Renowned Economist Friedman Dies

Milton Friedman, a Nobel Prize-winning economist, Columbia alumnus, and a major proponent of laissez-faire economics and limited government spending, died Thursday of heart failure. He was 94.

Friedman earned his doctorate from Columbia in 1946 and taught at the University between 1964 and 1965.

"America has lost a true visionary and advocate for human freedom," Gordon St. Angelo, president and CEO of the Milton and Rose D. Friedman Foundation, said in a statement. "Few people have done more to advance civil and economic liberties throughout the world."

Throughout his life, he pushed for tax reform, deregulation, free trade, and an all-volunteer army.

He provided the theoretical framework for many economic policies put into place by former President Ronald Reagan and former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s.

One of his best-known ideas is the theory of monetarism, which holds that business cycles are determined by money supply. In 1976, he earned the Nobel Prize in economics for his Theory of the Consumption Function, which proved that individuals' decisions about spending and savings were dependent upon their perceptions of their long-term incomes, according to The Financial Times.

He began his educational career at Rutgers University at 15 and earned his master's at the University of Chicago, where he also taught for many years. After retiring, he served as a fellow of the Hoover Institution at Stanford.

Friedman is hailed as a visionary by many fiscally conservative thinkers. In a tribute to Friedman on his 90th birthday, Washington Post columnist George F. Will described Friedman as "the most consequential public intellectual of the 20th century."

According to The Boston Globe, Friedman often faced criticism from the New Left during the 1960s. In response to hecklers, he is said to have responded, "Your objective is the same as mine-greater individual freedom. ... The difference is that I know how to achieve that objective and you do not."

He is survived by his wife, his son David, and his daughter Janet.