Milton Friedman (July 31 1912 – November 16 2006) was a prominent American economist and public intellectual. An advocate of laissez-faire capitalism, Friedman made major contributions to the fields of macroeconomics, microeconomics, economic history and statistics. In 1976, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics for his achievements in the fields of consumption analysis, monetary history and theory and for his demonstration of the complexity of stabilization policy.^[1]

According to The Economist, Friedman "was the most influential economist of the second half of the 20th century…possibly of all of it."^[2] Alan Greenspan stated "There are very few people over the generations who have ideas that are sufficiently original to materially alter the direction of civilization. Milton is one of those very few people."^[3] In his 1962 book Capitalism and Freedom, Friedman advocated minimizing the role of government in a free market as a means of creating political and social freedom. In his 1980 television series Free to Choose Friedman explained how the free market works, emphasizing that its principles have shown to solve social and political problems that other systems have failed to address adequately. His books and columns for Newsweek were widely read and even circulated underground behind the Iron Curtain.^[4]

Starting as a Keynesian supporter of the New Deal and advocate of high taxes, Friedman moved to the right in the 1950s, along with his close friend George Stigler. Before the 1970s their advocacy of free markets was a minority view among economists. His political philosophy, which Friedman himself considered classically liberal and consequentialist libertarian, stressed the advantages of the marketplace and the disadvantages of government intervention, shaping the outlook of American conservatives and libertarians. He adamantly argued that if capitalism, or economic freedom, is introduced into countries governed by totalitarian regimes that political freedom would tend to result. He lived to see his laissez-faire ideas embraced by the mainstream,^[5] especially during the 1980s, a watershed decade for the acceptance of Friedman's ideas. His views of monetary policy, taxation, privatization and deregulation informed the policy of governments around the globe, especially the administrations of Ronald Reagan in the U.S. and Margaret Thatcher in Britain.

Friedman's political positions were buttressed by a large number of technical articles covering a wide range of topics in economics and economic history, which gained the grudging respect of specialists by the early 1960s. His intellectual leadership of the Chicago School, which came to dominate theoretical economics by the 1970s, further strengthened his stature.

When asked to examine binary economics (which uses central bank-issued interest-free loans (administered by the banking system) for the spreading of productive (and the associated consuming) capacity, on market principles, throughout the population), he called it “Marx stood on its head”.^[6]

Biography

Early life and education

Milton Friedman was born on July 31, 1912 in Brooklyn, New York to a working family of Jewish immigrants from Berehove in Austria-Hungary (now part of Ukraine). He was the first son and youngest child of Sára Eszter Landau and Jenő Saul Friedman,^[7] both of whom worked as dry goods merchants. Shortly after Milton's birth, the family relocated to Rahway, New Jersey. A gifted student, Friedman graduated from Rahway High School in 1928, shortly before his 16th birthday.

Friedman was awarded a competitive scholarship to Rutgers University in New Jersey, graduating with a Bachelor of Arts in 1932.^[8] He specialized in Mathematics, and initially intended to become an actuary but found the exams cumbersome and quit. During his time at Rutgers, Friedman fell under the influence of two economics professors, Arthur F. Burns and Homer Jones. At the height of the Great Depression, they convinced him that the study of Economics could help to solve the ongoing economic difficulties, and he ended up graduating with the equivalent of a double major in Mathematics and Economics.

Upon his graduation from Rutgers, Friedman turned down an offer to study Applied Mathematics at Brown University, instead accepting a scholarship to study Economics at the University of Chicago (M.A., 1933). During this year in Chicago, Friedman's intellectual development was strongly influenced by Jacob Viner, Frank Knight, and Henry Simons. It was also during this time at Chicago that Friedman met his future wife, Rose Director (sister of prominent law professor Aaron Director).

After completing his master's degree, Friedman spent the next academic year (1933-34) on a postgraduate fellowship at Columbia University, where he studied statistics with renowned statistician Harold Hotelling.

He was back in Chicago for 1934-35, spending the year working as a research assistant for Henry Schultz, who was then working on his Theory and Measurement of Demand. During this year, Friedman formed what would prove to be lifelong friendships with George Stigler and W. Allen Wallis.

