The first work written for the general public by the highly influential American economist Milton Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom argues that economies and societies work best when a free market functions with minimal government interference. Friedman's ideas were on the fringes of the economic debate when the book was first published in 1962, but they came to be seen as powerful new challenges to the then-dominant economic ideas put forward by John Maynard Keynes. Friedman's arguments would go on to shape global economics and influence world leaders in the late twentieth century.