Milton Friedman

Milton Friedman (1912–2006) was an American economist, statistician, and public intellectual whose monetarist revolution reshaped macroeconomic policy and whose polemical advocacy for free markets made him the most visible exponent of the Chicago School. Friedman's 1970 essay "The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits" became the foundational text of shareholder primacy, arguing that corporate executives have no legitimate authority to pursue social goals at the expense of returns to shareholders. His monetary theory — that inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon, and that central banks should target stable money supply growth rather than interest rates — challenged Keynesian demand management and influenced central banking from the Federal Reserve to the European Central Bank. Friedman's popular books, television series, and advising of political leaders (including Chile's Pinochet regime) made him a global figure, though critics accused him of reducing complex social problems to simplistic market solutions and of ignoring the political and distributional consequences of unfettered capitalism.

Friedman called himself a scientist, but he was better understood as a missionary. His economics was not wrong; it was incomplete in ways that served his politics. The gap between what Friedman proved and what he claimed to have proved is the space where much of modern economic debate still occurs.