Federal service

Friedman was unable to find academic employment, so in 1935, he followed his friend W. Allen Wallis to Washington, D.C., where Roosevelt's New Deal was "a lifesaver" for many young economists.

At this stage, Friedman said that he and his wife "regarded [the job-creation programs] appropriate responses to the critical situation," such as the WPA, CCC, and PWA "but not "the price- and wage-fixing measures of the National Recovery Administration and the Agricultural Adjustment Administration."^[9] He saw price controls as interfering with what he considered an essential signaling mechanism to help resources go where they are most valued. However, Friedman later concluded that all government intervention associated with the New Deal was "the wrong cure for the wrong disease," arguing that simply the money supply should have been expanded.^[10] In Monetary History of the United States he argues that the Great Depression was caused by monetary contraction, which was consequence of poor policy making and continuous crisis in banking system.^[11]

In 1935, he began work at the National Resources Committee which was then working on a large consumer budget survey. Ideas from this project later became a part of his Theory of the Consumption Function.

In fall 1937, Friedman moved to the National Bureau of Economic Research to assist Simon Kuznets in his work on professional income. This work led to their jointly-authored Incomes from Independent Professional Practice, which introduced the concepts of permanent and transitory income, which was a major component of the Permanent Income Hypothesis which Friedman worked out in greater detail in the 1950s. The book hypothesizes that professional licensing artificially restricts the supply of services and raises prices. In 1945, Friedman submitted this book (completed in 1940) to Columbia University as his doctoral dissertation.

In 1940, Friedman was appointed an assistant professor teaching Economics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, but encountered anti-Semitism in the Economics department and decided to return to government service.^[12]

In 1941-43, he worked on wartime tax policy for the Federal Government, as an advisor to senior officials of the United States Department of the Treasury. As a Treasury spokesman in 1942 he advocated a Keynesian policy of taxation, and during this time he helped to invent the payroll withholding tax system.^[13]

In his autobiography, he comments on "how thoroughly Keynesian I was then."^[14] As Friedman grew older he reversed himself and in 2006 said, "You know, it's a mystery as to why people think Roosevelt's policies pulled us out of the Depression. The problem was that you had unemployed machines and unemployed people. How do you get them together by forming industrial cartels and keeping prices and wages up?"^[15]

Academic career

In 1943, Friedman joined the Division of War Research at Columbia University (headed by W. Allen Wallis and Henry Hotelling), where he spent the rest of the war years working as a mathematical statistician, focusing on problems of weapons design, military tactics, and metallurgical experiments.

As noted in the previous section, in 1945, Friedman submitted Incomes from Independent Professional Practice (co-authored with Kuznets and completed in 1940) to Columbia, which subsequently awarded him a Ph.D. in 1946.

Milton and Rose Friedman's son, David Director Friedman was born during their time at Columbia, on February 2, 1945.

Friedman spent the 1945-46 academic year teaching at the University of Minnesota (where his friend George Stigler was employed)

In 1946, Friedman accepted an offer to teach economic theory at the University of Chicago (a position opened by Jacob Viner's departure to Princeton University). Friedman would stay at the University of Chicago for the next thirty years. There he helped build a close-knit intellectual community that produced a number of Nobel Prize winners, known collectively as the Chicago School of Economics.

At the same time he moved to the University of Chicago, Arthur Burns, who was then the head of the National Bureau of Economic Research, asked Friedman to rejoin the Bureau's staff. He accepted the invitation, and assumed responsibility for the Bureau's inquiry into the role of money in the business cycle. As a result, he founded the "Workshop in Money and Banking" (the "Chicago Workshop"), which led a revival in monetary studies. During the latter half of the 1940s, Friedman began a collaboration with Anna Schwartz, an economic historian at the Bureau, which would ultimately result in the 1963 publication of a book co-authored by Friedman and Schwartz, A Monetary History of the United States, 1867-1960.

Friedman spent the latter part of 1950 in Paris, where he assisted the US administrators of the Marshall Plan in formulating their response to the Schuman Declaration. This led Friedman to the study of floating exchange rates which resulted in his The Case for Flexible Exchange Rates.

