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In spite of continual discussions and some critique, the scientific direction gained recognition more and more by both the scientific community and governmental bodies. The token of this recognition was the Lenin Prize which I was awarded in 1965.

Now I head the Research Laboratory at the Institute of National Economy Control, Moscow, where high-ranking executives are introduced to new methods of control and management. I act as consultant to various governmental bodies.

I was married in 1938. My wife, Natalie, is a physician. We have two adult children, both working in mathematical economy.

Biography of Milton Friedman (1912 — ...)

Milton Friedman is a U.S. economist, known primarily for his work on macroeconomics and for his advocacy of laissez-faire capitalism. In 1976 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Economics "for his achievements in the fields of consumption analysis, monetary history and theory and for his demonstration of the complexity of stabilization policy." His book Free to Choose, co-authored with his wife Rose, was made into a ten-part television series that aired on PBS in early 1980.

Born in Brooklyn, New York, to a working-class family of Jewish Hungarian immigrants from Beregszasz (Berehove, today Ukraine), Friedman grew up in Rahway, New Jersey, was educated at Rutgers University (B.A., 1932) and at the University of Chicago (M.A., 1933). After working for the federal government and for Columbia University, he received the Ph.D. from that institution in 1946. He then served as Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago from 1946 to 1976, where he contributed significantly to the intellectual tradition of the socalled Chicago school of economics. Since 1977, Friedman has been affiliated with the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.

Friedman can be classified as a monetarist and he is widely regarded as the leading proponent of that economic school of thought. He argued that there is a close and stable link between inflation and the money supply,

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rejects the use of fiscal policy as a tool of demand management and holds that the government's role in the management of the economy should be severely restricted. Friedman wrote a veritable tome on the subject of the Great Depression which he called the Great Contraction, attributing it to the failure of The Federal Reserve. He also argued for the cessation of intervention in exchange markets, thereby spawning an enormous literature on the subject, as well as the practice of freely floating exchange rates.

— Friedman has also supported various libertarian policies such as decriminalization of drugs and prostitution. In addition, he headed the Reagan committee that researched the possibility of a move towards a paid/volunteer armed force, and played a role in the abolition of the draft that took place in the 1970s in the U.S. He served as a member of the U.S. President Ronald Reagan's Economic Policy Advisory Board in 1981. In 1988 he received both the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the National Medal of Science.

Friedman made headlines by proposing a negative income tax to replace the existing welfare system and then opposing the bill to implement it because it merely supplemented the existing system rather than replacing it.

In recent years Friedman has devoted much of his effort to promoting school vouchers that can be used to pay for tuition at both private and public schools, saying, "What is needed in America is a voucher of substantial size available to all students, and free of excessive regulations."

Milton Friedman's son, David Friedman, has carried on his tradition of arguing in favor of free markets.

Friedman allowed the Cato Institute to use his name for its Milton Friedman Prize for Advancing Liberty in 2001. His wife Rose D. Friedщап with whom he founded the Milton and Rose D. Friedman Foundation for School Choice served in the International Selection Committee.

In the 1970's, Friedman argued against the trade and diplomatic embargoes that many Western nations had imposed on the white minority

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governments of South Africa and Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), claiming that the embargoes played into the hands of anti-Western, Communist insurgencies in those countries, that far more repressive regimes in Africa and elsewhere were not being similarly punished, and that progress towards racial equality and freedom in South Africa and Rhodesia might be better pursued through a policy of engagement with their governments. Friedman was criticized for visiting those countries in 1976 and meeting with members of pro-Apartheid government without publicly calling for repealing the racist electoral laws that were then in place.

Quotes by Friedman

"Inflation is the one form of taxation that can be imposed without legislation."

"The government solution to a problem is usually as bad as the problem."

"There's no such thing as a free lunch."

"We have a system that increasingly taxes work and subsidizes nonwork."

