“Friedman’s Legacy: How Milton Friedman’s Doctrine Affected How People Communicated with and Ran Their Business”

Alex Choi
Korea International School

Abstract

When choosing the topic to fit under the theme, communication, there were a wide variety of topics and ideas to select from, and many questions I wanted to find the answer to and dive deeper into. One topic I was intrigued by was how businesses have evolved over time into what it is today. When I was conducting initial research just to decide on a final topic, I settled on Milton Friedman, specifically his Friedman Doctrine. I had been interested in business and economics for a long time, and Friedman is an important figure in business, so that is why I decided to use his doctrine for my topic. Friedman was an expert economist who was widely known for his economic theories and research on stockholders and consumption. When the brainstorming process was complete, the strategy was to find more broad sources about Friedman, as well as how businesses were being run at the time. After I found these broader sources from online databases and libraries, a lot of them had bibliographies with many other sources. These were sources specific enough to fulfill my needs and had what I was looking for, which was the connection between Milton Friedman, economics, and communication, the theme of this year’s National History Day. It was overall a complicated but successful creation process and ended up well. For the communication angle of my paper, in the 1900s, there was a lot of communication happening due to the Friedman Doctrine when there were more discussions and debates between economists and business leaders when it came to Friedman’s beliefs It was included in the paper that there were many discussions among economists about how the way businesses were being run could change in the future. Another important detail to acknowledge is that there were many economists that questioned and criticized his work, but still many others that supported it. Although there were disagreements, there was overall a development of knowledge when it came to the importance of shareholders and how businesses should be managed. The main historical argument I was looking to argue was that the Friedman Doctrine greatly impacted the way that people ran their businesses, especially since it encouraged business leaders to focus on shareholder returns. These shareholders are people that can be considered a member of the business that legally owns shares of the corporation, and they can partially own a part of the corporation. My topic is especially important in history because it is about how Friedman’s doctrine changed the world of economics and how businesses saw their shareholders, which is and has been a large part of lives throughout history.

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