Milton Friedman: Economist, Teacher, Defender of Freedom

Milton Friedman, one of the most influential economists of the past century and winner of a 1976 Nobel Prize, died on Thursday morning of heart failure at a San Francisco area hospital, a spokeswoman for his family said. He was 94.

I've never actually read any of his books, which doesn't keep me from understanding what an enormous contribution he has made to the world. I was directly influenced by his son David's book, The Machinery of Freedom, which cohered a lot of thoughts I had been thinking in the early 80s. I learned of his death, not through any news source, but via LJ - his grandson patrissimo is on my friends list.

Milton Friedman was not just a Nobel Prize-winning economist, exemplar monetarist, and thinker; his greatest contribution was in popularizing and extending into the post-WW II world the ideas of decentralization, free markets, and limited government solutions to problems of the day. One has to remember the memetic environment of the era; decades of war and authoritarian central planning schemes following the Great Depression, when the majority of educated people around the world believed socialism and ever-greater government intervention were the answer to poverty and conflict of all sorts. (His diagnosis of the Depression: "The Fed was largely responsible for converting what might have been a garden-variety recession, although perhaps a fairly severe one, into a major catastrophe. Instead of using its powers to offset the depression, it presided over a decline in the quantity of money by one-third from 1929 to 1933.... Far from the depression being a failure of the free-enterprise system, it was a tragic failure of government.")

Tirelessly, decade after decade, he worked to educate the population and counteract generations of government propaganda promoting government interventions as the only solutions to problems. As a result, we now live in a world where large numbers of voters understand that problems are best resolved closest to their source, by people with a direct interest in the outcome, and that designing a government program to solve a problem is no easy task, since such programs are subject to pitfalls of unintended consequences and inefficiency. He contributed to a political environment that led to the end of the draft, deregulation, welfare reform, and recent experiments in school choice. While identified with the Republican Party, he was politically more a classic liberal of the old school, interested in maximizing freedom; he supported decriminalization of drugs and prostitution. He was a friend of freedom in all its forms. If one's highest duty to humanity is to contribute to the body of what we know and understand (the Noösphere) in a way that promotes the future of mankind, he did his duty many times over.