1912–2006 · American economist · Nobel laureate in economics, 1976
Milton Friedman was the most influential free-market economist of the twentieth century: a University of Chicago monetarist, an adviser to presidents, and winner of the 1976 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. He was also an unusually gifted popular communicator — through Capitalism and Freedom and the television series Free to Choose — which is precisely why loose free-market aphorisms drift toward his name. The spoons line is one of them. People who knew him remembered him telling it, and it fits his argument about make-work programmes exactly; but it was a stock newspaper joke decades before he could have coined it, and his own published work does not contain it.