JAMES PIERESON: The Age of Friedman.

The following remarks were delivered on receiving the Milton Friedman Award at the Pacific Research Institute in New York City June 16, 2026.

It is a special honor to receive an award named for Milton Friedman, pathbreaking economist, friend and advocate for liberty, fierce debater and intellectual combatant – a man whose ideas have shaped the modern world. It is not an exaggeration to say that we live today in the Age of Friedman, an era shaped by his ideas about the importance of monetary policy in the performance of modern economies, and the role played by central banks in managing money supply.

That was not all, not by any means. Milton Friedman was a fierce advocate of market economies not only because they worked, but because they promoted liberty, which was to him the most important principle of all. One of his early books, Capitalism and Freedom, published in 1963, which I encountered in college, made this case from historical and philosophical points of view, much as Hayek did in The Road to Serfdom. Along the way in that book, Friedman set forth numerous applications of free market principles that are influential today: school choice and school vouchers, a negative income tax to replace welfare programs, and private accounts in social security, among them. He was the rare academic economist who could speak to the public as well.

He advanced those ideas in other forums as well, including in his award-winning television series, Free to Choose, and in a regular column for Newsweek magazine, in which he expressed many controversial ideas, for example: that the welfare state increased poverty, public unions were harming schools and student achievement, and government regulation was responsible for inflation, unemployment, and stagnation. Free to Choose reached millions of viewers, in the same year as Ronald Reagan was poised to win the presidency – and to put some of those ideas into practice.

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