The legacy of Milton Friedman

Milton Friedman died recently at the age of 94. What were his central ideas and how did he change the way economies are run? Simon Wilson explains.

Why was Milton Friedman important?

He was one of a tiny handful of economic thinkers who have combined outstanding academic achievement (Friedman headed the influential Chicago School of Economists and was awarded the Nobel prize in 1976) with a popular following, including among the world's most powerful policy-makers. In Friedman's case, his espousal of individual freedom, small government, and monetarism' make him the major economist of the past half century. The only other 20th-century economists who can be placed in the same bracket are (certainly) John Maynard Keynes the great Cambridge economist of the generation before Friedman and (more arguably) JK Galbraith, Friedman's contemporary and bitter economic foe.

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Simon Wilson’s first career was in book publishing, as an economics editor at Routledge, and as a publisher of non-fiction at Random House, specialising in popular business and management books. While there, he published Customers.com, a bestselling classic of the early days of e-commerce, and The Money or Your Life: Reuniting Work and Joy, an inspirational book that helped inspire its publisher towards a post-corporate, portfolio life.   

Since 2001, he has been a writer for MoneyWeek, a financial copywriter, and a long-time contributing editor at The Week. Simon also works as an actor and corporate trainer; current and past clients include investment banks, the Bank of England, the UK government, several Magic Circle law firms and all of the Big Four accountancy firms. He has a degree in languages (German and Spanish) and social and political sciences from the University of Cambridge.