Donahue is the Americanized version of Irish surname Donohoe, which, in turn, is an Anglicized version of the ancient Irish name "Donnchadh" (sometimes "Donncha").

Donncha was a common “first name” in 9th Century Ireland, and when the use of surnames became more common in Ireland around the 10th Century, many people looked to a respected common ancestor to form a surname. The ancestors of the modern Donahues took the name O’Donnchadha (pronounced “o-don-a-chu), of the line of Donnacha. However, these modern Donahues are not all descended from the same person named Donnacha; rather, the modern Donahues are likely descended from one of at least eight unrelated Donnachas, each of whose descendants adopted the surname O’Donnchadha.

There are eight known O'Donoghue ancient tribal areas in Ireland. They were in Munster: Tipperary, Cork/Kerry - Leinster: Kilkenny, Wicklow/Dublin, Meath - Connaught: Galway, Mayo/Sligo, Cavan. Considerable migration took place over the centuries and family groups took root in many other counties (eg Clare, Limerick, Waterford, Roscommon and others), which would today be recognised as their areas of origin.

The Donohoes of the ancient Kingdom of Breifne, centered in modern-day Co. Cavan, are genetically linked to 4th century Irish warlord Niall of the Nine Hostages.

When the name O’Donnchadha became Anglicized, at least 30 different spellings developed in Ireland, but by the 19th Century the most common spelling was "Donohoe." Of 2,800 families reporting variations of the name at the time of Griffith’s Valuation (1847-1864), 2,483, or 88%, were listed as “Donohoe.” None were listed as “Donahue.” The name distribution geographically during this same period reflects that there were significant clusters of Donohoes found in various parts of Ireland, including County Cavan, County Cork, County Galway, and County Kerry.

The name Donahue may refer to one of several people:

• Ann Donahue (born 1955), American television writer
• Art Donahue (1913-1942), American pilot who flew for the Royal Air Force during the Battle of Britain
• Cornelius Donahue (1850–1878), American Old West outlaw
• Elinor Donahue (born 1937), American actress
• Heather Donahue (born 1974), American actress
• Jack Donahue (1804–1830), Australian outlaw
• Jack Donahue (born 1944), Louisiana politician and philanthropist
• Jed Donahue (born 1960), American Sports Radio
• Jed Donahue, American competitive eater
• Jerry Donahue (born 1946), American guitarist
• Jiggs Donahue, American baseball player
• Jim Donahue (1862–1935), American baseball player
• John Donahue, American baseball player
• John F. "Jack" Donahue, American founder of Federated Investors
• Jonathan Donahue, American rock guitarist
• Joseph Donahue (born 1954), American poet
• Lisa Donahue (born 1976), American reality TV contestant and actress
• Mike Donahue (1871–1960), American athlete and football coach
• Pat Donahue, American baseball player
• Patty Donahue (1956–1996), American New Wave singer
• Phil Donahue (born 1935), American talk show host
• Red Donahue (Francis Rostell "Red" Donahue, 1873–1913), American baseball player
• Richard Donahue (1979-1984) British actor and taxidermist
• Sam Donahue (1918-1974), American saxophonist
• Terry Donahue (born 1925), Canadian female professional baseball player
• Terry Donahue (born 1944), American college football coach
• Thomas R. Donahue (born 1928), American organized labor activist
• Tim Donahue (1870-1902), American baseball player
• Timothy Donahue, American executive
• Troy Donahue (1936–2001), American actor

Other uses[link]

• Donahue, Iowa, a small city in the United States
• The Phil Donahue Show, also known as Donahue

See also[link]

• Donohue
• O'Donoghue
  • Ross Castle, ancestral home of the O'Donoghue clan, in County Kerry

This page or section lists people with the surname Donahue. If an internal link intending to refer to a specific person led you to this page, you may wish to change that link by adding the person's given name(s) to the link.

