Latest Milton Friedman Quotes from Interviews

Quotes about:

• You never can cure poverty. Poverty is in the eye of the beholder.

  Milton Friedman

  Eye, Poverty, Beholder

  Source: www.pbs.org

• I think it's a scandal what has been happening in the school system so far as lower income classes. The dropout rates, the illiteracy rate, you know literacy in the United States was a lot higher in 1890 than it is now.

  Milton Friedman

  School, Thinking, Class

  Source: www.pbs.org

• There is no good way of measuring poverty.

  Milton Friedman

  Way, Poverty, Measuring

  Source: www.pbs.org

• I think in some ways it would make more sense to have as a poverty level a relative concept and say, the level of poverty is that level of income or that level of consumption below which 10 percent of the people now are.

  Milton Friedman

  Thinking, People, Income

  Source: www.pbs.org

• We measure poverty by what I believe is a very, very crude concept. We actually measure poverty by trying to get some kind of an estimate of the minimum expenditures on food that are required to maintain health, multiplying that number by three, and saying that's the level of poverty. And it's a very crude, inaccurate arrangement.

  Milton Friedman

  Believe, Numbers, Trying

  Source: www.pbs.org

• I believe that the monetary stability is an absolutely critical element in the satisfactory operation of a system.

  Milton Friedman

  Believe, Elements, Operations

  Source: www.pbs.org

• A private enterprise system needs some measuring rod, it needs something, it needs money to make its transactions. You can't run a big complicated system through barter, through converting one commodity into another. You need a monetary system to operate. And the instability in that monetary system is devastating to the performance of the economy.

  Milton Friedman

  Running, Needs, Complicated

  Source: www.pbs.org

• The fall of the Berlin Wall really demonstrated beyond the shadow of a doubt that there was a bad system, and what subsequently happened in the Soviet Union, that that system was a failure.

  Milton Friedman

  Wall, Fall, Doubt

  Source: www.pbs.org

• If you continue to use monetary policy to attempt to promote full employment the result would be that you would have higher inflation, and that you would not have lower unemployment.

  Milton Friedman

  Would Be, Unemployment, Use

  Source: www.pbs.org

• When you have a time of crisis what happens depends on what ideas are floating around, and what ideas have been developed, and thought through, and are made effective.

  Milton Friedman

  Ideas, Floating, Times Of Crisis

  Source: www.pbs.org

• I believe the role that people like myself have played in the transformation of public opinion has been by persistently presenting a different point of view, a point of view which stresses the importance of private markets, of individual freedom, and the distorting effect of governmental policy.

  Milton Friedman

  Stress, Believe, Views

  Source: www.pbs.org

• You never have real changes unless you have a time of crisis.

  Milton Friedman

  Real, Times Of Crisis, Crisis

  Source: www.pbs.org

• The Great Depression in the United States was caused - I won't say caused, was enormously intensified and made far worse than it would have been by bad monetary policy.

  Milton Friedman

  United States, Great Depression, Made

  Source: www.pbs.org

• What happened was that for every $100 of money, by which I mean the cash that people keep in their pockets, and the deposits they have in the bank, for every $100 of money that there was in 1929, by 1933 there was only $67. The Federal Reserve allowed the quantity of money to decline by a third. While, at all times, it had the possibilities and the power of preventing that from happening.

  Milton Friedman

  Mean, People, Pockets

  Source: www.pbs.org

• I think there is universal agreement within the economics profession that the decline - the sharp decline in the quantity of money played a very major role in producing the Great Depression.

  Milton Friedman

  Thinking, Agreement, Roles

  Source: www.pbs.org

• The stock market crashed in October 1929. But that was not the cause of what caused the Great Depression. It was, in my opinion, a very minor element of it. What happened was that from 1929 to 1933 you had a major contraction which, in my opinion, was caused primarily by the failure of the Federal Reserve System, to follow the course of action for which it was set up. It was set up to prevent exactly what happened from 1929 to 1933. But instead of preventing it, they facilitated it.

  Milton Friedman

  Elements, October, Causes

  Source: www.pbs.org

• The Depression, which started in 1929 was rather mild from 1929 to 1930. And, indeed, in my opinion would have been over in 1931 at the latest had it not been that the Federal Reserve followed a policy which led to bank failures, widespread bank failures, and led to a reduction in the quantity of money.

  Milton Friedman

  Opinion, Reduction, Federal Reserve

  Source: www.pbs.org

• The facts never speak for themselves. They have to be interpreted in terms of some understanding of where they come from and what the relation between them is.

  Milton Friedman

  Understanding, Facts, Speak

  Source: www.pbs.org

• Statistics do not speak for themselves.

  Milton Friedman

  Statistics, Speak

  Source: www.pbs.org

• There is no person, no theorist so reckless as he who says that the facts speak for themselves.

  Milton Friedman

  Facts, Speak, Reckless

  Source: www.pbs.org

• Americans know very little about social statistics, but I am not sure that it's important that Americans know about social statistics.

  Milton Friedman

  Important, Littles, Statistics

  Source: www.pbs.org

• If instead of looking at income, you look at levels of consumption, if anything that's become more equal. The fraction of families that have a dishwasher, that have a sewing machine, that have a television set. In respect to consumption, it's very hard to avoid the view that people have been getting more equal rather than more unequal.

  Milton Friedman

  Views, People, Income

  Source: www.pbs.org

• Reality ensures that the end of history will never come.

  Milton Friedman

  Reality, Ends

  Source: www.huffingtonpost.com

• The countries that have risen and separated out as a result of the collapse of the Soviet Union are, on the whole, following freer economic policies. Most of these states have freer government and less restrictions on trade.

  Milton Friedman

  Country, Government, Unions

  Source: www.huffingtonpost.com

• We had much freer trade in the 19th century. We have much less globalization now than we did then.

  Milton Friedman

  Globalization, Century, Trade

  Source: www.huffingtonpost.com