Friedman’s earliest research attributed high doctor pay to AMA licensing restrictions

Evidence

His graduate dissertation, Income from In de pen dent Professional Practice (coauthored with Simon Kuznets for the NBER), demonstrated a proclivity to advocate the extension of markets to areas where restrictions were well entrenched and widely assumed to be benefi cial. In the densely statistical format common to the NBER, Friedman and Kuznets argued that the high wages of medical doctors relative to dentists was attributable largely to the restrictions on entry to the profession entailed in the licensing requirements enforced by the American Medical Association. — Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion, 417

Categorization

• SEED: The licensing-vs-market-wages argument at the dissertation stage predates the famous Monetarism — an angle on how neoliberal market critique began technically in professional licensing rather than macro theory.
• XREF: Parallels the FEE/MPS origin story and connects to the reader’s adjacent-history interest in how free-market advocacy built on NBER empirical work.