 Friedman is acknowledged as a pivotal figure in the Chicago school of economics.The essay can be read as a manifesto for that school.Still, Melvin Reder writes that a significant minority of Chicago-school economists such as Ronald Coase and James M. Buchanan have written as if "the validity of an economic theory lies in its intuitive appeal and/or its compatibility with a set of common-sense axioms rather than the conformity of its implications with empirical observation."