Friedman spent the 1954-55 academic year as a Visiting Fellow at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. At the time, the Cambridge economics faculty was deeply divided into a Keynesian majority (including Joan Robinson and Richard Kahn) and a virulently anti-Keynesian minority (headed by Dennis Robertson). Friedman speculates that he was invited to the fellowship because his extreme laissez-faire views were unacceptable to both of the Cambridge factions, a fact which highlights how far out of the mainstream Friedman was in the 1950s.

In 1962, in his first major salvo as a public intellectual, Friedman published Capitalism and Freedom, a major defense of capitalism and critique of the New Deal and the emerging welfare state. The book would eventually sell half a million copies.

In 1964, Friedman served as an economic adviser to Barry Goldwater during his failed presidential campaign. Like Friedman, Goldwater had come to reject the New Deal and called for a return to laissez-faire economic principles. This position was extreme in 1964, but gained momentum over the next two decades, finally culminating in the presidency of Ronald Reagan.

In 1966, Friedman began publishing a tri-weekly column for Newsweek magazine, giving his ideas wider public dissemination. (He would continue writing this column until 1983.)

In 1968, he served on Richard Nixon's committee of economic advisers. In 1969, Nixon appointed him to the Advisory Commission on an All-Volunteer Force (the "Gates Commission"), on which Friedman loudly advocated against the draft and in favor of a voluntary military, a result which was achieved in the US in 1973.

In 1975, Friedman was a keynote speaker at a high-profile economic conference in Santiago, Chile, where he paved the way for the economic programme designed by the so-called Chicago Boys. Friedman subsequently wrote on free market policies in the Chilean context. Friedman's meeting with Pinochet provoked criticism among leftists all over the world, but no such criticism was heard when he met the top communist Chinese leadership in Beijing.

Nobel prize and retirement

In 1976, Friedman won the "Nobel Prize in Economics" "for his achievements in the fields of consumption analysis, monetary history and theory and for his demonstration of the complexity of stabilization policy."

In 1977, at age 65, Friedman retired from the University of Chicago after teaching there for thirty years. He and his wife moved to San Francisco. From 1977 on, he was affiliated with the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.

In 1977, Friedman was approached by the Palmer R. Chitester Fund and asked to create a television program presenting his economic and social philosophy. The Friedmans worked on this project for the next three years, and in 1980, the ten-part series, entitled Free to Choose, aired on PBS. The companion book to the series (co-authored by Milton and Rose Friedman), also entitled Free to Choose, was the bestselling nonfiction book of 1980 and has since been translated into 14 foreign languages.

Friedman served as an unofficial adviser to Ronald Reagan during his 1980 presidential campaign, and then served on the President's Economic Policy Advisory Board for the rest of the Reagan Administration. In 1988, he received the National Medal of Science and Reagan honored him with the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Milton Friedman is today known as one of the most influential economists of the 20th century.^[16]

Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Friedman continued to write op-eds and appear in the media. He made several trips to Eastern Europe and to China.

A proponent of school vouchers since the 1950s, in 1996, the Friedmans established the Milton and Rose D. Friedman Foundation to advocate for school vouchers.

The Friedmans' memoirs, Two Lucky People by Milton and Rose Friedman, were published in 1998.

In Friedman's last email interview in 2006, he said that the greatest threat to the world's economy is "Islamofascism, with terrorism as its weapon."^[17]

Milton Friedman died at the age of 94 in San Francisco on November 16 2006 of heart failure.^[18][19] Friedman's son is the philosopher and economist David D. Friedman.

