George Pratt Shultz is the Thomas W. and Susan B. Ford Distinguished Fellow at the Hoover Institution. He has had a distinguished career in government, in academia, and in the world of business. He is one of two individuals who have held four different federal cabinet posts; he has taught at three of this country’s great universities; and for eight years he was president of a major engineering and construction company. He attended Princeton University, graduating with a BA in economics, whereupon he enlisted in the US Marine Corps, serving through 1945. He later earned a PhD in industrial economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and served on President Eisenhower’s Council of Economic Advisers. From 1962 to 1969, Shultz was dean of the University of Chicago Booth School of Business before returning to Washington to serve as secretary of labor, as director of the Office of Management and Budget, and as secretary of the Treasury in the cabinet of President Nixon. Shultz was sworn in July 16, 1982, as the sixtieth US secretary of state and served until January 20, 1989. In 1989, Shultz was awarded the Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor. He was editor of Blueprint for America (2016), coeditor of Beyond Disruption: Technology’s Challenge to Governance (2018), and most recently author of Thinking about the Future (2019).
John B. Taylor is the George P. Shultz Senior Fellow in Economics at the Hoover Institution and the Mary and Robert Raymond Professor of Economics at Stanford University. He chairs the Hoover Working Group on Economic Policy and is director of Stanford’s Introductory Economics Center. Taylor’s fields of expertise are monetary policy, fiscal policy, and international economics, subjects about which he has widely authored both policy and academic texts. Taylor served as senior economist on the Council of Economic Advisers for both President Ford and President Carter, as a member of President George H. W. Bush’s Council of Economic Advisers, as under secretary of the Treasury in the George W. Bush administration, and as a senior economic adviser to numerous presidential campaigns. He was a member of the Congressional Budget Office’s Panel of Economic Advisers and the Eminent Persons Group on Global Financial Governance. Taylor received a BA in economics summa cum laude from Princeton University in 1968 and a PhD in economics from Stanford in 1973. His book Global Financial Warriors (2008) chronicles his policy innovations at the US Treasury. He received the Hayek Prize for his book First Principles (2012), and his recent research and writing is on international economics, including Reform of the International Monetary System: Why and How? (2019).
Milton Friedman (1912–2006), recipient of the 1976 Nobel Memorial Prize for economic science, was a senior research fellow at the Hoover Institution from 1977 to 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.
He is widely regarded as the leader of the Chicago School of economics. Friedman wrote extensively on public policy, always with a primary emphasis on the preservation and extension of individual freedom. His most important books in this field are Capitalism and Freedom (1962); Bright Promises, Dismal Performance (1983); Free to Choose (1980, with Rose Friedman); and Tyranny of the Status Quo (1984, with Rose Friedman). Friedman was active in public affairs, serving as an informal economic adviser to Senator Barry Goldwater in his unsuccessful presidential campaign in 1964; to Richard Nixon in his successful 1968 campaign and during his presidency; and to Ronald Reagan during and after his winning 1980 campaign, subsequently serving as a member of the President’s Economic Policy Advisory Board. He was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1988 and received the National Medal of Science the same year. Friedman passed away on November 16, 2006.
More than 1,500 of Friedman’s articles and speeches are available through the Hoover Institution Library & Archives, online at miltonfriedman.hoover.org, and excerpted in Milton Friedman on Freedom (Hoover Institution Press, 2017).