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The Top 50 Economists from 1900 to the Present

top-50-economists-1900-to-presentDo you live indoors? Use transportation powered by gasoline? How
about buy food, you do that right? And not to get awkward or anything, but you do wear clothes from
time to time, right . . . right?

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"The rules of the economic game have radically changed". The Top 50 Economists from 1900 to the
Present!

Presumably the answer to these questions is yes. If you partake in any sort of interaction with modern
civilization you are constantly acquiring goods and services in exchange for some medium, a medium we
call money. Money provides a way for us to acquire what we want from others without engaging in
violence or coercion. It enables two strangers who have no reason to trust each other to efficiently,
often almost instantaneously, work out a deal that benefits each other and then separate and go about
their day.

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But what is money? Where does it come from, and who decides how it is distributed? These questions
strike at the core of society. Whatever position your government and context take towards the nature of
economics has incredible impact on your daily life and whether your goals come to fruition.
Consequently, the study of economics in recent times is both very important and controversial.
But studying economics can be difficult due to the overwhelming changes the subject has undergone. In
1900 we were living under the classical gold standard and enjoying perhaps the greatest period of
economic development the world had ever seen. But after the world bludgeoned prosperity in the Great
War, much of the previous era's stability came crashing down. Whatever was left of the international
gold standard was drowned in blood a second time during World War II, and since then the world has
slowly transitioned from a commodity-backed monetary system tied to the U.S. dollar to a multinational
central bank backed system.

What this means is that even the rules of the economic game have radically changed. Several
generations ago debt was bad and banks were never to be trusted. Now, avoiding a mortgage and
student loans is considered irresponsible. Thirty to forty years ago central bankers saw price stability as
the mandate behind their existence. Now they have a dual mandate which also includes full
employment.

Most economists will love some of the names on this list and hate others. But regardless of whether you
think a particular thinker included here was brilliant or foolish, noble or wicked, you are living with the
consequences of their actions. Hopefully understanding this will help us all build a brighter future.

1John Maynard Keynes (1882-1946)

John Maynard Keynes

The flow of history is a river that most ride, but every so often a man, through sheer brilliance or force of
will, builds a dam and redirects the course of civilization. John Maynard Keynes was such a man. As the
most influential economist since 1900, some would argue in history, Keynes' influence is difficult to
overstate. He was the son of a successful economist and trafficked in the circles of the intellectual elite
from his youth. He would become the leading figure in economics at Cambridge at a time when
Cambridge became the leading center of economic study in the world.

It is difficult to appreciate Keynes' impact until one compares what economics was like before him with
what exists today. Before Keynes the world used the relatively simple gold standard. Money had a
straightforward definition, namely it equaled a certain weight, and economics followed certain basic,
common sense principles. Everyone knew that saving money was a good thing, and that it formed the
foundation of future investment. Everyone also knew that debt was a dangerous drug that was only to
be used in small doses.
But Keynes challenged the intellectual orthodoxy of his day. He argued that a gold standard shackled the
hands of policy makers. For Keynes, an elastic currency allowed governments to spend money when the
economy was most in need of new, economic energy. Under Keynesianism, deficit spending was the
antidote to recession. His ideas informed governments' response to the great depression, and played a
pivotal role in the creation of a new monetary standard at the close of World War II. To this day, many
of Keynes' most radical ideas are still economic orthodoxy.

2Friedrich August von Hayek (1899-1992)

Friedrich von Hayek

Friedich August von Hayek, often referred to as F.A. Hayek, was the foil to Keynes' early rise to
prominence. This Austrian-born economist who later settled in Britain had a distinguished career. He
earned two doctorates, one in law and the other in political science. He was made a member of the
Order of the Companions of Honour by Queen Elizabeth II at the urging of Margaret Thatcher, the first
person to receive the Hanns Martin Schleyer Prize, a recipient of the U.S. Presidential Medal of Freedom
under George Bush, and a winner of the Nobel Prize.

Hayek was especially known for his contribution to our knowledge of changing prices and their
ramifications. According to Hayek, changes in prices provide information which then allow individuals to
adjust their expenditures. Under his view, changes in price are an essential element in communicating
the state of the economy. This provided a powerful argument in defense of free markets, because
manipulating markets encouraged consumers and entrepreneurs alike to make poor investment
decisions, whereas free markets communicated truths about the actual health of the economy and
therefore the future. Hayek, more so than anyone else in the 20th century, kept the Austrian School in
mainstream academic discussions of economics. Although now largely underappreciated in left-leaning
western nations, he has become the chief economist for nations recovering from communism and
looking to move in a free market direction.

Hayek worked with the Cato Institute which ranks highly among The Most Influential Think Tanks

3Milton Friedman (1912-2006)

Milton Friedman
If the 20th century was the time of central banking and Keynesian economics, then Milton Friedman was
the most mainstream alternative. Friedman defended the free market and is considered the leading
figure behind the Chicago School of Economics. He received the John Bates Clark Medal honoring
economists under the age of 40, and won the 1976 Nobel Prize in Economics.

When Friedman entered economics, Keynesianism dominated the intellectual milieu. But slowly
Friedman chipped away at the intellectual orthodoxy. His coauthored volume, Income from
Independent Professional Practice, argued that government licensing for doctors artificially raised the
price of medicine. A Theory of the Consumption Function, argued that the Keynesian view that
households adjust their consumption based on their actual income, as opposed to projected income,
was false. In Capitalism and Freedom, he argued for floating exchange rates, a volunteer army, a
negative income tax, education vouchers, a deregulated medical field, and numerous other free market
proposals for a general audience. His devastating critique of the Federal Reserve in Monetary History of
the United States, 1867-1960 so frustrated the Fed that they commissioned a counter history and
stopped making their meetings public. To this day, they still keep their meeting minutes private.

