Loved and loathed; perhaps the most influential economist of his generation. He won the Nobel Prize for economics in 1976, one of many Chicago school economists to receive that honor. He has been recognized for his achievements in the study of consumption, monetary history and theory, and for demonstrating how complex policies aimed at economic stabilization can be. A fierce advocate of free markets, Mr. Friedman argued for monetarism at a time when Keynesian policies were dominant. Unusually, his work is readily accessible to the layman. He argues that the problems of inflation and short-run unemployment would be solved if the Federal Reserve had to increase the money supply at a constant rate. Like Adam Smith and Friedrich Hayek, who inspired him, Mr. Friedman praises the free market not just for its economic efficiency but also for its moral strength. For him, freedom--economic, political and civil--is an end in itself, not a means to an end. It is what makes life worthwhile. He has said he would prefer to live in a free country, even if it did not provide a higher standard of living, than a country run by an alternative regime. However, the likelihood of a free country being poorer than an unfree one strikes him as implausible; the economic as well as the moral superiority of free markets is, he has declared, "now proven". An adviser to Richard Nixon, he was disappointed when the president went against the spirit of monetarism in 1971 by asking him to urge the chairman of the Fed to increase the money supply more rapidly. The 1980s economic policies of Margaret Thatcher and General Pinochet were inspired--and defended--by Mr. Friedman. However, in 2003, he admitted that one of those policies, the targeting of the money supply, had "not been a success" and that he doubted he would "as of today push it as hard as I once did".