Milton Friedman

Chicago School of Economics
Born	(1912-07-31)July 31, 1912 Brooklyn, New York
Died	November 16, 2006(2006-11-16) (aged 94) San Francisco, California
Nationality	American
Institution	Hoover Institution (1977–2006) University of Chicago (1946–77) Columbia University (1937–41, 1943–45, 1964–65) NBER (1937–40)
Field	Economics
Alma mater	Columbia University (Ph.D.), 1946, University of Chicago (M.A.), 1933 Rutgers University (B.A.), (1932)
Opposed	John Maynard Keynes, John Kenneth Galbraith, Murray Rothbard
Influences	Adam Smith, Irving Fisher, Frank Knight, Murray Rothbard, Jacob Viner, Harold Hotelling, Arthur Burns, Friedrich Hayek, Homer Jones, Ludwig von Mises, Henry Simons, George Stigler
Influenced	Margaret Thatcher, Alan Greenspan, David D. Friedman, Anna J. Schwartz, Ben Bernanke, Gary Becker, Thomas Sowell, Harry Markowitz, Chicago Boys, William F. Buckley, Jr., Cato Institute
Contributions	Price theory, Monetarism, applied macroeconomics, floating exchange rates, volunteer military, Permanent income hypothesis, Friedman test
Awards	John Bates Clark Medal (1951) Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics (1976) Presidential Medal of Freedom (1988) National Medal of Science (1988)
Signature

Milton Friedman (July 31, 1912 – November 16, 2006) was an American economist, statistician, and author who taught at the University of Chicago for more than three decades. He was a recipient of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, and is known for his research on consumption analysis, monetary history and theory, and the complexity of stabilization policy.^[1] As a leader of the Chicago school of economics, he influenced the research agenda of the economics profession. A survey of economists ranked Friedman as the second most popular economist of the twentieth century behind John Maynard Keynes,^[2] and The Economist described him as "the most influential economist of the second half of the 20th century…possibly of all of it."^[3]

Friedman's challenges to what he later called "naive Keynesian" (as opposed to New Keynesian) theory^[4] began with his 1950s reinterpretation of the consumption function, and he became the main advocate opposing activist Keynesian government policies.^[5] In the late 1960s he described his own approach (along with all of mainstream economics) as using "Keynesian language and apparatus" yet rejecting its "initial" conclusions.^[6] During the 1960s he promoted an alternative macroeconomic policy known as "monetarism". He theorized there existed a "natural" rate of unemployment, and argued that governments could increase employment above this rate (e.g., by increasing aggregate demand) only at the risk of causing inflation to accelerate.^[7] He argued that the Phillips curve was not stable and predicted what would come to be known as stagflation.^[8] Friedman argued that, given the existence of the Federal Reserve, a constant small expansion of the money supply was the only wise policy.^[9]

Friedman was an economic adviser to conservative President Ronald Reagan. His political philosophy extolled the virtues of a free market economic system with minimal intervention. He once stated that his role in eliminating U.S. conscription was his proudest accomplishment, and his support for school choice led him to found The Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice. In his 1962 book Capitalism and Freedom, Friedman advocated policies such as a volunteer military, freely floating exchange rates, abolition of medical licenses, a negative income tax, and education vouchers.^[10] His ideas concerning monetary policy, taxation, privatization and deregulation influenced government policies, especially during the 1980s. His monetary theory influenced the Federal Reserve's response to the global financial crisis.^[11]

Milton Friedman's works include many monographs, books, scholarly articles, papers, magazine columns, television programs, videos, and lectures, and cover a broad range of topics of microeconomics, macroeconomics, economic history, and public policy issues. His books and essays were widely read, and have had an international influence, including in Communist countries.^{[12][13][14][15]}

Early life[link]

Friedman was born in Brooklyn, New York, to recent Jewish immigrants Jenő Friedman and Sára Landau from Beregszász in Austria-Hungary (now Berehove in Ukraine), both of whom worked as dry goods merchants. Shortly after Milton's birth, the family relocated to Rahway, New Jersey. A talented student, Friedman graduated from Rahway High School in 1928, just before his 16th birthday.^[16][17]

