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Princeton University Press
November 1971
On Sale: November 1, 1971
888 pages ISBN: 0691003548 EAN: 9780691003542 Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
Writing in the June 1965 issue of theEconomic Journal, Harry
G. Johnson begins with a sentence seemingly calibrated to
the scale of the book he set himself to review: "The
long-awaited monetary history of the United States by
Friedman and Schwartz is in every sense of the term a
monumental scholarly achievement--monumental in its sheer
bulk, monumental in the definitiveness of its treatment of
innumerable issues, large and small . . . monumental, above
all, in the theoretical and statistical effort and ingenuity
that have been brought to bear on the solution of complex
and subtle economic issues." Friedman and Schwartz marshaled massive historical data and
sharp analytics to support the claim that monetary
policy--steady control of the money supply--matters
profoundly in the management of the nation's economy,
especially in navigating serious economic fluctuations. In
their influential chapter 7, The Great Contraction--which
Princeton published in 1965 as a separate paperback--they
address the central economic event of the century, the
Depression. According to Hugh Rockoff, writing in January
1965: "If Great Depressions could be prevented through
timely actions by the monetary authority (or by a monetary
rule), as Friedman and Schwartz had contended, then the case
for market economies was measurably stronger." Milton Friedman won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2000 for
work related to A Monetary History as well as to his other
Princeton University Press book, A Theory of the Consumption
Function (1957).
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