Milton Friedman Speaks: Money and Inflation (B1230) - Full Video
Why Hacker News recommends it
Shared during inflation discussions as an accessible, layman-friendly statement of the monetarist view.
What it is
An 86-minute Milton Friedman talk arguing that inflation is a monetary phenomenon caused by money supply growing faster than goods, and that the cure is less government spending and money printing.
Recommended by 3 HN commenters across 3 different months, 2022 to 2025.
What Hacker News said
Strong rec yevpats · 2022-08 · on “What to read to understand how economists think”
Milton Friedman - Money and Inflation - [this video] I think is under rated talk which explains complex stuff in layman terms.
Recommends _448 · 2022-05 · on “Ask HN: What things in the world are increasing at the fastest rate?”
- Militarisation. Countries are spending a lot of defence. - The move towards reverting globalisation(with rising unemployment, countries are looking inwards) - Inflation (this is not going to end in the near future; inflation is the result of quantitative easing that was done multiple times. Here is a good explanation of that: [this video] ) - Differences among citizens of different countries are becoming prominent (the reason is the same as point #2 above)
Recommends Mertax · 2022-06 · on “How Inflation Works”
I watched this video from Friedman just a couple of days ago and found it insightful on the topic of inflation: [this video]
Cites ryandv · 2025-08 · on “Is economics education fit for the 21st century?”
This is absurd. An opinion column in the NYT does not constitute an authoritative reference on the matter. Try some Milton Friedman [0] on for size: Now the first step towards understanding the cause of inflation is to recognize that it is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon. It's always and everywhere a result of too much money - of a more rapid increase in the quantity of money than in output. [...] inflation in the United States is made in Washington and nowhere else. [...] We have evidence for the United States for over a hundred years; for Great Britain, for two hundred years; for Sweden, for two hundred years. There has never in history been an inflation that was not accompanie