ECONOMIC GROWTH:
The Fed and the Natural Rate*

By Milton Friedman

Argue that the economy should be growing more briskly, and you have Nobel Prize-winner and Hoover fellow Milton Friedman's sympathy. Argue that the Federal Reserve Bank should be doing something about it, and you lose Friedman's sympathy. The man who coined the term explains why the natural rate of unemployment is no argument for loose money-or, for that matter, tight money, either.

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Milton Friedman, recipient of the 1976 Nobel Memorial Prize for economic science, was a senior research fellow at the Hoover Institution from 1977 to 2006. He passed away on Nov. 16, 2006. He was also the Paul Snowden Russell Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of Economics at the University of Chicago, where he taught from 1946 to 1976, and a member of the research staff of the National Bureau of Economic Research from 1937 to 1981.