Autobiography of George J. Stigler

I was born in Renton, a suburb of Seattle, Washington, in 1911. I was the only child of Joseph and Elizabeth Stigler, who had separately migrated to the United States at the end of the 19th century, my father from Bavaria and my mother from what was then Austria-Hungary (and her mother was in fact Hungarian). I attended schools in Seattle through the University of Washington, from which I was graduated in 1931. I spent the next year at North-Western University.

My main graduate training was received at the University of Chicago from which I received the Ph.D. in 1938. The University of Chicago then had three economists — each remarkable in his own way — under whose influence I came. Frank H. Knight was a powerful, sceptical philosopher, at that time vigorously debating Austrian capital theory but gradually losing interest in the details of economic theory. Jacob Viner was the logical

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disciplinarian, and equally the omniscient student of the history of economics. Henry Simons was the passionate spokesman for a rational, decentralised organisation of the economy. I was equally influenced by two fellow students, W. Allen Wallis and Milton Friedman.

The Chicago Economics Department was in intellectual ferment, although the central issues of the 1930's were very different from those in later times. I had never before encountered minds of that quality at close quarters and they influenced me strongly. For example, Knight supervised my thesis, which was on the history of production and distribution theories from 1870 to 1915. He had a wonderfully critical mind, which, however, was not well suited to intellectual history because he could not understand, let alone excuse, the errors of earlier economists. It was perhaps a decade later before I could read Ricardo through my eyes rather than through Knight's eyes.

My teaching began in 1936 at Iowa State College where T. W. Schultz was the department chairman. Two years later, I went to the University of Minnesota from which I was on leave for several years during the war as a member of the Statistical Research Group at Columbia University. After the war, I returned to Minnesota, from which I soon moved to Brown University and a year later to Columbia University where I remained from 1947 until 1958. The last year, I was on leave at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioural Sciences, sharing a splendid year with Kenneth Arrow, Milton Friedman, Melvin Reder, and Robert Solow. In 1958,1 came to Chicago where I have remained.

In retrospect, I, no doubt, purposely avoided administrative duties, and indeed, almost all non-academic entanglements. I recall my mother asking in about 1946 what I was and I replied proudly that I was a professor. A decade later she repeated her question and I repeated my answer. "No promotion?" was her comment.

Early in my professional life, I found that many areas of economics attracted me. I started working and publishing in price theory by 1938. In 1946, I published an early work on linear programming (The Cost of

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Subsistence) which solved the problem only approximately; George Dantzig soon presented the exact solution. In the 1940s, I began empirical work on price theory, starting with a test of the oligopoly demand curve theory of rigid prices. In the 1950s, I proposed the survivor method of determining the efficient sizes of enterprises, and worked on delivered price systems, vertical integration, and similar topics.

In this same period, I was on the staff of the National Bureau of Economic Research. There I worked on the service industries and used what may have been the first total factor productivity measure (in Trends in Output and Employment). Later books on scientific personnel (with David Blank), on capital and. rates of return in manufacturing, and on the behaviour of industrial prices (with James Kindahl) were also done under Bureau sponsorship. It would be remiss to fail to mention the fascinating association I had with that remarkable economist, Arthur F. Burns.

Even before I came to Chicago, I had gotten interested in the existence of dispersion of prices under conditions which economic theory said would yield a single price. That interest culminated in The Economics of Information (1961) and later work — indeed I am about to enter into the study of the extension of this analysis to political behaviour.

It was in the 1960s that I began the detailed study of public regulation. My interests were aroused, and my faith in the cliches of the subject destroyed, as so often with other subjects, by the discussions with my friend, Aaron Director. This wonderful man is that rarest of scholars: a clear-headed, imaginative, erudite man who enjoys the task of constructing luminous and original theories but does not even write them down!

Throughout the last 40 years, I have maintained a continued interest in the history of economics (as an aside, I am a diligent book collector; my oldest son is equally active in the history of statistics, and my oldest grandson has an immense collection of comic books — leading some friends to suggest a new gene!). That subject has lost its one time appeal to economists as our science has become more abstract, but my interest has

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