The year 1963 saw some important and dramatic developments in the continuing story of the human experience: it saw the brutal assassination of an American President; it recorded that another Friedman named Herbert directed the launch of a satellite to study x-rays in space; in consumer affairs a cassette for recording and playing back sound was introduced by Phillips; and in space two manned spaceships, one Russian and one American, were in orbit at the same time. Back on earth, Milton and Anna Schwarts published their massive "Monetary History of the United States." Argument can be made as to which of these events had the most lasting and pervasive effect on our subsequent history, but none can deny that monetary history had a profound influence not only on the way we think about our world but on the way it works. The impact of the ideas in the book were reflected in the most extraordinary way in the financial markets. The bridge between academia and business has often been tenuous at best, but it became very real in the late 1970s and early '80s. Every Friday afternoon a kind of eerie silence settled over the normally boisterous trading rooms on the street. The computer screens started going blank at about 4:20 as the traders waited for the 4:30 announcement by the Federal Reserve of the M1 and M2 figures. The quantity theory of money had come to Wall Street and was instantly reflected in the price of Government bonds. It was an extraordinary demonstration of the power of an idea advanced by private citizens affecting the way the world works.

Today all governments are forced to acknowledge the power of what in Washington speak are called NGOs, or non-government organizations. These range from groups trying to save the whales to advocates of the land mine treaty. There are now more than 30,000 of these NGOs with multiple allegiances and global reach. As usual, Milton and Rose were ahead of their time as they were one of the first effective NGO all by themselves. The massive technical research that has characterized the Friedmans' writings, while impressive and benefiting generation of economists, fails to explain their true impact on the way the world works. What is even more remarkable than their research is their ability to utilize this data and to state complex economic truths in a language all of us can understand. Indeed the slow death of the Keynesian thesis is due, at least in part, to three words everyone could understand. Those words were Free to Choose. In the closing hours of the Twentieth Century the flood of data and news is now so prolix, and the rate of change so fast, that it is easy to forget what the intellectual climate of the world was like when the Friedmans left college. In our country, the President of the United States announced to the nation that: "Our industrial plant is built...Our task now is not discovery or expansion of natural resources or the necessity of producing more goods. It is the somberer, less dramatic business of administering resources and plant already in hand." While President Roosevelt was writing finis to innovation, growth and the American experiment, his Vice President Henry Wallace was informing us in a speech on November 9, 1942, that perhaps we had too much freedom as "we have overemphasized what might be called political or Bill of Rights democracy." Individual liberty was taking a beating everywhere. Overseas, Mussolini who was admired by some intellectuals for 4 making the trains run on time, was defining how the Fascist State organized a nation, by stating that the individual "is deprived of all useless and possibly harmful freedom." Italy was plastered with signs reading "He will decide." It is hard to imagine a more hostile intellectual climate in which to preach the gospel of freedom.

By 1980, when Free to Choose arrived on the world scene, inflation in the U. S. was in double digits and the President spoke after a weekend in Camp David of a "crisis of confidence...in the growing doubt about the meaning of our own lives and in the loss of a unity of purpose for our nation" and later announced that we were suffering from a "national malaise." It is fair to say that the socialist experiment still absorbed the attention of many intellectuals. To jump start their ideas, the Friedmans needed a platform and television filled the bill.

Through a chance combination of circumstances, The Public Broadcasting Company - the bureaucrats in which were no doubt still voting for Norman Thomas - the Friedmans were able to get the television series, "Free to Choose," on the air. While many books have been written on similar subjects, their circulation was limited to the academic world except for Frederick Hayek's Road to Serfdom, but even that had in modern terms a limited circulation. Despite this initial triumph of obtaining air time for their programs, the power of a Government bureaucracy should, as Milton has constantly reminded us, never be underestimated. PBS did not do as the Spanish authorities did in the 16th century by decreeing the death penalty for the publishing of any book without their permission. They took more modern measures to protect the public. The PBS Station in America's largest market, New York City was so terrified of the idea of being free to choose that it put the first program in the series on the air in a time slot opposite the Super Bowl. At least the bureaucrats knew a dangerous idea when they saw one. But they grossly underestimated the power of the idea. The Friedmans meant free to choose one's political leaders, they meant free to choose one's church, or to choose one's school, or the product one buys. The Friedmans became the embodiment of what Emerson, in a lecture delivered on August 31, 1837, at Cambridge, said that a true scholar should be. He "raises himself from private considerations and breathes and lives on public and illustrious thoughts. He is the world's eye. He is the world's heart." No one can measure with certainty just how strong a part "Free to Choose", both the TV and book, played in the spread of freedom in the world, but wherever it was seen, or the book was read, the virus of freedom, for which there is no antidote, was carried to people in a way that they could understand. The impact of the ideas was magnified and enhanced by the extraordinary teaching ability of Rose and Milton. No one who has been fortunate enough to listen to them fails to learn something new. This magic, which is the gift of great teachers, was projected to millions of people around the world by television, the use of which broke the monopoly of the world's literate classes by bypassing them and delivering the message of freedom in oral-visual form. And that year, 1980, another student of theirs named Ronald Reagan was nominated for President and added his powerful gift of communication to the cause. And one country after another has moved toward free markets and some form of democracy.

While the world moves toward freedom, we now observe that the Industrial Age is morphing into a network/information economy that is as different from the industrial society as it was from the agricultural society that preceded it. Clearly the world has changed and the question arises, does the new economy need some new rules? Or do the old rules still apply? Will the long boom continue or soon end? Does the quantity theory of money have to be amended now that more than two-thirds of all cash issued by the Federal Reserve is no longer in this country and resides permanently abroad? Will shrinking bank balances mean the same thing it used to as money is downloaded onto electronic purse smart cards which by the year 2000 are estimated to total more than 2.5 billion world- wide, while a quarter of all American households will have one. They will be issued not only by banks but by merchants from Wal- Mart to 7-11 Stores. What should we deduce from the emerging digital economy where more than 100 million people access the Internet and traffic has been doubling every hundred days? Today one can buy anything in cyberspace from a car to an airline ticket, and pay for it with a series of electronic bits arranged in a way that people believe constitutes money -- money which may never be redeemed for Federal Reserves notes as it may never leave the Net. We are moving back to the future when anyone can announce his or her brand of private cash. There are no lack of entrants to operate these new private mints ranging from Microsoft to Mondex and more enter every day. As Bill Frezza has pointed out, if ordinary people are able to create and exchange wealth on the Net, "the underlying products of their creative output upon which the value of money will be based may never exist in the physical world...and that wealth may not have to be exchanged for government fiat currency to be useful..." All of this, and much more, cries out for the analytical powers of the Friedmans to guide us in formulating and understanding the new rules for a new economy, or telling us the old rules are still valid. One of our current problems is extracting information from a mountain of data. Data is not the same as knowledge, and knowledge may not be the same as wisdom. One of our current problems is extracting information from a mountain of data. Perhaps it is not a new economy, but it is a world where knowledge applied to work creates wealth in a way and at a volume never seen before. The market now values intellectual capital more highly than fixed assets, and there is every indication that it will continue to do so, even though current accounting does not recognize this reality.

Recently the "New York Times" carried on its front page a picture of a group of people who were all over the age of 100 and intimated that that life span may become more and more normal. This is good news for everyone, but particularly for the economics profession for it means that we can all look forward to a new book and TV series by the Friedmans, giving us their analysis of the new realities in this complex, adaptive system we now call the global marketplace. Or in the words of Peter Drucker, we need someone: "To give us a functioning economic theory, we need a new synthesis that simplifies..." No one can do that better than Rose and Milton, and I, for one can hardly wait.