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What was milton friedman's general economic theory , and what were his influences on modern economics?

does anyone know a site that would give me an easy-to-understand but detailed explanation for these questions? all the ones ive looked at keep talking about Keynes.

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  1. Friedman was best known for reviving interest in the money supply as a determinant of the nominal value of output, that is, the quantity theory of money. Monetarism is the set of views associated with modern quantity theory. Its origins can be traced back to the 16th-century School of Salamanca or even further but Friedman's contribution is largely responsible for its modern formulation. He co-authored, with Anna Schwartz, A Monetary History of the United States (1963), which sought to examine the role of the money supply and economic activity in U.S. history. A striking conclusion of their research was one regarding the role of money supply fluctuations as contributing to economic fluctuations. Several regression studies with David Meiselman in the 1960s suggested the primacy of the money supply over investment and government spending in determining consumption and output. These challenged a prevailing but largely untested view on their relative importance. Friedman's empirical research and some theory supported the conclusion that the short-run effect of a change in the money supply was primarily on output but that the longer-run effect was primarily on the price level. Friedman was the leading proponent of the monetarist school of economic thought. He maintained that there is a close and stable link between inflation and the money supply, mainly that the phenomenon of inflation is to be regulated by controlling the amount of money poured into the national economy by the Federal Reserve Bank. He famously quipped that deflation can be fought against by "dropping money out of a helicopter". Friedman's arguments were designed to counter popular claims that inflation at the time was the result of increases in the oil price, or increases in wages: as he wrote, Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon. —Milton Friedman, A Monetary History of the United States 1867-1960 (1963) Friedman rejected the use of fiscal policy as a tool of demand management; and he held that the government's role in the guidance of the economy should be severely restricted. Friedman wrote extensively on the Great Depression, which he called the Great Contraction, arguing that it had been caused by an ordinary financial shock whose duration and seriousness were greatly increased by the subsequent contraction of the money supply caused by the misguided policies of the directors of the Federal Reserve. The Fed was largely responsible for converting what might have been a garden-variety recession, although perhaps a fairly severe one, into a major catastrophe. Instead of using its powers to offset the depression, it presided over a decline in the quantity of money by one-third from 1929 to 1933 ... Far from the depression being a failure of the free-enterprise system, it was a tragic failure of government. —Milton Friedman, Two Lucky People, 233 Friedman also argued for the cessation of government intervention in currency markets, thereby spawning an enormous literature on the subject, as well as promoting the practice of freely floating exchange rates. Friedman's macroeconomic theories were soon displaced. His close friend George Stigler explained, "As is customary in science, he did not win a full victory, in part because research was directed along different lines by the theory of rational expectations, a newer approach developed by Robert Lucas, also at the University of Chicago."[26] Friedman was also known for his work on the consumption function, the permanent income hypothesis (1957), which Friedman himself referred to as his best scientific work.[27] This work contended that rational consumers would spend a proportional amount of what they perceived to be their permanent income. Windfall gains would mostly be saved. Tax reductions likewise, as rational consumers would predict that taxes would have to rise later to balance public finances. Other important contributions include his critique of the Phillips curve and the concept of the natural rate of unemployment (1968). This critique associated his name, together with that of Edmumd Phelps, with the insight that a government that brings about higher inflation cannot permanently reduce unemployment by doing so. Unemployment may be temporarily lower, if the inflation is a surprise, but in the long run unemployment will be determined by the frictions and imperfections in the labour market. Friedman's essay "The Methodology of Positive Economics" (1953) set the epistemological course for his own subsequent research and to a degree that of the Chicago School of Economics. There he argued that economics as science should be free of value judgments for it to be objective. Moreover, a useful economic theory should be judged not by its descriptive realism (hair color, etc.) but by its simplicity and fruitfulness as an engine of prediction. [edit] Statistics Although less popularly known for these advances, Friedman was also widely agreed to be a b
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