By the time Friedman was finished, his conservative views had become the new orthodoxy. He
established a place at the table for free market capitalism, and still has many devout followers and
ardent enemies.

Friedman worked with the Cato Institute and the National Bureau of Economic Research which rank
highly among The Most Influential Think Tanks

4Lawrence Robert Klein (1920-2013)

Lawrence Robert Klein

Of the various underlying paradigms in economics, which include historical, behavioral, philosophical,
and others, Lawrence Robert Klein is one of the best examples of a mathematical approach to the field.
Born in Omaha, Nebraska, this MIT trained economist dedicated his career to developing new
macroeconometric computer models. He created this metric for economies of all macroeconomic sizes,
ranging from the national, to the regional, to the world. Unlike so many economists who spend half their
time telling you why their predictions did not pan out, Klein's work gained notoriety from a series of
early successes. While acquiring his PhD under Paul Samuelson in 1944, Klein made multiple successful
predictions concerning the economic context of the world immediately following the Second World War.
Despite these successes, Klein still left the United States during the post-war Red Scare under
McCarthyism due to his brief time in the communist party. Nevertheless, he did eventually return to
America and his successes contributed to his winning the John Bates Clark Medal in 1959 and the Nobel
Prize in 1980. These models embody Keynesianism, and are still in use by the Federal Reserve, other
major central banks around the world, and the International Monetary Fund.

5Robert Lucas Jr. (1937-Present)

Robert Lucas, Jr

The classics never die! Or at least, they never will as long as smart guys like Robert Lucas Jr. keep
resurrecting them. Lucas has pushed back Keynes' macroeconomics and fought to revive many
traditional views. He is now considered one of the leading figures in neo-classical economics. Not
surprisingly, he is very skeptical of government intervention. He casts doubt on the Phillips curve, which
purports to show that government induced inflation lowers unemployment. Lucas has taught at both
Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Chicago. He has spent a great deal of time exploring
the theory of rational expectations, which begins with certain assumptions about human behavior
attempting to act in sensible ways, which maximize utility and build expectations out from these
presuppositions. His work won him the Nobel Prize in 1995. Lucas also produced the novel idea that
microeconomic behavior should be seen as foundational to macroeconomic behavior. Before Lucas, the
Keynesian school saw these two sub-branches of economics as largely independent, but Lucas saw the
larger scale model as reducing to the former. Lucas was also very leery of the dangers of unsystematic
monetary policy deceiving market participants into making poor choices. This view obviously emphasizes
the dangers of government manipulation of markets, even if well intended. As a whole, Lucas is a prime
example of the conservative Chicago School of Economics at work.

6Elinor Ostrom (1933-2012)

Elinor Ostrom

Many economists have incorporated prior interest in other fields of study into their analysis of money.
Usually this involves math, history, or sociology, but Elinor Ostrom has approached things from a
different angle. She has championed New Institutional Economics. Under this approach, one studies the
background political context that thereby produces the rules under which commerce operates. For
Ostrom, the institutional context is critical in order to understand economics, and often the key to
advancing the economic agenda involves reforming the pre-existent institutional structure.
This is not surprising considering Ostrom's formal training at UCLA was in political science. She later took
a professorship at Indiana University where she became the Arthur F. Bentley Professor of Political
Science. Both she and her husband started the Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis. In 1999
she won the Johan Skytte Prize in Political Science, the John J. Carty Award from the National Academy
of Sciences in 2004, and the James Madison Award by the American Political Science Association in
2005. She served as a lead researcher for the government's SANREM CRSP program, (an initiative
studying natural resource management). In 2009 she became the first woman to win the Nobel Prize in
economics.

7Leon Walras (1834-1910)

Leon Walras

Leon Walras was the son of economist Auguste Walras. This Frenchmen was educated at the University
of Paris and became a professor of political economy at the University of Lausanne. He was one of the
first figures to use marginal utility, and became the first person to mathematically model general
equilibrium in Elements of Pure Economics. This made him an early pioneer in broader, general
equilibrium theory. Walras spent substantial energy trying to draw attention to his text, but
unfortunately its mathematical sophistication was too intricate to allow the thinkers of his day to
adequately appreciate it. Like many great minds, he would not be fully recognized until after his death.
He began his models with two parties working in a barter system and then slowly built greater and
greater levels of complexity into his system. Despite being largely known for his more theoretical work,
Walras was also very interested in practical application. He wanted to improve society with moderately
socialist reforms, but passed away before completing a full, systematic treatment on the subject
comparable to what he achieved with Elements of Pure Economics.

8Carmen Reinhart (1955-Present)

Carmen Reinhart

There are numerous pithy sayings which speak to the circular nature of history. But whether you prefer,
"the lesson of history is that we learn nothing from history," or, "those who don't study the past are
doomed to repeat it," or even, "those who do study the past are doomed to watch helplessly as
everyone else repeats it," the same overarching point remains. Simply put, people are slow to learn
from readily available lessons.
This is why Carmen Reinhart's book, This Time is Different: Eight centuries of Financial Folly, is as
pragmatic a text as one can find for people in power. In it she shows incredible similarity between the
boom and bust cycles in history. Her book has been translated into over 20 languages and won the 2010
Paul A. Samuelson TIAA-CREF Institute Award. This, and her numerous other scholarly achievements, is
why she now servers as professor of the International Financial System at Harvard's elite Kennedy
School.

Luckily for the rest of us, Reinhart's work is not merely ivory tower intellectual material that has no
substantial impact on the real world. She has served as both the Chief Economist and the Vice President
at the Bear Stearns investment bank and worked at the International Monetary Fund. Hopefully her
words of wisdom have fallen on open-minded ears.