Friedman graduated from Rutgers University in New Jersey, where he specialized in mathematics and initially intended to become an actuary. During his time at Rutgers, Friedman became influenced by two economics professors, Arthur F. Burns and Homer Jones, who convinced him that modern economics could help end the Great Depression. After graduating from Rutgers in 1932, Friedman was offered two scholarships to do graduate work; one being Mathematics at Brown University and the other being Economics at the University of Chicago.^[18]Friedman chose the latter, thus earning an M.A. in 1933. He was strongly influenced by Jacob Viner, Frank Knight, and Henry Simons. It was at Chicago that Friedman met his future wife, economist Rose Director. During 1933–34 he had a fellowship at Columbia University, where he studied statistics with renowned statistician and economist Harold Hotelling. He was back in Chicago for 1934–35, spending the year working as a research assistant for Henry Schultz, who was then working on Theory and Measurement of Demand. That year, Friedman formed what would prove to be lifelong friendships with George Stigler and W. Allen Wallis.^[19]

Public service[link]

Friedman was initially unable to find academic employment, so during 1935, he followed his friend W. Allen Wallis to Washington, where Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal was "a lifesaver" for many young economists.^[20] At this stage, Friedman said that he and his wife "regarded the job-creation programs such as the WPA, CCC, and PWA appropriate responses to the critical situation," but not "the price- and wage-fixing measures of the National Recovery Administration and the Agricultural Adjustment Administration."^[21] Foreshadowing his later ideas, he believed price controls interfered with an essential signaling mechanism to help resources be used where they were most valued. Indeed, Friedman later concluded that all government intervention associated with the New Deal was "the wrong cure for the wrong disease," arguing that the money supply should simply have been expanded, instead of contracted.^[22] In the publication Monetary History of the United States by Friedman and Anna Schwartz, they argue that the Great Depression was caused by monetary contraction, which was the consequence of poor policymaking by the Federal reserve and the continuous crises of the banking system.^[23]

During 1935, he began work for the National Resources Committee, which was then working on a large consumer budget survey. Ideas from this project later became a part of his Theory of the Consumption Function. Friedman began employment with the National Bureau of Economic Research during autumn 1937 to assist Simon Kuznets in his work on professional income. This work resulted in their jointly authored publication Incomes from Independent Professional Practice, which introduced the concepts of permanent and transitory income, a major component of the Permanent Income Hypothesis that Friedman worked out in greater detail in the 1950s. The book hypothesizes that professional licensing artificially restricts the supply of services and raises prices.

During 1940, Friedman was appointed an assistant professor teaching Economics at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, but encountered antisemitism in the Economics department and decided to return to government service.^[24][25] Friedman spent 1941–43 working on wartime tax policy for the Federal Government, as an advisor to senior officials of the United States Department of the Treasury. As a Treasury spokesman during 1942 he advocated a Keynesian policy of taxation. He helped to invent the payroll withholding tax system, since the federal government badly needed money in order to fight the war.^[26] He later said, "I have no apologies for it, but I really wish we hadn't found it necessary and I wish there were some way of abolishing withholding now."^[27]

Academic career[link]

Early years[link]

In 1943, Friedman joined the Division of War Research at Columbia University (headed by W. Allen Wallis and Harold Hotelling), where he spent the rest of World War II working as a mathematical statistician, focusing on problems of weapons design.^[28]

During 1945, Friedman submitted Incomes from Independent Professional Practice (co-authored with Kuznets and completed during 1940) to Columbia as his doctoral dissertation. The university awarded him a Ph.D. during 1946. Friedman spent the 1945–46 academic year teaching at the University of Minnesota (where his friend George Stigler was employed). On February 12, 1945, his son, David D. Friedman was born.

University of Chicago[link]

University of Chicago

During 1946, Friedman accepted an offer to teach economic theory at the University of Chicago (a position opened by departure of his former professor Jacob Viner to Princeton University). Friedman would work for the University of Chicago for the next 30 years. There he helped build an intellectual community that produced a number of Nobel Prize winners, known collectively as the Chicago School of Economics.

