Chicago School

The Chicago School refers to the distinctive approach to economics developed at the University of Chicago from the 1930s onward, associated first with economists including Frank Knight and Jacob Viner and later, from the 1950s through the 1970s, with Milton Friedman, George Stigler and Gary Becker. Chicago School economists share a strong commitment to price theory, the view that rational individual choice operating through markets and prices can explain a very wide range of behavior, extended by Becker well beyond conventional markets into subjects including crime, discrimination and family decision making. The school is closely associated with a general confidence in the efficiency of competitive markets and a corresponding skepticism of government intervention, though it is broader than monetarism specifically: monetarism concerns the causes of inflation and the conduct of monetary policy, while the Chicago School as a whole extends the same price theoretic method across microeconomics, law and economics, and much of applied economic policy, and its leading twentieth century figure, Milton Friedman, was a central architect of both traditions at once. Historians of economic thought commonly date the identity of the school to the arrival of Frank Knight at Chicago in 1927, though the label and its wider public association with free market economic policy crystallized more fully during the ascendance of Milton Friedman in the 1950s and 1960s.