Influential economist Milton Friedman died at the age of 94 last week. The 1976 Nobel Prize winner's belief in free markets influenced the policies of Britain's Margaret Thatcher, Chile's Augusto Pinochet, and US presidents Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, and especially Ronald Reagan. The work by him and his students at the University of Chicago became known as the "Chicago school of monetary economics," and it provided a conservative reaction to economics departments at Harvard and MIT, who built on British economist John Maynard Keynes' ideas about how a government could actively stimulate economic growth.