Eamonn Butler - Milton Friedman: A Concise Guide to the Ideas and Influence of the Free-Market Economist

This book guides the reader through the startlingly original ideas of Milton Friedman (19122006) a Nobel laureate in economics, but best known to many for his TV series and book Free to Choose (1980), a searing critique of big government and robust defence of individual freedom.

Friedmans thinking had a powerful influence on world leaders such as Margaret Thatcher in Britain and Ronald Reagan in America. In the 1970s, it underpinned the replacement of fixed exchange rates by open currency markets and free trade. In the 1980s, it contributed to the demise of Soviet communism in the East and to privatisation in the West. In the 1990s, it provided the blueprint for reform as countries in Eastern Europe and Latin America emerged from years of totalitarianism. By the 2000s, it had helped cut world inflation to a tenth of what it had been a decade before.

Friedman was the best-known economist of his generation. He undid the grip that Keynesianism based on the thinking of John Maynard Keynes, with its faith in large-scale government spending and intervention held over postwar politicians and economists. The radical alternative he created Monetarism called instead for sound money, balanced budgets and deregulation. And he showed how the Great Depression of the 1930s was caused, not by some failure of capitalism, but by a profound failure of government drawing lessons that are just as relevant to how we should handle financial crises today.

But Friedman was much more than an economist. At a time when the world was bitterly divided between capitalism and communism, he threw himself into every major debate on how society should be organised. He became the worlds leading advocate of personal and economic freedom; and his arguments helped change the politics of a generation.