Milton Friedman

Born July 31, 1912, Friedman led the Chicago school's intellectual charge against Keynesian orthodoxy, introducing the permanent income hypothesis to explain consumer behavior and among the first to model consumption smoothing. Through the 1960s he theorized a natural rate of unemployment and predicted stagflation by arguing the Phillips curve was vertical in the long run - a forecast that arrived on schedule. He championed monetarism: steady, small growth in money supply over volatile intervention. After retiring from Chicago in 1977, he advised Reagan and Thatcher while his 1962 Capitalism and Freedom laid out a vision of minimal state interference - volunteer military, floating exchange rates, school vouchers, an end to medical licensing and drug prohibition. When he died November 16, 2006, The Economist called him possibly the most influential economist of the entire 20th century.