Milton Friedman (1912-2006) was one of the most relevant contemporary economists in the development of modern liberal economic thought. His figure has been the subject of numerous studies aimed at understanding his impact on the current functioning of the global economy.
Friedman was the youngest child of a humble Jewish family from Brooklyn of Central European descent. He had to pay for his own Economics studies at Rutgers University after his father died when he was just 15 years old.
Once graduated, he moved to Chicago to work as a researcher at the University of Chicago, which would later become the beginning of an internationally significant economic school.
At 29, he was put in charge of fiscal policy at the Treasury Department with the entry of the United States into World War II. As a result, in 1953 he obtained a scholarship to study in the United Kingdom, at the University of Cambridge, where he had the opportunity to delve into the latent debate on the ideas of John Maynard Keynes.
Since then, he worked as an economist for various institutions and federal agencies, founding organizations such as the Mont Pèlerin Society alongside Friedrich Hayek, and was a professor at prestigious American universities such as Columbia or Stanford until he retired in 1977.
Throughout his career, he was politically involved in the Republican Party, becoming an economic advisor to Presidents Nixon, Reagan, George W. Bush, and Margaret Thatcher in the United Kingdom.
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