9James Tobin (1918-2002)

James Tobin

As a Harvard trained academic who later went on to be Yale's Sterling Professor of Economics, James
Tobin was an internationally respected intellectual. He is regarded by many to be the greatest American
from the Keynesian School, and eventually won the Nobel Prize for his work in 1981. However, Tobin's
work was more than theoretical. Much of his research was geared towards providing investors with
valuable tools so that they could know where to place their money. His pragmatic approach is part of
why both during 1955-1961 and 1964-1965 he was the director of the Cowles Foundation for Research
in Economics.

Tobin argued that monetary policy is only effective in capital investment. He also noted that although
interest rates are a critical factor in understanding capital investment, they are but one of many
influences. He is famous for developing "Tobin's q," which describes the ratio of market value for an
asset to the asset's replacement cost. Under this model, if a given asset's q is greater than 1, then the
asset should be profitable. He is also well known for what came to be known as, "Tobin's Tax," which is a
tax on foreign exchange transactions. Tobin saw speculation in foreign currency markets as wasteful at
best, and potentially destructive, and consequently encouraged policies which limited this behavior.

10Irving Fisher (1867-1947)

Irving Fisher

Irving Fisher was one of the most prominent American economists of the early 20th century, and to this
day he is arguably the greatest besides Milton Friedman. Like many of his contemporaries, he began his
studies in mathematics and later switched to economics. He would eventually receive the first PhD in
economics ever offered by Yale. In particular, his Mathematical Investigations in the Theory of Value and
Prices, and Appreciation and Interest gained wide acclaim. He spent most of his career at Yale, where he
became a member of the Skull and Bones Society and supported various social and political causes
aimed at building a utopian world. He advocated for prohibition, world peace, and like many
intellectuals of his day, eugenics. He was also a founder and the first president of the Econometric
Society.

Fisher was a major figure in the quantity theory. In particular, his theory was the first to utilize both
currency and bank credit. He also built on the tradition of Eugen Von Böhm-Bawerk by further
developing models of interest. Additionally, Fisher helped advance discussions of utility and general
equilibrium. His work inspired the monetarist school of macroeconomic thought. Fisher was also the
first celebrity economist, having achieved public intellectual status relatively early in his career.
Unfortunately his reputation was forever tarnished when, in 1929, he said the stock market had reached
a "permanently high plateau," shortly before it crashed. Nevertheless, his work on debt deflation has
become increasingly influential in recent years as mainstream economists become more and more
concerned with deflation.

11Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk (1851-1914)

Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk

There are few economists whose ideas are both more relevant and challenged in today's world of
negative interest rates than Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk. This man was born and educated in law in Vienna.
His career oscillated between professional occupations, which included three terms as minister of
finance, and academic ventures, including professorships at both the University of Vienna and
Innsbruck.

Böhm-Bawerk was diametrically opposed to Karl Marx, and alongside Friedrich von Wieser, greatly
popularized the Austrian school of economics. His contribution to the field centers on
"roundaboutness," or the concept that physical capital investment both lengthens production and
improves productivity. He was one of the first economists to incorporate the passage of time into his
theories in a clear and precise way. He noted that people have a time preference. They prefer their
desires met sooner rather than later. This time preference is what allows for meaningful interest rates.
People will borrow in order to buy today and pay later because they are typically more concerned about
the present than the future.

Until very recently, one could make a good argument that Böhm-Bawerk undergirded our entire
financial system. After all, the world's current economic order runs on banking and debt, or stated
otherwise, if it were not for the phenomenon that Böhm-Bawerk studied, the modern world as we know
it could not exist. However, at the time of this article's creation, well over 400 million people are living in
nations with negative interest rates. Thus, the question poised to current economists is, "was Böhm-
Bawerk wrong, or have we utterly perverted the economic order?" And likewise we can also ask, "if he
was wrong, then how did we manage to build an entire economy based on debt?" Surely the answer to
these questions will remain controversial for some time.

12Ludwig von Mises (1881-1973)

Ludwig von Mises

Ludwig von Mises has been called the last knight of liberalism. In many ways, his thought represents the
most significant leap forward in the Austrian School. As an Austrian Jew he fled his homeland for the
safety of America as the dangers of the Third Reich grew. He was a true genius, having attained fluency
in German, Polish, and French, literacy of Latin, and comprehension in Ukrainian by the age of 12.

Mises served as the chief economist for the Austrian Chamber of Commerce before taking a teaching
position in Switzerland and eventually fleeing the Nazi advance for New York City. There he became a
professor of economics at New York University until his retirement. He spent the majority of his career
developing the study of praxeology, or human choice. His magna opus, Human Action, meticulously
outlines how individual choices form the bedrock of economics. For Mises, economics is an entirely
bottom-up science that extends from the individual. This stands in stark contrast from Marx and various
other socialists who think in terms of the aggregate. His work had a major influence on other free
market thinkers such as F.A. Hayek and Murray Rothbard. The Mises Institute, one of the world's
foremost think tanks promoting free market capitalism and limited government, promotes both his
ideas and those of kindred thinkers.
The Ludwig von Mises Institute ranks highly among The Most Influential Think Tanks

13Alfred Marshall (1842-1924)

Alfred Marshall

Alfred Marshall was one of the most influential economists of his generation. His book, Principles of
Economics, was a standard textbook in the field for decades. The text unifies marginal utility, supply and
demand, and costs of production under a larger theory. He also contributes to discussions of increasing
and decreasing returns in production. Like many economists of the period, he was first trained in
mathematics and even served as a professor in that field before later switching to political economics.
But despite his extensive mathematics background, his work typically relegates complex equations to
footnotes. His work's consequent readability may have contributed to its influence.

