MILTON FRIEDMAN, a brilliant champion of free-market economics and individual freedom who almost single-handedly altered the boundaries of public debate on an array of national issues, died Thursday in San Francisco. He was 94.
The cause was heart failure, said Robert Fanger, a spokesman for the Milton and Rose D. Friedman Foundation in Indianapolis.
Friedman was considered a leading economic thinker of the 20th century. His many prescriptions for policy, notably on managing the nation's money supply and curbing the welfare state, influenced presidents and presidential candidates dating to the 1960s. President Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, the former British prime minister, were among his fans. Friedman's sweeping, pro-capitalist ideas earned him legions of followers both domestically and overseas, while also sparking dissent and controversy.
He was awarded the Nobel Prize in economics in 1976 for a body of "original and weighty work," including his money supply research, which jurors said had influenced fellow scholars as well as the U.S. Federal Reserve and the central banks of other nations.
"He was a great man," said Allan H. Meltzer, an economics scholar at Carnegie Mellon University and the American Enterprise Institute. "It's hard to think of anybody who never held a government position of any importance who influenced our country -- and the whole world -- as much as he did."
The longtime San Francisco resident had been a senior research fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution since 1977.
Yet Friedman's influence extended far beyond the ivory tower. He became an economist-celebrity, promoting his passionate beliefs in books, magazines and television appearances. With confidence and a professor's logic, he sought to demolish the conventional belief after World War II that government should play a sweeping role in people's lives.
Taxes should be cut and simplified, he said, and society would benefit when personal choice reigned supreme.
Though some of his teachings about money lost influence over time, he ultimately attained the status of a capitalist icon through the purity and force of his broader world view.
"He had been a fixture in my life both professionally and personally for half a century," former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan said in a statement Thursday. "My world will not be the same."
