican were disabused by the variety of radical causes he championed. He would not give a millimetre where his convictions were at stake. Although an unassuming and essentially democratic personality, he was human enough to be aware of, and enjoy, his reputation in the last decades of his life.
Friedman’s was an archetypal American success story. He was born in New York in 1912 to poor immigrants and his father died when he was 15. He nevertheless studied at Rutgers and Chicago.
During the Second World War Friedman not only worked for the US Treasury on tax but also had a spell in the statistical war research group at Columbia. He became professor of economics at Chicago in 1946.
Friedman’s own earliest work was in mathematical statistics, where he helped to pioneer some methods, for instance in sampling, which are still in use.
His major achievement was his Theory of the Consumption Function, published in 1957, the work most prominently mentioned in the citation for the Nobel Prize. His investigation was touched off by a well-known paradox that the percentage of income saved increased as income rose. On the other hand, time-series data showed much less change in the savings proportion over the years. Financial Times, Sapa-AFP
Milton Friedman, doyen of free markets, dead at 94
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
E-Mail article Print-Friendly
ICONOCLASTIC Nobel Prize-winning US eco-nomist Milton Friedman died yesterday, aged 94, bringing to an end a professional career dedicated to highlighting the place of freedom in economics.
Friedman, whose ideas greatly influenced the policies of former US president Ronald Reagan and former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher, won the Nobel Prize for economics in 1976.
From 1946-1976 he taught at the University of Chicago, a bastion of free-market thinking, and remained a professor emeritus there. He was the last of the great economists to combine the possession of a household name with the highest professional credentials, and in this respect he was often compared with John Maynard Keynes, whose work he always respected, even though he to some extent supplanted it.
Both admirers and detractors have pointed out that his world view was essentially simple: a passionate belief in personal freedom combined with a conviction that free markets were the best way of co-ordinating the activities of dispersed individuals to their mutual enrichment. Where he shone was in his ability to derive interesting and unexpected consequences from simple ideas.
Part of his appeal lay in his willingness to tell home truths that had occurred to others who dared not utter them. Friedman would then go on, however, to defend these maxims against the massed forces of economic correctness; and in the course of those defences he, almost unintentionally, added to know-ledge.
Those who wanted to write him off as a right-wing Republican were disabused by the variety of radical causes he championed. He would not give a millimetre where his convictions were at stake. Although an unassuming and essentially democratic personality, he was human enough to be aware of, and enjoy, his reputation in the last decades of his life.
Friedman’s was an archetypal American success story. He was born in New York in 1912 to poor immigrants and his father died when he was 15. He nevertheless studied at Rutgers and Chicago.
During the Second World War Friedman not only worked for the US Treasury on tax but also had a spell in the statistical war research group at Columbia. He became professor of economics at Chicago in 1946.
Friedman’s own earliest work was in mathematical statistics, where he helped to pioneer some methods, for instance in sampling, which are still in use.
His major achievement was his Theory of the Consumption Function, published in 1957, the work most prominently mentioned in the citation for the Nobel Prize. His investigation was touched off by a well-known paradox that the percentage of income saved increased as income rose. On the other hand, time-series data showed much less change in the savings proportion over the years. Financial Times, Sapa-AFP