Marshall's theory revolves around price determination. For Marshall, price results from the relationship
between demand and supply and can behave in different ways based on different time periods. In the
short term, price is chiefly effected by demand, but in the long term, the cost of production becomes
much more significant. At all times, the price is heavily influenced by how competitive the market has
become. Marshall was also famous for his scissors analogy, in which he spoke of utility and cost of
production as two blades working together as they do in a pair of scissors.

14Joseph Stiglitz (1943-present)

Joseph Stiglitz

Sometimes an old idea needs a new champion. Keynesian economics, despite having achieved the status
of intellectual orthodoxy in the first half of the 20th century and still retaining it, has come under fire
numerous times from New Classical Economics. Consequently, proponents of Keynes like MIT-trained
Joseph Stiglitz have responded by defending the updated versions of the theory.

Stiglitz has done this in numerous ways, but perhaps the most obvious includes his development of a
new branch of economics called "The Economics of Information." This field studies information
asymmetries and develops novel ideas like adverse selection and moral hazard. Much of this work led to
him receiving the Noble Prize in economics in 2001. Furthermore, he acted as the lead author of the
1995 Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which received the Noble Peace Prize in
2007. He has been given over 40 honorary doctorates. The New York Times listed him as one of the 100
most influential people in the world. He was chief economist of the World Bank from 1997-2000 before
Janet Yellen succeeded him. He now serves on various prestigious boards such as the Acumen Fund and
Resources for the Future.

Stiglitz worked with the National Bureau of Economic Research which ranks highly among The Most
Influential Think Tanks

15William Forsyth Sharpe (1934-present)

William Forsyth Sharpe

Some economists spend a lot of time talking about hypothetical abstract models, others put their time
into championing political causes, and still others put their knowledge to practical applications like
making a ton of money. These are the sort of people that corporations, not-for-profits, and other big
money people go to for advice. People like William Forsyth Sharpe are the pragmatically-driven sort who
build ideas in order to fill bank accounts.

Sharpe received his PhD in economics from the University of California, Los Angeles. He won the Nobel
Prize in 1990. Early in his career he met economist Harry Markowitz during his tenure at the RAND
Corporation. Markowitz had a profound impact on his thinking. Later, his work became influential
enough to establish financial economics as its own branch of study. He developed a model to explain
how securities prices reflect risks and returns. He taught first at the University of Washington in Seattle
and later at Stanford University until he left academia in order to start an investment consulting firm. He
created the Sharpe ratio, which measures risk-adjusted investment performance. He also played a role
in creating the binomial method for options analysis, the gradient method to help determine ideal assets
to invest in, and returns-based style analysis for investigating investment fund track records.

16Christopher Antoniou Pissarides (1948-present)

Christopher Antoniou Pissarides

Christopher Antoniou Pissarides was born in Cyprus but has since moved to Britain and done most of his
professional work there. He won the Nobel Prize in 2010 for his research on markets with search
frictions. He earned his PhD from the London School of Economics in 1973 in mathematical economics,
and was elected to the prestigious British Academy in 2002. Since 2009 he has also been a part of the
executive committee of the European Economic Association, and a fellow in numerous other academic
societies. In 2013 he was even knighted. Pissarides has been a professor at the London School of
Economics since 1976, has become the Regius professor there, and is now the Chair for the Centre for
Macroeconomics.

Pissarides is particularly known for his work in the search and matching theory underlying relations
between the macroeconomy and the labor market. He provided the empirical evidence necessary to
model this relationship using the matching function, which shows how labor market changes from
unemployment to employment occur in time. In addition to this mathematical modeling, his additional
studies include work on structural change and expanding economies. Pissarides' work is now standard
material for graduate students in economics the world over.

17Arthur Laffer (1940-Present)

Arthur Laffer

Did you ever wish you could have your cake and eat it too? Well, according to Arthur Laffer the
government can do exactly that. He argued for this by developing the famous "Laffer Curve," which
showed that although raising taxes will initially raise government revenue, doing so beyond a certain
point so stymies the economy that it actually does more harm. In other words, if a government raises
taxes too much, it will slow economic activity and in the process decrease tax revenue. If one follows
this argument to its logical conclusion, then one should be able to lower taxes in such a way so as to
increase economic activity and consequently offset the loss in revenue.

The practicality of the Laffer Curve has been criticized by some and praised by others, but love it or hate
it, Laffer's ideas provided the grounding for Reaganomics. Laffer gave Reagan the intellectual
justification the president needed to both increase military spending and cut taxes. In addition to this
work, he also taught at the University of Chicago, the University of Southern California, and Pepperdine
University. Furthermore, he worked as a consultant to the U.S. Treasury and Defense Departments. He
eventually became the founder and CEO of a consulting firm in Nashville, Tennessee called Laffer
Associates.

18Daniel Kahneman (1934-Present)

Daniel Kahneman

If the first half of the 20th century economics represented the rise of the Keynesianism school and the
decline of the classical gold standard, and if the second half represented the Chicago School's free
market challenge, then the early 20th century represents the rise of anthropology-based economics that
focus on the frailties of human thinking. Daniel Kahneman is a University of Jerusalem and Berkeley
trained Israeli-American psychologist and behavioral economist. As is typical with his school of thought,
Kahneman draws heavily on the social sciences to understand game theory and decision making. His
work establishes a cognitive basis for poor human choices based on heuristics and biases through a
series of groundbreaking articles on judgement and decision making. This work eventually came
together in a full-blown model called Prospect Theory.