At that time, Arthur Burns, who was then the head of the National Bureau of Economic Research, asked Friedman to rejoin the Bureau's staff. He accepted the invitation, and assumed responsibility for the Bureau's inquiry into the role of money in the business cycle. As a result, he initiated the "Workshop in Money and Banking" (the "Chicago Workshop"), which promoted a revival of monetary studies. During the latter half of the 1940s, Friedman began a collaboration with Anna Schwartz, an economic historian at the Bureau, that would ultimately result in the 1963 publication of a book co-authored by Friedman and Schwartz, A Monetary History of the United States, 1867–1960.

Friedman spent the 1954–55 academic year as a Fulbright Visiting Fellow at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. At the time, the Cambridge economics faculty was divided into a Keynesian majority (including Joan Robinson and Richard Kahn) and an anti-Keynesian minority (headed by Dennis Robertson). Friedman speculates that he was invited to the fellowship because his views were unacceptable to both of the Cambridge factions. Later his weekly columns for Newsweek magazine (1966–84) were well read and increasingly influential among political and business people.^[29] From 1968 to 1978, he and Paul Samuelson participated in the Economics Cassette Series, a biweekly subscription series where the economist would discuss the days' issues for about a half hour at a time.^[30]

Friedman was an economic adviser to Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater during 1964.

Nobel memorial prize and retirement[link]

In 1976 Friedman won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics "for his achievements in the fields of consumption analysis, monetary history and theory and for his demonstration of the complexity of stabilization policy."^[1] During the banquet speech he made a reference to “the Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel”. In that he was the first recipient to do so, and it wasn’t until 2006 that a recipient of the prize called it by its proper name.^[31] During 1977, at age 65, Friedman retired from the University of Chicago after teaching there for 30 years. He and his wife moved to San Francisco where he became a visiting scholar at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco. From 1977 on, he was affiliated with the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. During the same year, Friedman was approached by the Free To Choose Network and asked to create a television program presenting his economic and social philosophy. The Friedmans worked on this project for the next three years, and during 1980, the ten-part series, titled Free to Choose, was broadcast by the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS). The companion book to the series (co-authored by Milton and his wife, Rose Friedman), also titled Free To Choose, was the bestselling nonfiction book of 1980 and has since been translated into 14 foreign languages.

Friedman served as an unofficial adviser to Ronald Reagan during his 1980 presidential campaign, and then served on the President's Economic Policy Advisory Board for the rest of the Reagan Administration. During 1988, he received the National Medal of Science and Reagan honored him with the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Milton Friedman is known now as one of the most influential economists of the 20th century.^[32][33] Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Friedman continued to write editorials and appear on television. He made several visits to Eastern Europe and to China, where he also advised governments. He was also for many years a Trustee of the Philadelphia Society.^[34][35][36]

Scholarly contributions[link]

Economics[link]

Friedman was best known for reviving interest in the money supply as a determinant of the nominal value of output, that is, the quantity theory of money. Monetarism is the set of views associated with modern quantity theory. Its origins can be traced back to the 16th-century School of Salamanca or even further; however, Friedman's contribution is largely responsible for its modern popularization. He co-authored, with Anna Schwartz, A Monetary History of the United States (1963), which was an examination of the role of the money supply and economic activity in U.S. history. A striking conclusion of their research was one regarding the role of money supply fluctuations as contributing to economic fluctuations. Several regression studies with David Meiselman during the 1960s suggested the primacy of the money supply over investment and government spending in determining consumption and output. These challenged a prevailing but largely untested view on their relative importance. Friedman's empirical research and some theory supported the conclusion that the short-run effect of a change of the money supply was primarily on output but that the longer-run effect was primarily on the price level.

Friedman was the main proponent of the monetarist school of economics. He maintained that there is a close and stable association between price inflation and the money supply, mainly that price inflation should be regulated with monetary deflation and price deflation with monetary inflation. He famously quipped that price deflation can be fought by "dropping money out of a helicopter."^[37]

Friedman's arguments were designed to counter popular claims that price inflation at the time was the result of increases in the price of oil, or increases in wages: as he wrote,

Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon.

—Milton Friedman, 1963.^[38]

Friedman rejected the use of fiscal policy as a tool of demand management; and he held that the government's role in the guidance of the economy should be restricted severely. Friedman wrote extensively on the Great Depression, which he termed the Great Contraction, arguing that it had been caused by an ordinary financial shock whose duration and seriousness were greatly increased by the subsequent contraction of the money supply caused by the misguided policies of the directors of the Federal Reserve.

