Selection Committee Announced for the 2016 Milton Friedman Prize for Advancing Liberty

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Washington, D.C. – The Cato Institute today announced the international committee to select the eighth recipient of the Milton Friedman Prize for Advancing Liberty, a $250,000 biennial award presented to an individual for achievement in promoting freedom and individual liberty. Since the Prize’s inception in 2002, $3 million has been awarded.

The late Nobel laureate Milton Friedman agreed in 2001 to lend his name to the prize, which has become the leading international award for acknowledging contributions to the promotion of individual liberty. In a statement at the time he said: "Those of us who were fortunate enough to live and be raised in a reasonably free society tend to underestimate the importance of freedom. We tend to take it for granted. It has made us in the West more complacent, so having a prize emphasizing liberty is extremely important." Dr. Friedman passed away in 2006.

The first recipient of the Friedman Prize was the late British economist Peter Bauer, who received the prize in 2002. He was followed by the Peruvian scholar and author Hernando de Soto in 2004; the former Estonian prime minister Mart Laar in 2006; leader of the pro-democracy student movement in Venezuela Yon Goicoechea in 2008; the Iranian writer and journalist Akbar Ganji in 2010; Chinese economist Mao Yushi in 2012; and Leszek Balcerowicz, the former deputy prime minister and finance minister of Poland, in 2014.

The selection committee members for the 2016 prize are:

Gurcharan Das
Former CEO
Procter & Gamble India

Peter Goettler
President and CEO
Cato Institute

Karen Horn
Former Economics Editor
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
Germany

Ethelmae Humphreys
Chairman of the Board
TAMKO Building Products, Inc.

Giancarlo Ibárgüen
Member of the Board of Trustees
Francisco Marroquín University, Guatemala

John Mackey
Co-Founder and Co-CEO
Whole Foods Market

Herman Mashaba
Former Chairman
Free Market Foundation
South Africa

Ruth Richardson
Former Minister of Finance
New Zealand

Vernon Smith
Nobel Laureate
Professor of Economics and Law
Chapman University

The prizewinner will be announced in April and the award will be presented at the Milton Friedman Prize for Advancing Liberty Biennial Dinner on May 25, 2016 at the Waldorf Astoria, New York, NY.