Kahneman's work was given the Nobel Prize in 2002. He was included in a list of leading international
thinkers by Foreign Policy magazine in 2011. He has worked at Princeton since 1993, and is now
professor emeritus of psychology and public affairs at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public Policy. He
was one of the founders of TGG, a respected business and charity consulting firm.

19Vilfredo Pareto (1848-1923)

Vilfredo Pareto

In a bygone era the ideal scholar was a generalist renaissance man who knew much about a lot, while in
the present era specialist scholars strive to know everything about a little. Vilfredo Pareto was one of
the last polyglots who, among his contributions to economics, also worked in philosophy, sociology, and
engineering. This Italian economist developed the 80/20 rule, which broadly speaking, states that 80
percent of the effect comes from 20 percent of the causes after he noticed that 80 percent of Italian
land was owned by 20 percent of the population. This pattern is common in nature but Pareto found it
prevalent in various forms of wealth distribution. He believed that every major civilization's wealth
distribution looked more like an arrow head than a pyramid. There was no gradual distribution of
wealth, but a natural division along the 80/20 distinction between the wealthy and the masses. This was
true of all peoples across all of history. He was also the first person to popularize the term, "elite," when
referring to a class of people. Pareto was instrumental in transforming economics from a subcategory of
moral philosophy as it was practiced during the enlightenment into a mathematically-driven social
science. His views were also popular among Darwinists and Mussolini's fascists supporters, and thus had
tremendous historical as well as economic impact, (although Pareto's personal views of fascism are a
matter of more nuanced debate).

20John Bates Clark (1847-1938)

John Bates Clark

Very rarely do scholars reverse an opinion that they have directed considerable energy towards
defending, but John Bates Clark did exactly that with respect to his views about just wages. Earlier in his
career he wrote Philosophy of Wealth, Economic Principles Newly Formulated, which attacked
competition as a viable form of just wage discovery. Although simultaneously being critical of the
communists, Clark nevertheless felt that intervention was required to prevent unfair underpayment of
workers, and even compared such practices to indirect cannibalism. However, shortly after publishing
this work he began reversing his opinion, and eventually published The Distribution of Wealth, which
defended a neo-classical view of economics. Clark used Darwinism to justify a competition-based
economics model that allowed the better equipped to advance. Although elements of this process may
have appeared savage, the final outcome was superior. Clark also had a unique understanding of capital.
For Clark, capital was not the means of production, but rather it was more of a productive tool. This
alternative view led to the Cambridge capital controversy between Cambridge University and MIT
between 1954 and 1965.

21Ronald Coase (1910-2013)

Ronald Coase

Ronald Coase spent much of his extensive life span teaching at the University of Chicago Law School. He
is particularly known for two influential essays he wrote: the 1937 article titled, "The Nature of the
Firm," and the 1960 article titled, "The Problem of Social Cost." In "The Nature of the Firm," Coase asked
why the economy organizes into firms. After all, one can imagine an economy where everyone acts as an
independent contractor and hires out their respective services on a case by case basis, but instead
people organize into larger firms with steady employees. Coase noted numerous advantages that the
firm model possessed, from protecting trade secrets to greater efficiency when minimizing overhead
costs. This essay was initially criticized by professors from the University of Chicago, but his successful
defense of the paper won over his critics and eventually won him a teaching position at Chicago, which
in many ways cemented that school's paradigm shift towards a more free market stance. In "The
Problem of Social Cost," Coase argued that property rights should be distributed in such a way so as to
encourage the owner of the property to take economically efficient actions. Coase was trained as an
economist, but spent most of his career working in a law school. He was a pioneering figure in the field
of law and economics. He won the Nobel Prize in 1991.

22Paul Samuelson (1915-2009)

Paul Samuelson
The New York Times considered Paul Samuelson to be the foremost academic economist of the 20th
century. He was the first American to win the Noble Prize in economics in 1970. He was awarded the
National Medal of Science, America's top science award, by Bill Clinton in 1996. He served as an advisor
to both Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, and acted as a consultant to the United States Treasury. But
perhaps his greatest impact came by writing Economics: An Introductory Analysis. This textbook has sold
over 4 million copies and become the all-time best selling economics textbook. It is in its 19th printing.

Samuelson achieved these numerous accolades by developing the mathematical methodology now
considered foundational to all economics. Before Samuelson several revolutionary thinkers had explored
detailed modeling techniques in their effort to advance their science. However, Samuelson gave such a
systematic treatment of the material that his approach soon became the yardstick by which all other
economists measured. But despite his great technical accomplishments, Samuelson also popularized his
ideas. He brought Keynesianism from esoteric to common sense through his textbook writing and his
weekly Newsweek column in which he and Milton Friedman represented opposing views. Because of
Samuelson, Neo-Keynesianism became the established academic norm, and continues to exert
considerable influence to this day.

23Murray Rothbard (1926-1995)

Murray Rothbard

When most people think of anarchists they think of muscle-bound Rambo-like men with a spear in one
hand, an assault rifle in the other, and a massive, freshly slain game animal slung over the warrior's
broad shoulders. How ironic that the most important figure in the anarcho-capitalist movement was
really a short, jolly, intellectual? But that is exactly who Murray Rothbard was.

Rothbard's thinking stands in total contrast to just about everything that modern economics teaches. He
argued that government itself was totally unnecessary, and that the free market could do a better job of
providing everything that government provides, whether that be roads, healthcare, security forces, or a
public justice system. To put things mildly, Chicago School thinkers like Milton Friedman look like
socialists by comparison. Even his way of writing is drastically different from the majority of economists.
Most modern economists make ample use of math-based models in an effort to model physics. Their
texts are drenched in complex, statistically sophisticated analysis. But Rothbard proceeds from very
basic propositions and builds axiom upon axiom until 1,500 pages later, a full blown alternative
worldview majestically unfolds. His material, being both exhaustive and accessible to the average
person, has procured a cult following amongst heterodox thinkers and continues to grow in prominence
through the Mises Institute, which he helped found.