Awards

• 1951: John Bates Clark Medal
• 1976: Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel (Nobel Prize in Economics)
• 1988: National Medal of Science
• 1988: Presidential Medal of Freedom
• January 29, 2007: Milton Friedman Day

Scholarly contributions

Friedman was best known for reviving interest in the money supply as a determinant of the nominal value of output, that is, the quantity theory of money. Monetarism is the set of views associated with modern quantity theory. Its origins can be traced back to the 16th century School of Salamanca or even further but Friedman's contribution is largely responsible for its modern formulation. He co-authored, with Anna Schwartz, A Monetary History of the United States (1963), which sought to examine the role of the money supply and economic activity in U.S. history. A striking conclusion of their research was one regarding the role of money supply fluctuations as contributing to economic fluctuations. Or, as a Federal Reserve official (Ben Bernanke) joked on the occasion of Friedman's 90th birthday in 2002: "Regarding the Great Depression. You're right, we did it. We're very sorry." Several regression studies with David Meiselman in the 1960s suggested the primacy of the money supply over investment and government spending in determining consumption and output. These challenged a prevailing but largely untested view on their relative importance. Friedman's empirical research and some theory supported the conclusion that the short-run effect of a change in the money supply was primarily on output but that the longer-run effect was primarily on the price level.

Friedman was the leading proponent of the monetarist school of economic thought. He maintained that there is a close and stable link between inflation and the money supply, mainly that the phenomenon of inflation is to be regulated by controlling the amount of money poured into the national economy by the Federal Reserve Bank; he rejected the use of fiscal policy as a tool of demand management; and he held that the government's role in the guidance of the economy should be severely restricted. Friedman wrote extensively on the Great Depression, which he called the Great Contraction, arguing that it had been caused by an ordinary financial shock whose duration and seriousness were greatly increased by the subsequent contraction of the money supply caused by the misguided policies of the directors of the Federal Reserve. "The Fed was largely responsible for converting what might have been a garden-variety recession, although perhaps a fairly severe one, into a major catastrophe. Instead of using its powers to offset the depression, it presided over a decline in the quantity of money by one-third from 1929 to 1933.... Far from the depression being a failure of the free-enterprise system, it was a tragic failure of government."^[20] Friedman also argued for the cessation of government intervention in currency markets, thereby spawning an enormous literature on the subject, as well as promoting the practice of freely floating exchange rates. Friedman's macroeconomic theories were soon displaced. His close friend George Stigler explained, "As is customary in science, he did not win a full victory, in part because research was directed along different lines by the theory of rational expectations, a newer approach developed by Robert Lucas, also at the University of Chicago."^[21]

Friedman was also known for his refinement of the consumption function, the permanent income hypothesis (1957), which Friedman himself referred to as his best scientific work.^[22] Other important contributions include his critique of the Phillips curve and the concept of the natural rate of unemployment (1968). Each of these has implications for the effect of monetary and fiscal policy on output in the short run and the long run.

Friedman's essay "The Methodology of Positive Economics" (1953) set the epistemological course for his own subsequent research and to a degree that of the Chicago School of Economics. There he argued that economics as science should be free of value judgments for it to be objective. Moreover, a useful economic theory should be judged not by its descriptive realism (hair color, etc.) but by its simplicity and fruitfulness as an engine of prediction.

Other public policy positions

Friedman also supported various libertarian policies such as decriminalization of drugs and prostitution. In addition, he headed the Nixon administration committee that researched the possibility of a move towards a paid/volunteer armed force, and played a large role in the abolition of the draft that took place in the 1970s in the U.S. He would later state that his role in eliminating the draft was his proudest accomplishment.^[23] He served as a member of President Reagan's Economic Policy Advisory Board in 1981. In 1988, he received both the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the National Medal of Science. He said that he was a libertarian philosophically, but a member of the U.S. Republican Party for the sake of "expediency" ("I am a libertarian with a small 'l' and a Republican with a capital 'R.' And I am a Republican with a capital 'R' on grounds of expediency, not on principle.") But, he said, "I think the term classical liberal is also equally applicable. I don't really care very much what I'm called. I'm much more interested in having people thinking about the ideas, rather than the person."^[24]

Friedman was supportive of the state provision of some public goods that the market is not seen as being able to provide. However, he saw the scope of such goods as being minimal. And, he argued that many of the services performed by government could be performed better by the private sector. Above all, if some public goods are provided by the state, he believed that they should not be a legal monopoly where private competition is prohibited. For, example, in response to the United States Post Office's legal monopoly on mail, he said, "there is no way to justify our present public monopoly of the post office. It may be argued that the carrying of mail is a technical monopoly and that a government monopoly is the least of evils. Along these lines, one could perhaps justify a government post office, but not the present law, which makes it illegal for anybody else to carry the mail. If the delivery of mail is a technical monopoly, no one else will be able to succeed in competition with the government. If it is not, there is no reason why the government should be engaged in it. The only way to find out is to leave other people free to enter."^[25] In recent years, Friedman devoted much of his effort to promoting school vouchers that can be used to pay for tuition at both private and public schools, saying, "What is needed in America is a voucher of substantial size available to all students, and free of excessive regulations." His idea was that vouchers would allow private schools to compete with the public school monopoly.

