If there is a single unifying thread of Milton Friedman’s career, it is his commitment to the free society. In print, on television, in speeches, and through the countless students who consider themselves “Friedmanites,” his work has shaped the economic and political outlook of the 20th and 21st century.
Since 1977, Friedman has been a Senior Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution after 30 years at the University of Chicago. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1976, and in 1988 awarded both the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the National Medal of Science. He is coauthor (with his wife Rose) of Capitalism and Freedom, Free to Choose, and the author of Theory of the Consumption Function, The Optimum Quantity of Money and Other Essays, and (with Anna J. Schwartz) A Monetary History of the United States, Monetary Statistics of the United States, and Monetary Trends in the United States and the United Kingdom.
Friedman has been a guiding influence at the Cato Institute throughout its history. In 2004, the Cato Institute inaugurated the Milton Friedman Prize for Advancing Liberty, which honors “an individual who has made a significant contribution to advancing human freedom.”