Milton Friedman

Milton Friedman was born on July 31, 1912 in Brooklyn, New York, to Jewish immigrants from Beregszász (then in Hungary, now Berehove, Ukraine). The family moved to Rahway, New Jersey, when he was a year old and ran a small dry-goods store. He earned a B.A. in mathematics and economics from Rutgers University in 1932, an M.A. from the University of Chicago in 1933, and a Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1946.

He worked during the 1930s and early 1940s for the National Resources Committee, the National Bureau of Economic Research, and the U.S. Treasury Department, where he helped design wartime payroll tax withholding, a policy he later said he regretted. He joined the economics faculty at the University of Chicago in 1946 and remained there for thirty years, becoming the central figure of what came to be called the Chicago School of economics.

His 1957 book A Theory of the Consumption Function introduced the permanent-income hypothesis. A Monetary History of the United States, 1867–1960, written with Anna Schwartz and published in 1963, argued that the Federal Reserve's contraction of the money supply turned the 1929 stock-market crash into the Great Depression and laid the foundations of modern monetarism. He won the John Bates Clark Medal in 1951 and the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1976.

He hosted the ten-part PBS series Free to Choose in 1980 with his wife and frequent collaborator Rose Director Friedman, and the companion book of the same title became a worldwide bestseller. He advised Presidents Nixon and Reagan and Prime Minister Thatcher and championed school vouchers, an all-volunteer military, and floating exchange rates. He died on November 16, 2006 in San Francisco.

The name Milton comes from an Old English place-name combining myln ("mill") and tūn ("settlement"), meaning "settlement by the mill." He carried it as a masculine given name common among American Jewish families of his generation.