Friedman made headlines by proposing a negative income tax to replace the existing welfare system and then opposing the bill to implement it because it merely supplemented the existing system rather than replace it. In 2005, Friedman and more than 500 other economists called for discussions regarding the economic benefits of the legalization of marijuana.^[26]

Michael Walker of the Fraser Institute and Friedman hosted a series of conferences from 1986 to 1994. The goal was to create a clear definition of Economic freedom and a method for measuring it. Eventually this resulted in the first report on worldwide economic freedom, Economic Freedom in the World. These annual report has since provided data for numerous peer-reviewed studies and has influenced policy in several nations.

Along with sixteen other distinguished economists he opposed the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act and filed an amicus brief in Eldred v. Ashcroft.[3]

Other honors, recognition, and influence

Friedman allowed the Cato Institute to use his name for its Milton Friedman Prize for Advancing Liberty in 2001. The award is given out biannually. The Friedman Prize went to the late British economist Peter Bauer in 2002, Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto in 2004 and Mart Laar, former Estonian Prime Minister in 2006.

His wife Rose, sister of Aaron Director, with whom he founded the Milton and Rose D. Friedman Foundation for School Choice, served in the international selection committee. Friedman's son, David D. Friedman, has carried on his tradition of arguing in favor of free markets, but to a further extreme, advocating anarcho-capitalism.

At a ceremony celebrating Friedman's achievements, Alan Greenspan said "There are many Nobel Prize winners in economics, but few have achieved the mythical status of Milton Friedman."^[27]

According to Harry Girvetz and Kenneth Minogue, Friedman was co-responsible with Friedrich von Hayek for providing the intellectual foundations for the revival of classical liberalism in the 20th century.^[28]

29 January 2007 has been declared Milton Friedman Day by Arnold Schwarzenegger, Governor of California, to honor his life, works, and achievements, as well as his influence on modern economic and governmental policy.^[29]

China

Milton Friedman delivered a speech entitled "The Chinese Economic Reform" in 1988 to Chinese students and scholars in the San Francisco Bay Area. The taped speech was hand-delivered to Deng Xiaoping, the architect of the Chinese Economic Reform.

Hong Kong

Friedman once said "if you want to see capitalism in action, go to Hong Kong". He believed the Hong Kong economy is the best example of a laissez-faire capitalism economy.

One month before his death, he wrote the article "Hong Kong Wrong - What would Cowperthwaite say?" in the Wall Street Journal, criticizing Donald Tsang, Chief Executive of Hong Kong, for abandoning "positive noninterventionism".^[30] Tsang later said he was merely changing the slogan to "big market, small government", where small government is defined as less than 20% of GDP. In a debate between Tsang and Alan Leong, rival for the position of Chief Executive, Leong brought up the topic and accused Tsang of angering Friedman to death.

Just before he died, he criticized Hong Kong's kindergarten voucher system as "not properly structured".

Chile

For more information on Milton Friedman's views on Chile, see Miracle of Chile.

Friedman's economic ideas were implemented in Chile under the dictator Augusto Pinochet. It had never happened before (or since) that an economic theory was implemented so rigorously, which gave economics a unique opportunity for scientific research because it can normally not experiment and thus verify or falsify its theories.

