Milton Friedman

[itty.bitty.kitty]

So I am doing an autobiography on him and I just want to know what were his major contributions to economics.

[MariusIBDP]

Autobiography is a book about a life of a person, written by that person. Only Friedman can write his autobiography, and he has done so - Milton Friedman's autobiography . Read it and you'll find everything you need.

[arra]

A google search can tell you more than us. No less... His major contributions were to the neoclassical economics, i.e. what you might link with "conservative" politicians (though he liked to think of himself as the liberal in the classical sense).

[Tony Stark]

You mean, a biography? Also I don't see how this relates to the IB Economics course, perhaps it would be better suited for General Discussion. But yeah, he was a Nobel Prize Winner and a noted proponent of Free Market Economics. Describing him as a Monetarist or Neoclassical is probably inaccurate, though that may just be bias on my part (we Austrians like to claim him as family, though he is criticised by some as having been too willing to compromise with big government). He's credited as the founding father of the Chicago School of Economics and is known to hold similar views to the Austrian Ludwig von Mises in particular. One of his most known and arguably most controversial works involved a quite thorough refutation of one of John Maynard Keynes' early works; in fact Keynes vs. Friedman was the largest economic debate in the 20th Century. He described himself as a libertarian, which no major American politician truly represents (it is the antithesis of big government) asides from perhaps Ron Paul; however much of the Republican party do sometimes espouse strings of Libertarian theory to justify cutting taxes and leaving the Private Sector be.

Googling him, of course, would have been the simple answer to this question, however if you want some more in-depth information on him and his and similar theories and don't have the time to read his works, I would suggest you visit mises.org.

[Ezak]

He is also pretty famous for his negative tax theory/propsal.