Born in 1912 in New York to Hungarian Jewish immig

Milton Friedman mounted the most effective challenge to Keynesian economics, establishing monetarism as a rival paradigm that reshaped how governments manage their economies.

Born in Brooklyn to Jewish immigrants from present-day Ukraine, he grew up poor. His father died when Milton was fifteen. A state scholarship took him to Rutgers, where Mill's On Liberty sparked libertarian convictions. He earned a Chicago master's in one year, learning the quantity theory from Mints, then studied statistics under Hotelling at Columbia.

Government work designing income surveys and assisting Kuznets at the NBER built his empirical instincts. In 1938 he married Rose Director, his future co-author. Joining Chicago in 1946, he spent thirty years dismantling Keynesian assumptions.

A Monetary History of the United States (1963), with Anna Schwartz, proved the Depression resulted from the Fed's money-supply collapse, not demand failure. His core proposition: inflation is always a monetary phenomenon. Discretionary demand management is long-run neutral, accelerating only inflation. His k-percent rule called for steady money growth, rejecting discretionary rate-setting.

The 1970s stagflation confirmed his predictions. Volcker's tight-money policy tamed inflation, validating the framework. He won the 1976 Nobel.

Capitalism and Freedom (1962) and the TV series Free to Choose (1980) carried market ideas to millions. Floating rates, vouchers, and the negative income tax all stem from his proposals. He died in 2006 aged ninety-four.