Milton Friedman learned early in his career that having good ideas isn't enough. You have to be able to communicate them if you want them to count.

Friedman, who died Thursday in San Francisco at age 94, was considered one of the 20th century's leading economists.

"His thinking has so permeated modern macroeconomics that the worst pitfall in reading him today is to fail to appreciate the originality and even revolutionary character of his ideas," Ben Bernanke, chairman of the Federal Reserve, said in a recent speech.

Bernanke's predecessor, Alan Greenspan, said: "My world will not be the same. He has been a fixture in my life, both professionally and personally, for half a century."

Thus was Friedman's reputation that even his "nemesis," MIT economist Paul Samuelson, had a standard line he told his students: "Just because Milton Friedman says it, doesn't necessarily mean it's untrue."

It wasn't always this way. Before Friedman built his stellar reputation, before he received the Nobel Prize and the Presidential Medal of Freedom, he worked briefly at the National Bureau of Economic Research, where he and fellow economist Simon Kuznets co-authored a paper. Because Kuznets was born in Russia and didn't come to the U.S. until he was 20, Friedman did most of the writing. But apparently not very well.

His boss came in and said that while Kuznets had an excuse, Friedman didn't. "You were born in this country," the boss said. "There is no excuse for you not writing well."

It was an epiphany for the young scholar, who came to understand that if you can't clearly express what you mean, you probably don't understand it well.

Friedman made it a priority to write more clearly and concisely. He searched for just the right word to convey an idea, and became a powerful communicator, writing columns for Newsweek and influential books, and producing a PBS miniseries.

He also became a leading force in conservative economic thought who wasn't afraid to buck conventional wisdom.

For most of the century, the prevailing economic philosophy was that of English economist John Maynard Keynes. That school urged greater involvement by the government to smooth wide swings in the economy from recession to inflationary boom times. Keynes favored using government spending, tax policy and manipulation of interest rates toward this end.

Friedman, however, believed that less was more. He felt the government ought largely to stay out of private enterprise and limit its involvement to controlling the money supply to suppress inflation.

Early Scorn

He and like-minded economists at the University of Chicago, where he taught, were known as the Chicago school's monetarists. Initially, his ideas were scorned. That didn't stop him. When accused of being over-the-top in his analysis, he said:

"In every generation there's got to be somebody who goes the whole way, and that's why I believe as I do."

Early in his life, there might've been doubt that Friedman would go even part of the way. He was born in New York City, the son of poor immigrants who, he said, probably didn't get past grade school.

Friedman studied with a vengeance and won a scholarship to Rutgers University, where he majored in math.

He graduated at the peak of the Depression, his excellent grades earning him a choice of graduate scholarships, one from Brown University in math and another from the University of Chicago in economics. Friedman chose economics because he saw what was going on around him and surmised that the science of money was where the action was.

"What made up my mind for me, of course, was the state of the world," he told the Academy of Achievement. "In 1932, with that choice before you, economics seemed most clearly and obviously the most important place a young man should put his energies."

One of his early influences was Arthur Burns, who was teaching at Rutgers. One of Friedman's assignments was to pore over Burns' doctoral dissertation, "trying to find mistakes in it, improve it and criticize it."

It might have seemed a mundane chore, but Friedman reveled in it. "I can think of but one other course in my life that had as much value to me as that course, because it supplied standards of workmanship, the level of accuracy you want to aim at, the openness to criticism."

Friedman found what he wanted to do and focused on it.

"I think the most important single thing in people's success is whether they are lucky enough to be able to earn their living doing something that if they could afford to they would do without pay," he told the academy. "I think the most unlucky people in the world are those who have to earn their living by doing something in which they would not voluntarily work overtime."

Friedman never surrounded himself with sycophants; he liked nothing better than an old-fashioned discussion. The New York Times noted that Friedman was part of what made the University of Chicago the place to be for economists. He created "a place where independent thinkers could be encouraged to take unconventional stands as long as they were prepared to do battle to support them."

Know Your Enemy

Friedman stayed in touch with the enemy. He told IBD he kept abreast of key issues by reading the liberal New York Times and Washington Post. "It seems to me more important to read stuff you disagree with than to read stuff you agree with," he said.

Armed with a multitude of facts, Friedman liked to engage in passionate discussions that at first seemed outlandish but became logical by the time he finished. In an article he wrote for IBD in 2005, he suggested that corporate philanthropy was bad. He used the example of a supermarket chain that donated 5% of its profits to charity.

"But what reason is there to suppose that the stream of profit distributed in this way would do more good for society than investing that stream of profit in the enterprise itself?" he wrote.

While his philosophy influenced world leaders such as President Reagan and former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, and he advised many others, Friedman never took a government post, which left him free to criticize.

Although he denied being a skeptic when it came to government policy, he did believe there were many a slip between cup and lip.

"I believe that I have tried to examine what their (government programs') actual effects have been as opposed to what their intentions were," he said. "I think the great problem in so many of these areas is to distinguish between rhetoric and substance. There is a famous saying: 'The road to hell is paved with good intentions.' And that is the case."

BY CURT SCHLEIER