The Fed was largely responsible for converting what might have been a garden-variety recession, although perhaps a fairly severe one, into a major catastrophe. Instead of using its powers to offset the depression, it presided over a decline in the quantity of money by one-third from 1929 to 1933 ... Far from the depression being a failure of the free-enterprise system, it was a tragic failure of government.

—Milton Friedman, Two Lucky People, 233

Friedman also argued for the cessation of government intervention in currency markets, thereby spawning an enormous literature on the subject, as well as promoting the practice of freely floating exchange rates. His close friend George Stigler explained, "As is customary in science, he did not win a full victory, in part because research was directed along different lines by the theory of rational expectations, a newer approach developed by Robert Lucas, also at the University of Chicago."^[39]

Friedman was also known for his work on the consumption function, the permanent income hypothesis (1957), which Friedman himself referred to as his best scientific work.^[40] This work contended that rational consumers would spend a proportional amount of what they perceived to be their permanent income. Windfall gains would mostly be saved. Tax reductions likewise, as rational consumers would predict that taxes would have to increase later to balance public finances. Other important contributions include his critique of the Phillips curve and the concept of the natural rate of unemployment (1968). This critique associated his name, together with that of Edmund Phelps, with the insight that a government that brings about greater inflation cannot permanently reduce unemployment by doing so. Unemployment may be temporarily lower, if the inflation is a surprise, but in the long run unemployment will be determined by the frictions and imperfections of the labor market.

Friedman's essay "The Methodology of Positive Economics" (1953) provided the epistemological pattern for his own subsequent research and to a degree that of the Chicago School. There he argued that economics as science should be free of value judgments for it to be objective. Moreover, a useful economic theory should be judged not by its descriptive realism but by its simplicity and fruitfulness as an engine of prediction. That is, students should measure the accuracy of its predictions, rather than the "soundness of its assumptions. His argument was part of an ongoing debate among such statisticians as Jerzy Neyman, Leonard Savage, and Ronald Fisher.^[41]

Statistics[link]

One of his most famous contributions to statistics is sequential sampling. "Friedman did statistical work at the Division of War Research at Columbia. He and his colleagues came up with a sampling technique, known as sequential sampling, which became, in the words of The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics, 'the standard analysis of quality control inspection.' The dictionary adds: 'Like many of Friedman’s contributions, in retrospect it seems remarkably simple and obvious to apply basic economic ideas to quality control; that however is a measure of his genius.'"^[42]

Public policy positions[link]

Federal reserve[link]

Friedman believed that if the money supply was to be centrally controlled (as by the Federal Reserve) that the preferable way to do it would be with a mechanical system that would keep the quantity of money increasing at a steady rate. However, instead of government involvement at all, he was open to a "real," non-government, gold standard where money is produced by the private market: "A real gold standard is thoroughly consistent with [classical] liberal principles and I, for one, am entirely in favor of measures promoting its development." He did however add this caveat, "Let me emphasize that this note is not a plea for a return to a gold standard.... I regard a return to a gold standard as neither desirable nor feasible—with the one exception that it might become feasible if the doomsday predictions of hyperinflation under our present system should prove correct."^[43] He said the reason that it was not feasible was because "there is essentially no government in the world that is willing to surrender control over its domestic monetary policy." However, it could be done if "you could re-establish a world in which government's budget accounted for 10 percent of the national income, in which laissez-faire reigned, in which governments did not interfere with economic activities and in which full employment policies had been relegated to the dustbin..."^[43]

He was critical of the Federal Reserve's influence on the economics profession. In a 1993 letter to University of Texas economics professor and former House Banking Committee investigator Robert Auerbach, Friedman wrote:

I cannot disagree with you that having something like 500 economists is extremely unhealthy. As you say, it is not conducive to independent, objective research. You and I know there has been censorship of the material published. Equally important, the location of the economists in the Federal Reserve has had a significant influence on the kind of research they do, biasing that research toward noncontroversial technical papers on method as opposed to substantive papers on policy and results.^[44]

School choice[link]

In his 1955 article "The Role of Government in Education" Friedman proposed supplementing publicly operated schools with privately run but publicly funded schools through a system of school vouchers.^[45] Reforms similar to those proposed in the article were implemented in, for example, Chile in 1981 and Sweden in 1992.^[46] In 1996 Friedman, together with his wife, founded the The Foundation for Educational Choice to advocate school choice and vouchers.

