Milton Friedman

Friedman was born in Brooklyn in 1912 to Jewish immigrants from a Carpathian Ruthenian town who ran a small dry-goods business in Rahway, New Jersey. He was the youngest of four children and the only son. His father died during Friedman's senior year of high school, leaving him and his older sisters to help support their mother on very little money. He graduated at not quite 16 and won a scholarship to Rutgers, the first person in his family to go to college, planning at first to become an actuary. The Depression changed the plan: watching it unfold convinced him economics mattered more than insurance tables, and he went on to a master's degree at the University of Chicago in 1933, where he met the economist Rose Director.

He spent the war years first at the Treasury, where he helped design the payroll withholding system that still funds the federal government, and then at Columbia doing statistical work on weapons design. He joined the University of Chicago in 1946 and stayed 30 years, building what became known as the Chicago School. With Anna Schwartz he wrote A Monetary History of the United States, arguing the Federal Reserve, not a failure of markets, caused the Great Depression by letting the money supply collapse. His 1957 permanent income hypothesis challenged how economists explained saving and spending, and Capitalism and Freedom in 1962 argued for school vouchers, floating exchange rates, an all-volunteer military and drug legalization. He won the Nobel Memorial Prize in economics in 1976 and reached a larger public in 1980 with the PBS series Free to Choose.

The libertarian who wanted government out of economic life built one of its most durable instruments himself: the payroll withholding tax, adopted as a wartime emergency measure in 1943, which Friedman later said he regretted, since it let the government collect far more revenue with far less resistance than a tax anyone had to write a check for. In 1975 he flew to Chile at the invitation of economists trained at Chicago and spent six days lecturing, then wrote a letter to Augusto Pinochet laying out a shock-therapy plan to end the country's inflation. He always denied being Pinochet's adviser, but the visit, arriving two years into a dictatorship that had already killed and disappeared thousands of people, followed him to Stockholm, where protesters met his Nobel Prize with a country still under martial law in the background.

Friedman died of heart failure in San Francisco on November 16, 2006, at 94 — his last newspaper column ran the day after. A 2011 survey of economists ranked him second only to Keynes in twentieth-century influence, and in 2002 Ben Bernanke, then a Federal Reserve governor, told him directly at a birthday tribute that the Fed had been responsible for the Depression and, thanks to Friedman's own research, would not make that mistake again. Chile itself became the case study both sides argue from still: fast growth and a return to democracy in 1990 for his admirers, and a template for austerity imposed at gunpoint for his critics. Neither argument has settled the other.

Milton Friedman's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Payroll withholding tax system law
  Designed at the Treasury, later called his biggest regret 1943
• Permanent income hypothesis discovery
  Reframed how economists model saving and spending 1957
• A Monetary History of the United States, 1867-1960 book
  With Anna Schwartz 1963
• Capitalism and Freedom book
  Vouchers, floating exchange rates, drug legalization, years ahead of the mainstream 1962
• Free to Choose television
  Ten-part PBS series with Rose Friedman, and a bestselling companion book 1980

• July 31, 1912 aged 0 Born in Brooklyn, New York
• 1932 aged ~20 Graduates from Rutgers University
• 1938 aged ~26 Marries the economist Rose Director
• 1943 aged ~31 Helps design the wartime payroll withholding tax at the Treasury
• 1946 aged ~34 Joins the University of Chicago faculty
• 1962 aged ~50 Publishes Capitalism and Freedom
• 1975 aged ~63 Lectures in Chile and writes to Augusto Pinochet on ending inflation
• 1976 aged ~64 Wins the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences
• November 16, 2006 aged 94 Dies of heart failure in San Francisco

• Ronald Reagan 1911–2004
  40th president whose conservative domestic program and assertive Cold War strategy reshaped American politics. informal economic adviser to
• Ben Bernanke b. 1953
  Led the Federal Reserve through the 2008 financial crisis and won the 2022 Nobel Prize in Economics. publicly apologized to
• Paul Samuelson 1915–2009
  First American to win the Nobel Prize in Economics, whose textbook defined the field for decades. intellectual rival
• Alan Greenspan 1926–2026
  Chaired the Federal Reserve from 1987 to 2006 across several financial crises. shaped the Fed chairman who followed