Milton Friedman
Milton Friedman
Milton Friedmanwas an American economist who received the 1976 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his research on consumption analysis, monetary history and theory and the complexity of stabilization policy. With George Stigler and others, Friedman was among the intellectual leaders of the second generation of Chicago price theory, a methodological movement at the University of Chicago's Department of Economics, Law School, and Graduate School of Business from the 1940s onward. Several students and young professors that were recruited...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionHistorian
Date of Birth31 July 1912
CityBrooklyn, NY
CountryUnited States of America
If you pay people not to work and tax them when they do, don't be surprised if you get unemployment.
The state of our educational system is a disgrace to our country. We have an elementary and secondary school system in which close to half of the youngsters never graduate properly. It's a disgrace that there is more illiteracy today than there was 100 years ago.
You never have real changes unless you have a time of crisis.
When they so-called 'target the interest rate', what they're doing is controlling the money supply via the interest rate. The interest rate is only an intermediary instrument.
When you have a time of crisis what happens depends on what ideas are floating around, and what ideas have been developed, and thought through, and are made effective.
I think there is universal agreement within the economics profession that the decline - the sharp decline in the quantity of money played a very major role in producing the Great Depression.
It all would have been much better if individuals saved for their own old age.
Americans know very little about social statistics, but I am not sure that it's important that Americans know about social statistics.
The central banks cannot control interest rates. That's a mistake. They can control a particular rate, such as the Federal Funds rate, if they want to, but they can't control interest rates.
If you continue to use monetary policy to attempt to promote full employment the result would be that you would have higher inflation, and that you would not have lower unemployment.
Germany has a very able and productive workforce. It has high-quality products that are valued all over the world. It has every opportunity to be a productive, growing state. It just has to give its entrepreneurs a chance. It has to let them make money, hire and fire, and act like entrepreneurs.
The free market is not only a more efficient decision maker than even the wisest central planning body, but even more important, the free market keeps economic power widely dispersed.
The true test of any scholar's work is not what his contemporaries say, but what happens to his work in the next twenty-five or fifty years. And the thing that I will really be proud of is if some of the work I have done is still cited in the text books long after I am gone.
Is it really true that political self-interest is nobler somehow than economic self-interest?