At the height of the cultural revolution, a group of Chicago economists was quietly launching one of its own.

Around 8 pm on Friday, December 29, 1967, Milton Friedman stood to address the annual meeting of the American Economic Association. The space was cavernous; the Sheraton Park Hotel billed it as the largest hotel ballroom in the world. On this night it was filled with some 3,000 economists. 

Outside, the United States was in the throes of the sexual revolution. Only months earlier, young people from across the country had held their own gathering — the Summer of Love — in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury neighborhood. They had danced to rock music, taken drugs, and signaled an intent to deconstruct the social and political consensus that ruled the nation. 

Standing before the AEA meeting, Friedman could hardly have been mistaken for a hippie. He generally wore a business suit. What little hair he had formed a concave fringe around a bald scalp. And at 55, he was well past the age (30) when countercultural types were told to stop trusting people. 

Yet Friedman’s speech, titled “The Role of Monetary Policy,” kicked off its own revolution.

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