Nobel Laureate, TIAA-CREF client and former CREF Trustee Milton Friedman Dies at 94

Milton Friedman, a leading economic scholar of the 20th century — and a TIAA-CREF client and former CREF Trustee — whose conservative theories on a free-market economy brought him global acclaim and a Nobel Prize, died in San Francisco on November 16 at age 94. An advocate for less government and greater individual responsibility, Professor Friedman received the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science in 1976 "for his achievements in the fields of consumption analysis, monetary history and theory and for his demonstration of the complexity of stabilization policy."

Educator, Client and Trustee
In 1946, Professor Friedman joined the faculty of the University of Chicago, a TIAA-CREF institutional client since 1922, where he taught for 30 years. He served as a CREF Trustee from November 1964 to November 1968, and was a member of the Educator-Trustee Advisory Committee, a special TIAA-CREF planning and policy advisory group. Professor Friedman was also a TIAA-CREF client.

In the late Chairman William C. Greenough’s history of TIAA-CREF, "It's My Retirement Money — Take Good Care of It: The TIAA-CREF Story" (Irwin, 1990 © Pension Research Council, Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania), the author recalled that in 1971 — when index funds were just emerging on the financial services horizon — Professor Friedman recommended indexing CREF to the Standard & Poor’s 500. In 1981, CREF implemented a new investment strategy that included indexing a major portion of the domestic portfolio to the S&P 500.

Scholar, Advisor and Author
Professor Friedman held a B.A. from Rutgers University, an M.A. from the University of Chicago and a Ph.D. from Columbia University. He was highly regarded by both conservatives and liberals, and served as trusted advisor to heads of state including former Presidents Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, and former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. He wrote or co-wrote more than a dozen books including "Capitalism and Freedom" (1962), "Monetarist Economics" (1991) and "Two Lucky People: Memoirs" (1998). He also wrote a column for Newsweek magazine from 1966 to 1983, and starred in the PBS TV series “Free to Choose.” With his wife, Rose Friedman — whom he met in an economic-theory class at the University of Chicago, and who became a noted economist herself — he coauthored the 1980 best seller based on the television series. In 1977, he became a fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, and in 1988 received the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the National Medal of Science.

“Among economic scholars, Milton Friedman had no peer,” said Federal Reserve Board chairman, Ben S. Bernanke, as quoted in The New York Times. “The direct and indirect influences of his thinking on contemporary monetary economics would be difficult to overstate.”