Conscription[link]

Milton Friedman was a major proponent of a volunteer military, stating that the draft was "inconsistent with a free society."^[47][48] In Capitalism and Freedom, he argued that conscription is inequitable and arbitrary, preventing young men from shaping their lives as they see fit.^[49] During the Nixon administration he headed the committee to research a conversion to paid/volunteer armed force. He would later state that his role in eliminating the conscription in the United States was his proudest accomplishment.^[9] Friedman did, however, believe a nation could compel military training as a reserve in case of war time.^[49]

Libertarianism and the Republican party[link]

He served as a member of President Reagan's Economic Policy Advisory Board during 1981. During 1988, he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the National Medal of Science. He said that he was a libertarian philosophically, but a member of the U.S. Republican Party for the sake of "expediency" ("I am a libertarian with a small 'l' and a Republican with a capital 'R.' And I am a Republican with a capital 'R' on grounds of expediency, not on principle.") But, he said, "I think the term classical liberal is also equally applicable. I don't really care very much what I'm called. I'm much more interested in having people thinking about the ideas, rather than the person."^[50]

Public goods and monopoly[link]

Friedman was supportive of the state provision of some public goods that private businesses are not considered as being able to provide. However, he argued that many of the services performed by government could be performed better by the private sector. Above all, if some public goods are provided by the state, he believed that they should not be a legal monopoly where private competition is prohibited; for example, he wrote:

There is no way to justify our present public monopoly of the post office. It may be argued that the carrying of mail is a technical monopoly and that a government monopoly is the least of evils. Along these lines, one could perhaps justify a government post office, but not the present law, which makes it illegal for anybody else to carry the mail. If the delivery of mail is a technical monopoly, no one else will be able to succeed in competition with the government. If it is not, there is no reason why the government should be engaged in it. The only way to find out is to leave other people free to enter.

—Milton Friedman, Friedman, Milton & Rose D. Capitalism and Freedom, University of Chicago Press, 1982, 29

Welfare[link]

Friedman made newspaper headlines by proposing a negative income tax to replace the existing welfare system, and then opposing a bill to implement it because the bill proposed to supplement the existing system rather than replace it.

Drugs[link]

Friedman also supported libertarian policies such as legalization of drugs and prostitution. During 2005, Friedman and more than 500 other economists advocated discussions regarding the economic benefits of the legalization of marijuana.^[51]

Economic freedom[link]

Michael Walker of the Fraser Institute and Friedman hosted a series of conferences from 1986 to 1994. The goal was to create a clear definition of economic freedom and a method for measuring it. Eventually this resulted in the first report on worldwide economic freedom, Economic Freedom in the World. This annual report has since provided data for numerous peer-reviewed studies and has influenced policy in several nations.

Along with sixteen other distinguished economists he opposed the Copyright Term Extension Act and filed an amicus brief in Eldred v. Ashcroft.^[52] He supported the inclusion of the word "no-brainer" in the brief.^[53]

Friedman argued for stronger basic legal (constitutional) protection of economic rights and freedoms in order to further promote industrial-commercial growth and prosperity and buttress democracy and freedom and the rule of law generally in society.^[54]

Honors, recognition, and influence[link]

Friedman allowed the Cato Institute to use his name for its biannual Milton Friedman Prize for Advancing Liberty beginning in 2001. A Friedman Prize was given to the late British economist Peter Bauer during 2002, Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto during 2004, Mart Laar, former Estonian Prime Minister during 2006 and a young Venezuelan student Yon Goicoechea during 2008. His wife Rose, sister of Aaron Director, with whom he initiated the Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice, served on the international selection committee. Friedman was also a recipient of the Nobel Prize in Economics.

Hong Kong[link]