Friedman, Milton

1912 – He was born on the 31st day of July this year in Brooklyn, New York City.

1928 – His a gifted student, graduated from Rahway High School in this year, shortly before his 16th birthday.

1932 – He was awarded a competitive scholarship to Rutgers University in New Jersey, graduating with a Bachelor of Arts in this year.

1933 - Upon his graduation from Rutgers, he turned down an offer to study Applied Mathematics at Brown University, instead accepting a scholarship to study Economics at the University of Chicago where he received his M.A.

1934 - He was back in Chicago, spending the year working as a research assistant for Henry Schultz, who was then working on his Theory and Measurement of Demand.

1935 - Friedman was unable to find academic employment, so this year, he followed his friend W. Allen Wallis to Washington, D.C., where Roosevelt's New Deal was "a lifesaver" for many young economists. He began working at the National Resources Committee, which was then working on a large consumer budget survey.

1937 – He moved to the National Bureau of Economic Research to assist Simon Kuznets in his work on professional income. This work led to their jointly authored Incomes from Independent Professional Practice, which introduced the concepts of permanent and transitory income, which were a major component of the Permanent Income Hypothesis, which he worked out, in detail in the 1950s.

1940 – He was appointed an assistant professor teaching Economics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, but encountered anti-Semitism in the Economics department and decided to return to government service.

1941 – He worked on wartime tax policy for the Federal Government, as an advisor to senior officials of the Treasury until 1943.

1943 – He joined the Division of War Research at Columbia University headed by Wallis and Henry Hotelling, where he spent the rest of the war years working as a mathematical statistician, focusing on problems of weapons design, military tactics, and metallurgical experiments.

1945 – He submitted Incomes from Independent Professional Practice (co-authored with Kuznets and completed in 1940) to Columbia, which subsequently awarded him a Ph.D. in 1946.

1946 – He accepted an offer to teach economic theory at the University of Chicago. Friedman would stay at the University of Chicago for the next thirty years.

1962 – He wrote a book entitled “Capitalism and Freedom”, he advocated minimizing the role of government in a free market as a means of creating political and social freedom.

1964 – He served as an economic adviser to Barry Goldwater during his failed presidential campaign.

1968 – He served on Richard Nixon's committee of economic advisers.

1969 – He was appointed by Nixon to the Advisory Commission on an All-Volunteer Force (the "Gates Commission"), on which Friedman loudly advocated against the draft and in favor of a voluntary military, a result which was achieved in the US in 1973.

1975 - He was a keynote speaker at a high-profile economic conference in Santiago, Chile, where he paved the way for the economic program designed by the so-called Chicago Boys.

1976 – He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics for his achievements in the fields of consumption analysis, monetary history, and theory and for his demonstration of the complexity of stabilization policy.

1977 – At age 65, Friedman retired from the University of Chicago after teaching there for thirty years. He and his wife moved to San Francisco. From this year on, he was affiliated with the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.

1988 - He received the National Medal of Science and Reagan honored him with the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

2006 – He passed away at the age of 94 on the 16th day of November this year in San Francisco, California.

• "The price works so well, so efficiently, that we are not aware of it most of the time."
• "History suggests that Capitalism is a necessary condition for political freedom."