Rothbard worked with the Ludwig von Mises Institute which ranks highly among The Most Influential
Think Tanks

24Francis Ysidro Edgeworth (1845-1926)

Francis Ysidro Edgeworth

Francis Ysidro Edgeworth was born in Ireland and studied at Trinity College and Oxford. He was one of
the last polyglots who could readily excel in multiple academic disciplines. He practiced law, taught
literature and logic in addition to political economy, and did pioneering work in mathematical statistics.
In 1891 he became the Drummond Professor of Political Economy at Oxford, where he also worked as
editor of the Economic Journal.

Edgeworth developed several novel arguments in economics that proved to be fruitful for generations.
He produced unique mathematical models that mapped both utilitarian and economic principles. He
also was the first person to use indifference curves. These ideas advanced modern general equilibrium
theory. Contemporary students of microeconomics will also recognize his Edgeworth Box, which
represents various distributions of resources.

But perhaps Edgeworth's most substantial achievements come from something far more subtle. Before
Edgeworth, economics more closely resembled history or philosophy. It usually expressed itself through
many words. But Edgeworth's important mathematical contributions to the field were part of a self-
conscious effort to bring economics in line with the more prestigious natural sciences like physics,
(hence the name of his famous text Mathematical Psychics: An Essay on the Application of Mathematics
to the Moral Sciences). Today, mathematically nuanced models dominate economics, which is in no
small part due to the efforts of men like Edgeworth.

25Jeffrey Sachs (1954-present)

Jeffrey Sachs
There are some scholars who are known for a famous article they wrote, or a magisterial dissertation
that changed the way experts understand their field and has since been read by every graduate student.
Then there are finance experts who work in banking and Wall Street and get a big break with the
government. But Jeffery Sachs became one of the leading scholars on economic development, poverty,
and globalism by spearheading a long list of important research initiatives. He is well known amongst
numerous influential organizations that make the political world go round.

Sachs was a co-recipient of the 2015 Blue Planet Prize. His fight for the environment has led Time
Magazine to twice list him among the world's 100 most influential leaders. He was the head of the Earth
Institute from 2002 to 2016, and he became a professor at Columbia University in 2016. There he acts as
Quetelet Professor of Sustainable Development and Professor of Health Policy and Management. He is
also the Special Advisor to the U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon on Sustainable Development issues.
In the past he served as a U.N. Secretary advisor on Millennium Development Goals. Sachs is a
Distinguished Fellow of the International Institute of Applied Systems Analysis in Luxembourg, director
of the Center for Sustainable Development, and director for the U.N. Sustainable Development Solutions
Network. He is co-founder and Chief Strategist of the Millennium Promise Alliance, and director of the
Millennium Villages Project.

26Carl Menger (1840-1921)

Carl Menger

Carl Menger was born and raised in Poland, where he eventually received a law degree from the
University of Krakow in 1867. His love of economics developed while working for Vienna's Prime
Minister. He eventually published Principles of Economics in 1871. He spent three years working as the
tutor to the Crown Prince of Austria, and eventually became a professor at the University of Vienna from
1873-1903. After that, he retired and spent the rest of his life researching and further building on the
arguments he laid down in Principles of Economics, although he never completed another systematic
treatment of the material.

Menger used the concept of utility to develop his theory of value and price, (it should be noted that
utility for Menger meant subjectively held preferences as opposed to pleasure attainment and pain
avoidance). Menger also wrote extensively about the distinction and complimentary relationship
between consumer, or lower order, and producer, or higher order, goods. He favored using pure theory
over the more empirical and historical case study approach of his German counterparts. His works on
monetary theory provided the foundation for what would eventually be called the Austrian School of
Economics, and had a particularly profound impact on Ludwig von Mises.
Menger's work provides the cornerstone for much of the 20th century's free market thinking. He highly
valued institutions that organically developed, as opposed to favoring those which came into existence
via top-down central planning, as well as recognized how difficult it is to quantify the sum total of every
individual's subjective preferences.

27John R. Commons (1862-1945)

John R. Commons

For many people economics seems like a dry subject that only those with a love of words surpassed by
their love of numbers could ever enjoy. But some people are drawn to the field not so much because of
ability or curiosity, but rather because of conviction. John R. Commons was such a man, the kind of
person on a mission. He was raised in a deeply pious home, and consequently spent a great deal of time
trying to gel his Christian convictions with his studies in economics. This led him to a progressive
perspective and the institutionalist school of thought, where he systemically defended social change
that he thought would bring about a better world. Despite being shunned early in life as a radical, he
eventually became a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Commons made substantial
contributions to our understanding of the history of economics. He was the first historian and
theoretician of the American labor movement. His defense of the labor union as an institutional vehicle
helped establish him as the leader of Wisconsin Institutionalism. He went on to develop an entire theory
of institutional economics, which sought recognition of aggregate bodies like labor unions as protecting
and bearing the same sorts of rights traditionally ascribed to individuals under classical economics.

