“Must We Choose between Inflation and Unemployment?” by Milton Friedman Stanford Graduate School of Business Bulletin 35, Spring 1967, pp. 10-13, 40, 42 © The Board of Overseers of the Leland Stanford Junior University

We have been told repeatedly that, if we are to have full employment, the price we must pay is some inflation. On the other hand, we are told that the goal of price stability should be put above the goal of full employment. In a way the view that we must choose between unemployment and inflation, or between price stability and full employment, is something of a modern version of Karl Marx’s view about the reserve army of the unemployed. In his development, Marx believed that capitalism would always need to keep a large reserve army of the unemployed to keep the proletarians in their places. The modern version of that doctrine says that only a reserve army of unemployed will prevent workers and laborers, whether organized in unions or not, from pushing for ever higher wages. The widely expressed argument insists that if you seek to expand aggregate demand through the kind of governmental measures envisaged in the Full Employment Act, if you seek to expand aggregate demand beyond that point at which enough unemployment will keep workers from trying to get ever higher wages, if you try to push it beyond that point, you can reduce unemployment. But, the argument goes, the reduction of unemployment is possible only by paying the price of inflation. What you must do, the argument continues, is to push until you have enough demand so that prices are rising; with prices rising, you will keep unemployment low. You will get around the problem raised by the trade unions who are seeking higher wages. This notion has been described in various ways. In technical economic literature, the view is being labeled the Phillips Curve, after a New Zealander teaching at