The free-market, antisocialist approach of the University of Chicago Department of Economics, typified by Milton Friedman, came to be known as the Chicago School of Economics. Like other Chicago schools it developed from the university's isolation and talk, and its unconventional hiring. Leading figures were Frank Knight in the 1930s and 1940s, and Gary Becker and Robert Lucas in the 1980s and 1990s. The most creative and fact-oriented period came from the chairmanship of Theodore Schultz (1946–1961), eventually resulting in eight Nobel Prizes between 1976 and 1995, many more than at any other university (Friedman, Becker, Lucas, Schultz, Ronald Coase, Robert Fogel, George Stigler, and Merton Miller). The school became by the 1990s the mainstream of economics worldwide.

Deirdre N. McCloskey