28James M. Buchanan (1919-2013)

James M. Buchanan

Economics, like all sciences, originally began as a field of philosophy. It then developed into political
economy, which was a combination of what we now call political science and economics. Today most
scholars in either field see their work as intimately related, but still separate. James M. Buchanan,
however, was chiefly a contemporary political economist who gelled two fields that by his day had
separated. He made numerous important contributions, such as his distinction between politics (the
rules governing the social game), and policy (the strategies employed within the social game). He
developed constitutional economics, which saw the rules governing politics as an essential foundation to
all economic activity. He is known for his work on public choice theory, and especially his writings on
how politicians' non-overtly economic decisions are still driven by economic concepts of self-interest. He
discovered Austrian economics after independently coming to many of the same opinions held by Mises
and realizing his affinity for the latter man's book Human Action. Buchanan spent most of his career
teaching at George Mason University and won the Nobel Prize in 1986.

29Thomas Sowell (1930-Present)

Thomas Sowell

Thomas Sowell is a living testament to the fact that early failures do not bar later success. As a young
man Sowell dropped out of high school. Nevertheless, he joined the United States Marines during the
Korean War, and would later receive a magna cum laude bachelor's degree from Harvard, a master's
degree from Columbia, and a PhD in Economics from the University of Chicago.

He is now one of the most influential libertarian thinkers in America. He is known for advocating supply-
side economics and free market capitalism. Sowell is also a staunch critic of the Federal Reserve, often
arguing that since its inception the dollar has suffered systematic inflation and thus the Fed has failed to
maintain price stability. He also believes that the Fed has failed to prevent depressions.

Sowell's work as an economist, political philosopher, and social theorist has led to his writing of over 30
books. It has also granted him a position as a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford
University, a leading think tank with international reputation. He is both a popular syndicated columnist
and an academic economist with a regular column distributed by Creators Syndicate. He has won the
National Humanities Medal.

Thomas Sowell mentioned among the 10 Most Controversial College Professors

Sowell worked with the Hoover Institute which ranks highly among The Most Influential Think Tanks

30Ernst Fehr (1956-Present)

Ernst Fehr
Some economists have tried to use mathematical models to understand their field, while others have
built logical systems precept by precept. Still others see economics as an extension of history. And yet,
there is still more room for future economic development. Ernst Fehr is one of the figures building an
entirely new approach to the field, which he calls behavioral economics. His research draws much more
heavily from evolutionary anthropology than most other economists. He is especially interested in the
evolution of altruism and other group dynamics. This research asks questions about the origins and
perpetuation of social norms, and the proliferation of social preferences.

Fehr's research has earned him many accolades. He has held a professorship of Microeconomics and
Experimental Economics at the University of Zurich, and is currently the director of the economics
department. He previously served as president of the Economic Science Association and the European
Economic Association. He is also an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, as
well as a John Kenneth Galbraith Fellow of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences. He
won the Marcel Benoist Prize in 2008. He is widely regarded as one of the most influential economists in
the German speaking world.

But there is something far more important behind Fehr's work than a long list of titles. Fehr has given
economists an entire new avenue by which they can approach their work. He is drawing from the
intersection of biology and sociology in a way that unites the social and hard sciences. Consequently, his
research has the potential to dramatically impact the conceptual foundations of economics for
generations to come in a way that few scholars ever will.

31Hernando de Soto (1941-Present)

Hernando de Soto

Let's be honest. Most people think of a crusty old white guy living a pampered life in the Western ivy
tower when they hear the word, "economist." Very rarely do we think of someone whose ideas so
radically challenge his context that people try to assassinate him for his work, let alone an individual
who is so determined that such mortal danger only makes him work harder. Luckily for the free market
of ideas, there are men like Hernando de Soto.

De Soto is an immensely talented man. By the time he turned 38, he had already left his native Peru and
established a successful career in business in Europe. But instead of living a life of luxury after earning
enough money to retire at such a young age, he instead returned to his people in order to seek
economic reform and answer the fundamental question of economics, namely, why are some people
poor and others rich. He created the Institute for Liberty and Democracy, a pro-entrepreneurial think
tank which promoted free market reform throughout the nation. His institute brought numerous
economic reforms, including granting land titles to 1.2 million families and helping 380,000 firms to
move from the black market to the open market. Under de Soto's view, any nation looking to build a
strong market economy must also have a working information structure that transitions financial
transactions from under the table to cataloged, legal knowledge.

As a result of this public defense of capitalism, the Peruvian Marxist terror organization Shining Path
targeted him for assassination. Thus far, their efforts have failed. Instead, de Soto has been honored for
his efforts by numerous prestigious groups. Time Magazine called him one of the five leading Latin
American innovators of the century, and he now serves as an honorary co-chair for the World Justice
Project. Regardless of whether one agrees with or opposes de Soto, no one should deny that his work
has had substantial impact on his people, and that he has spent his life systematically attempting to
leave the world in a better place than which he found it.

De Soto is also featured in our article "50 People Who Deserve a Nobel Prize."

32Barbara Bergmann (1927-2015)

Barbara Bergmann

Barbara Bergmann was in many ways the leading voice for feminist economics of her generation. As
someone who grew up in the midst of the great depression, she developed a deeply convicted belief
that the government has a moral obligation to help the downtrodden. She carried these convictions with
her through her schooling, and eventually graduated from Harvard in 1959. She became further
interested in issues of social justice when she read Gunnar Myrdal's book (who himself won the Nobel
Prize with Friedrich Hayek and spent ample time championing social justice in Swedish politics), An
American Dilemma, which spoke of racial inequality in the workplace. She authored and coauthored
several important books, including The Economic Emergence of Women. She served as a staff economist
for the White House Council of Economic Advisers during the 60's, cofounded the International
Association for Feminist Economics, and received the American Economic Association's Carolyn Shaw
Bell Award in 2004 for improving women's position in economics. In addition to her work arguing that
discrimination is manifest throughout labor markets, Bergmann also challenged typical economic
metrics which drew conclusions from overly simplistic assumptions. Bergman held that many bad things
came from capitalism, but also believed these disadvantages could be controlled, and that the system
also produced much good. Unfortunately, after a lifetime of academic success, Bergmann met with an
unfortunate end when she committed suicide in 2015.
33Hyman Minsky (1919-1996)