Friedman visited Chile in 1975 during Pinochet's rule. Invited by a private foundation, he gave a series of lectures on economics. Several professors from the University of Chicago became advisors^{[citation needed]} to the Chilean government and several Ph.D. graduates from the same university – known as "the Chicago boys" – served in Chilean ministries. Friedman met with Pinochet during his visit to Chile, but he did not serve as a formal advisor to the Chilean government. He was, however, willing to advise Pinochet after Pinochet overthrew the democratically elected, socialist government of Salvador Allende, and was criticized for doing so by the left.^[31]He had given a lecture advocating monetarist economics to the Catholic University of Chile. Friedman said that the "the emphasis of that talk was that free markets would undermine political centralization and political control."^[32]

When he went to receive his Nobel prize in Stockholm, he was met by demonstrations.^[33] In an interview on the PBS program Commanding Heights in 2000, Friedman attributed these demonstrations to communists seeking to discredit anyone with only the slightest connection to Pinochet--such as himself--by opponents he recognized from earlier occasions, adding that "there was no doubt that there was a concerted effort to tar and feather me."^[34]

Friedman defended his role in Chile on the grounds that the move towards open market policies not only improved the economic situation in Chile but also contributed to the softening of Pinochet's rule and to the eventual constitutional transition to a democratic government in 1990. He also stressed that the lectures he gave in Chile were the same lectures he later gave in China and other socialist states.^[35] In the 2000 PBS documentary The Commanding Heights, Friedman also noted that this criticism was misdirected and missed his main point. Friedman advocated that freer markets led to free people, and that Chile had an unfree economy which led to the military government, which then implemented open economy policies. These policies led to the end of military rule and a "free society".^[36]

Iceland

Friedman visited Iceland in the autumn of 1984, met with prominent Icelanders and gave a lecture at the University of Iceland on the Tyranny of the Status Quo. He participated in a lively television debate August 31st with leading socialist intellectuals, including President Ólafur Ragnar Grímsson. When they complained that a fee was charged for attending his lecture at the University and that hitherto lectures by visiting scholars had been free-of-charge, Friedman replied that of course previous lectures had not been free-of-charge in a meaningful sense: There were always costs attached to lectures. What mattered was whether those who attended the lecture, were charged, or those who did not attend. He himself thought that it was fairer that only those who attended, paid. When Friedman was introduced, at a luncheon, to a governor of Iceland’s Central Bank with the words, that this person would become unemployed if Friedman’s theories were implemented in Iceland, Friedman immediately responded: "No, you would not become unemployed. You would only have to move to a more beneficial kind of employment."

Friedman made a great impact on a group of young intellectuals in the Independence Party, including Davíð Oddsson who became Prime Minister in 1991 and began a radical programme of monetary and fiscal stabilisation, ambitious privatisation, reduction of taxes (e.g. the corporate incomes tax from 45% to 18%), the definition of exclusive use rights in the fisheries, abolition of various government funds for aiding loss-making enterprises and liberalisation of currency transfers and capital markets. In 1975, Iceland had the 53rd freest economy in the world, whereas in 2004, it had the 9th freest economy, according to the Economic Freedom Index designed by Canada’s Fraser Institute. According to the index designed by the Heritage Foundation, Iceland has the 5th freest economy in the world. Davíð Oddsson was Prime Minister for thirteen and a half years, to 2004. Geir H. Haarde who followed him as leader of the Independence Party and who is at present Prime Minister, follows the same policies.^[37]

Estonia

Although Friedman never visited Estonia, his book Free to Choose exercised a great influence on the then 32-year-old prime minister of Estonia Mart Laar, who has claimed that it was the only book on economics he had read before taking office. Laar's reforms are often credited with responsibility for transforming Estonia from an impoverished Soviet Republic to the "Baltic Tiger." A prime element of Laar's program was introduction of the flat tax. Laar won the 2006 Milton Friedman Prize for Advancing Liberty, awarded by the Cato Institute.

As a result of Laar's adherence to the principles in Free to Choose, Estonia now consistently ranks highly in the Heritage Foundation/Wall Street Journal Economic Freedom Index.

