Milton Friedman
A champion of the free market and enemy of big government
Introduction
Milton Friedman was an American economist and winner of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. An advisor to both Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, The Economist has described Friedman as “the most influential economist of the second half of the 20th century… possibly of all of it.”1 His work, published in books including Capitalism and Freedom (1962) and A Monetary History of the United States, 1867–1960 (1963), popularized new ways of thinking about the economy, contradicting the dominant Keynesian thinking of the time.
For all his influence, Friedman was (and remains) a polarizing figure. As a libertarian, he was a staunch defender of the free market, garnering him effusive praise from some corners and withering criticism from others. Still, his ideas have redefined the way people approach business and macroeconomics, as well as how Western societies think about government in general.
One of the great mistakes is to judge policies and programs by their intentions rather than their results.
– Milton Friedman
About the Authors
Dan Pilat
Dan is a Co-Founder and Managing Director at The Decision Lab. He is a bestselling author of Intention - a book he wrote with Wiley on the mindful application of behavioral science in organizations. Dan has a background in organizational decision making, with a BComm in Decision & Information Systems from McGill University. He has worked on enterprise-level behavioral architecture at TD Securities and BMO Capital Markets, where he advised management on the implementation of systems processing billions of dollars per week. Driven by an appetite for the latest in technology, Dan created a course on business intelligence and lectured at McGill University, and has applied behavioral science to topics such as augmented and virtual reality.
Dr. Sekoul Krastev
Dr. Sekoul Krastev is a decision scientist and Co-Founder of The Decision Lab, one of the world's leading behavioral science consultancies. His team works with large organizations—Fortune 500 companies, governments, foundations and supernationals—to apply behavioral science and decision theory for social good. He holds a PhD in neuroscience from McGill University and is currently a visiting scholar at NYU. His work has been featured in academic journals as well as in The New York Times, Forbes, and Bloomberg. He is also the author of Intention (Wiley, 2024), a bestselling book on the science of human agency. Before founding The Decision Lab, he worked at the Boston Consulting Group and Google.
