Nobel laureate economist Milton Friedman dies at 94

Thursday, November 16, 2006
By Mark Feeney
Boston Globe Staff

Milton Friedman, the Nobel Prize-winning economist who played a key role in the intellectual resurgence of capitalism and the global shift to free-market economics in the final third of the 20th century, died today at a San Francisco hospital. He was 94. The cause of death was heart failure.

His death was announced by the Milton and Rose D. Friedman Foundation, of Indianapolis.

In a 90th-birthday tribute, the columnist George F. Will described Dr. Friedman as �the most consequential public intellectual of the 20th century.�

Few rivaled Dr. Friedman, a self-described �classical liberal,� in the 19th-century sense, in shaping the intellectual climate of the 21st century. A forceful advocate for laissez-faire economics, he provided the theoretical underpinnings for many of the policies put into practice by President Ronald Reagan and British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s.

Dr. Friedman had resisted the revolution in economics and public policy wrought during the middle third of the last century by the British economist John Maynard Keynes. Keynesianism saw government spending as the key to economic health and viewed a planned economy as the inevitable � and superior � successor to a market economy. (In a nice irony, Dr. Friedman twice submitted articles to an economic journal Keynes edited that were rejected.)

An upholder of the quantity theory of money, Dr. Friedman argued that the money supply mattered more than spending or taxing in influencing the economy. He proclaimed the primacy of the market and argued that it did the most to promote personal freedom.

�Freedom is the major objective in relations among individuals,� Dr. Friedman wrote in ......

Read the article on the Boston Globe also you can read my last post on Dr. Friedman.