During the 1960s he became the main advocate opposing Keynesian government policies, and described his approach (along with mainstream economics) as using 'Keynesian language and apparatus' yet rejecting its initial conclusions. He introduced a theory which would later become part of the mainstream and among the first to propagate the theory of consumption smoothing.
įriedman's challenges to what he later called 'naive Keynesian theory' began with his interpretation of consumption, which tracks how consumers spend. Several students, young professors and academics who were recruited or mentored by Friedman at Chicago went on to become leading economists, including Gary Becker, Robert Fogel, Thomas Sowell and Robert Lucas Jr. With George Stigler and others, Friedman was among the intellectual leaders of the Chicago school of economics, a neoclassical school of economic thought associated with the work of the faculty at the University of Chicago that rejected Keynesianism in favor of monetarism until the mid-1970s, when it turned to new classical macroeconomics heavily based on the concept of rational expectations. Milton Friedman ( / ˈ f r iː d m ən/ ( listen) J– November 16, 2006) was an American economist and statistician who received the 1976 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his research on consumption analysis, monetary history and theory and the complexity of stabilization policy.
