Attending a school out in Western Canada made me appreciate the work of Friedman who embraced the free market ideals. (Not saying the liberal pushers out east didn’t regard his work in high esteem.)But alas, Mr. ‘quantity theory of money’ is no more.
Milton Friedman, died November 16th, 2006, in San Francisco at the ripe age of 94. Friedman embraced free enterprise in the face of government regulation and advocated a monetary policy that called for steady growth in money supplies. The quantity theory of money was one of his most popular theories essentially stating that the money supply should be used as a determinant of the nominal value of output.
Friedman believed that economic stabilization policy did not operate like a thermostat, because of the ‘long and variable lag’ between policy actions and their ultimate effects.
Friedman called for a steady and predictable monetary policy as the surest guarantee against excessive fluctuations in the general price level and in the level of economic activity.
In 1976 Friedman’s years of teaching and nearly two-dozen books were recognized with the Nobel Prize for economic science.
His Nobel ceremony in Stockholm prompted a large turnout of demonstrators who criticized Friedman for the economic advice he provided to the government of Augusto Pinochet, who oversaw Chile’s 17-year dictatorship in which some 3,000 leftists were killed.
Later, as a contributing editor for Newsweek magazine and through frequent television appearances, Friedman became one of the country’s most visible economists.
In a retrospective on his work, Friedman traced his roots and those of the so-called Chicago school of economics back to Adam Smith.