Works

See also

• Rose Friedman (his wife)
• Chicago School of Economics
• Neoliberalism
• Chicago Boys
• Mont Pelerin Society
• Cato Institute
• List of economists
• List of notable Presidential Medal of Freedom recipients
• Nobel Prize in Economics
• Great Contraction

References

External links

Interviews

• Interviewed on America's Drug Forum about his criticism of the War on Drugs
• Charlie Rose Interview with Milton Friedman on December 26, 2005
• Interview with Rose & Milton Friedman at the Francisco Marroquín University
• "Best of Both Worlds", interview in Reason by Brian Doherty
• "Milton Friedman on Capitalism and Friedman". Podcast on EconTalk at Econlib. 2006.
• "Milton Friedman on Money". Podcast on EconTalk at Econlib. 2006.
• A classic video presentation of Friedman on freedom and the government
• Milton Friedman interviewed on Greek website (September 2006)
• Video of September 3, 2000 BookTV 'In Depth' interview
• Uncommon Knowledge interview on Libertarianism - Transcript and Video
• Milton Friedman and Rose Friedman in a video link speaking to the ACT New Zealand 2003 conference
• Interview with Milton Friedman Chicago Life Magazine
• Video Interview with Milton Friedman part of the Oral Histories of the NBER

Obituaries

• Obituary by Samuel Brittan in the Financial Times
• Elegy for the Master - Bruce Bartlett
• New York Times Obituary by Noble, Holcomb B.
• Reason writers remember the iconic libertarian economist
• A reflection on the life of Milton Friedman from his friend and colleague Leo Melamed
• A roundtable at the University of Chicago on Friedman's legacy

• Video of Memorial service for Milton Friedman with speakers: Gary Becker, Arnold Harberger, , Leo Melamed, Michael Walker, Robert Zimmer and President of the Czech Republic Václav Klaus.

Organizations

• Free to Choose
• Free to Choose Media
• ideachannel.tv
• Milton Friedman Day
• The Becker Center on Chicago Price Theory
• The Friedman Foundation
• The Idea Channel
• Milton Friedman and Cato

Lectures

• "I, pencil" by Milton Friedman at the Francisco Marroquín University
• Anatomy of a Crisis by Milton Friedman at the Francisco Marroquín University
• How to Cure Inflation by Milton Friedman at the Francisco Marroquín University
• The tyranny of Control by Milton Friedman at the Francisco Marroquín University
• Who Protects the Worker? by Milton Friedman at the Francisco Marroquín University
• What's Wrong With Our Schools? by Milton Friedman at the Francisco Marroquín University
• How to Stay Free? by Milton Friedman at the Francisco Marroquín University
• From Cradle to Grave by Milton Friedman at the Francisco Marroquín University
• The Power of the Market by Milton Friedman at the Francisco Marroquín University
• Milton Friedman addresses the American Legislative Exchange Council, C-Span, July 21, 2006
• Historical Audio Lecture by Dr. Milton Friedman (1960s) - "Role of Government in Our Society"
• George Shultz on Milton Friedman
• An Ethic for the New Global Economy panel discussion at the Stanford Graduate School of Business.

Biographies

• Home page of Milton Friedman
• About Milton Friedman
• PBS interview, profile and video
• Nobel Prize autobiography
• Biography of Milton Friedman. Concise encyclopedia of economics at Econlib

Articles

• March/April 1999 - The Business Community's Suicidal Impulse (talks about protectionism, bank regulation, privatized schooling, antitrust laws, bureaucracy, government burden)
• Fair versus Free
• His view of the Chilean government
• Gary Becker on Friedman's influence in South America
• Brian Doherty on The Economist and the Dictator
• The Political Economy of Milton Friedman (Modern Age, Winter 1978)
• Friedman and China's "Economic Miracle"
• November 17, 2006 "Milton Friedman and the Economics of Empire: The Road from Serfdom"
• The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase its Profits (Milton Friedman on corporate responsibility)
• Milton Friedman Was Right: "Corporate social responsibility" is bunk by Henry G. Manne
• Friedman's Sampler - A selection of writings from The Wall Street Journal
• Milton Friedman Unraveled by Murray Rothbard (1971).
• Milton Friedman, 1912-2006 by Hans Sennholz (2006).
• A Charismatic Economist Who Loved to Argue Austan Goolsbee, The New York Times, November 17, 2006.
• The Life and Times of Milton Friedman. Remembering the 20th century's most influential libertarian. by Brian Doherty from Reason Magazine, March 2007.

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