Friedman, Milton 
1912 - .
US economist, a pioneer of monetarism. 

He argued that a country's economy, and hence inflation, can be controlled through its money supply, although most governments lack the "political will" to cut government spending and thereby increase unemployment. Nobel Prize for Economics 1976. Friedman believed that inflation is "always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon". If the rate of growth of the money supply is limited to the rate of growth of output in the economy (through monetary policy such as changes in interest rates), it should be impossible for increases in costs, such as wages or imports, to be translated into a rise in prices in the economy as a whole. His advocacy of the use of monetary policy, and his rejection of Keynesian economics, stemmed from his belief in the self-regulating nature of market forces, and the idea that there is a "natural rate of unemployment". He argued that this was determined by "structural and institutional forces in the labour market", such as unemployment benefits and trade unions, and could not be reduced in the long term by increases in government spending. Friedman was professor of economics at Chicago University 1948-79. He advocated the introduction of a negative income tax to replace social-security benefits, to be paid automatically when incomes fell below a certain level. He argued that this would increase incentives to take paid employment and reduce bureaucratic intervention. Friedman's permanent-income hypothesis made a significant contribution to the theory of consumption. This hypothesis suggested that consumer spending depended on expectations of long-run, or permanent, income, and did not vary significantly with fluctuations in current income. His published works include A Theory of the Consumption Function 1957, Capitalism and Freedom 1962, A Monetary History of the United States 1867-1960 1963, A Theoretical Framework for Monetary Analysis 1971, and Free to Choose 1980.