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Research Paper On Milton Friedman

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Introduction
“Many people want consumer protection by the government. A much more urgent problem is to protect the consumer from the government,” is a familiar quote to any economist that was stated by Milton Friedman. He was one of the most significant personalities in the resuscitation of classical economics in the last half of the 21st century. Various awards such as the Nobel Prize for Economic Sciences and the Presidential Medal of Freedom bagged by Friedman in 1976 and 1988 respectively are a clear indication of his great contribution to modern economics.
Milton Friedman is considered to have played several roles in the intellectual life of the 20th century. He was a policy enterpriser, who spent decades pushing for the policy known …show more content…

He argued that consumer decisions were driven by a psychological trend to spend some amount just not all of any addition in wage settlements, income or profits. Friedman, however, contradicted this motion by arguing that economic theories should not be judged by their psychological but rather their power to predict behavior (The Methodology of Positive Economics, 1958). Friedman’s application of rational behavior to answer questions that other economists had thought outside their reaches made him stand …show more content…

In 1958, economist A.W. Philips stated that unemployment and inflation had a correlation from the past in that low inflation was associated with high unemployment and vice-versa. Friedman contradicted this view in a presidential address to the American Economic Association by saying that even though the correlation was visible in the data, it did not represent a true trade-off especially in the long run. He argued that there is always a temporary trade-off between inflation and unemployment but never a permanent trade-off. Only temporary success would be achieved through a policy to generate higher inflation to curb unemployment as it would finally pick again, even as inflation stayed high.
The 1960s saw Friedman author a book titled Capitalism and Freedom, where he advocated for freely floating exchange rates, education vouchers, and abolition of licensing doctors, a negative income tax, and a volunteer army among other things. The book created a cause for relatively free markets to a larger audience that encouraged the younger generation to take economics

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