suggests that, initially, he was a rather uncritical supporter of Franklin
Delano Roosevelt’s “New Deal” - in its own right, a largely independent source
of many of the dirigiste policy ideas that in the post-war years would come to
be labelled “Keynesian” - but among his earliest academic interests were pure
microeconomic theory and mathematical statistics. As I shall now argue, when
Friedman began to help transform macroeconomics in the 1950s, it was by
bringing his expertise in these areas to the very centre of the study of
consumption behaviour, a topic which had also engaged his attention from the
1930s onwards. His1957 monograph A Theory of the Consumption Function
was by no means his first publication on either the economics of consumption in
particular, or macroeconomics in general, but it is utterly central, both to his
own work and to the evolution of the discipline, so that is where I shall begin
this account of his contributions. Only when I have dealt with it shall I pass on
to his work on monetary theory, monetary history, and monetary policy.