Milton Friedman Is Known As One Of The Top Economists In The World. He Has A Ph. D. From Columbia University, Won A Noble Memor

Title	Milton Friedman Is Known As One Of The Top Economists In The World. He Has A Ph. D. From Columbia University, Won A Noble Memor
# of Words	1061
# of Pages (250 words per page double spaced)	4.24

Milton Friedman is known as one of the top economists in the world. He has a Ph. D. from Columbia University, won a Noble Memorial Prize in economics and has also been awarded many honorary degrees by other Universities in the United States. As you can tell, Milton Friedman has played a significant part in helping to solve the economy problems of the world. You’ve probably heard all about his accomplishments and awards he has received, but what about how Milton Friedman played a very important role in helping us get into a huge national debt? This paper will discuss how Milton Friedman played a negative role in our economy.
When the Great Depression hit worldwide, it was up to the economists to explain it and to devise a cure for it. A person named John Maynard Keynes came up with an explanation to the economic slump that was so simple people did not think it would work. Keynes explanation was something like this; in a normal economy, there is a high level of employment, and everyone is spending their earnings as usual. This means there is a circular flow of money in the economy, as my spending becomes part of your earnings, and your spending becomes part of my earnings. Suppose something happens to alter consumers confidence in the economy. Worried consumers may then try to weather the coming economic hardship by saving their money, but because my spending is part of your earnings, my decision to hoard money makes things worse for you and you, responding to your own difficult times, will start hoarding money too, making things even worse for me. So actually, everything is related. People hoard money in difficult times, but times become more difficult when people hoard money. That was basically how Keynes explained the recession. He also came up with a solution to it.
The cure for this, was for the central bank to expand the money supply. Keynes said, "by putting more bills in people's hands, consumer confidence would return, people would spend, and the circular flow of money would be reestablished(Keynes, 232)." That was the cure and explanation to the recession, but what about the depressions? Keynes believed that depressions were recessions that had fallen into a "liquidity trap(Keynes, 240)." A liquidity trap is when people hoard money and refuse to spend no matter how much the government tries to expand the money supply. In these circumstances, Keynes believed that the government should do what people were not, basically, spend.
In seven short years, under the Keynesian policy, the U.S. went from the greatest depression it has ever known to the greatest economic boom it has ever known. The success of Keynesian economics was so astounding that almost all capitalist governments around the world started using it. And the result was the extinction of the economic depression! Before World War II, eight U.S. recessions worsened into depressions (1807, 1837, 1873, 1882, 1893, 1920, 1933, and 1937). Since World War II, under Keynesian policies, there have been nine recessions (1945-46, 1949, 1954, 1956, 1960-61, 1970, 1973-75, 1980-83, 1990-92 ), but not one has turned into a depression. The success of Keynesian economics was such that even Richard Nixon once said, "We are all Keynesians no

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