Hyman Minsky

Hyman Minsky studied at the University of Chicago before acquiring his PhD from Harvard in 1954. He
later taught at several prestigious schools such as Carnegie Mellon, Brown, and Berkeley, before settling
at Washington University in St. Louis. Minsky considered himself a Keynesian with a heterodox
interpretation of the famous economic forefather, but many now consider Minsky to be post-Keynesian.
He opposed the efficient market hypothesis and instead advanced the financial instability hypothesis. He
articulated the notion that when investors have to sell their non-speculative positions in order to pay
their debts, the economy unwinds under the weight of deflationary pressure. This has come to be
known as the "Minsky moment." It represents an economic Rubicon from which the financial system
cannot turn back without extreme difficulty. This and other pieces represent his opposition to the
neoclassical synthesis interpretation of Keynes.

Minsky was a Levy Institute distinguished scholar and created two of their permanent research
programs, one being on monetary policy and the other on the state of U.S. and world economics. He
was awarded the 1996 Veblen-Commons Award. For a great deal of time Minsky's ideas were ignored.
However, the subprime mortgage crisis of 2008 has created new interest in his work on deflationary
debt crashes. Thus, he has become like many great geniuses in that too few recognized his brilliance
until both after his death and after his warnings were ignored.

34Anna J. Schwartz (1915-2012)

Anna J. Schwartz

Anna Schwartz worked for the National Bureau of Economic Research and was a former president of the
Western Economic Association International. Schwartz's research spans numerous topics, but her
greatest contributions have examined economic history. She is most famous for her work alongside
Milton Friedman on their book A Monetary History of the United States, 1867-1960. This project laid a
prolonged attack on the Federal Reserve, and systematically made the case that the Fed's policies are
both what created and what sustained the Great Depression. The work garnered extensive acclaim,
being called one of the most influential economic texts of the 20th century by the libertarian CATO
Institute, and received high praise from more centrist figures like Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke and left-
leaning Paul Krugman. Her and Friedman's work has set much of the monetary policy for contemporary
central bank policy in the wake of the 2008 financial crises. After Keynesian policies proved ineffective in
stabilizing the economy, monetarists used their research to justify the role of central banks in stabilizing
the economy.

35Kenneth Rogoff (1953-Present)

Kenneth Rogoff

Kenneth Rogoff is one of the most brilliant high school drop outs you could ever hope to meet. Of
course, when you leave school because you are a world class chess player who goes on to play the game
professionally and eventually become a grand master, you have a credential which is worth more than
most degrees.

Given Rogoff's intensely abstract and mathematically-tuned mind, it is not surprising that he is now a
Harvard economics professor, a member of the prestigious Group of 30, and someone who has worked
for both the International Monetary Fund and the Federal Reserve. He is best known for two major
contributions. The first was his sharp criticism of Carmen Reinhart's co-authored book, This Time is
Different. Rogoff showed computation errors in the text which challenged the author's thesis that excess
debt undermines GDP growth. Reinhart in turn corrected the computation errors, but continues to
defend her initial thesis. The second major policy Rogoff is known for is much more recent. In 2016 he
published a book titled The Curse of Cash. According to Rogoff, the untraceable nature of physical cash
transactions allows for criminal activity, and the world would be a much safer place if America first
phased out the $100 bill, and then the $50, and eventually the $20. This argument, although
unthinkable a couple decades ago, has become increasingly popular. Recently the European Union,
Australia, and especially India have made similar policy decisions.

36Amartya Sen (1933-present)

Amartya Sen

Some people come to study economics because they are good at math and find the financial realm to be
a useful place to apply their skill set. Others are born with a silver spoon in their mouth, and apply their
time and effort at the university towards this particular brand of academics. And then there are others
who are motivated by personal conviction, who see the world in an unbalanced state and wonder how it
got to be that way.
Amartya Sen is the latter sort of man. He witnessed a great famine while growing up in India, and went
on to study the causes of famine from a combination of economic and philosophical perspectives. Sen
has combined his knowledge of welfare economics and wealth distribution with philosophy's study of
choice and game theory. His work in this field has significantly impacted the United Nations' Human
Development Report, as well as landed him numerous prestigious teaching positions at places like
Oxford and Cambridge. He now teaches economics, philosophy, and law at Harvard. He won the Nobel
Prize in economics in 1998.

Sen is especially known for his development of "capabilities." Under his argument, saying a person has a
right that cannot be taken from them is extremely shallow. Instead, a society must equip people with
everything they need in order to implement that right and make it a live concept. Sen has effectively
raised the bar on what a society needs to provide in order to grant its citizens rights, and consequently
has transformed the role of the state.

37Joseph Schumpeter (1883-1950)

Joseph Schumpeter

Modern economic theory tends to be a battle between loose money economic policies from left-leaning
Keynesianism and right-leaning free market views. In their most pure forms, this can often involve a
pedagogical preference for mathematical modeling by the former school of thought, and system
building from the latter. But Joseph Schumpeter represented a third way. He is a prime example of the
historical school's approach to economics. Under this view, it is difficult to build universal laws of
economics because unlike physics, economics changes based on its relationship to the culture which
produced its context.

Schumpeter, who began his career in Austria but later left under the encroaching forces behind World
War II, eventually came to America and finished his career teaching at Harvard. He saw an unfortunate
pattern unfolding before him. For Schumpeter, capitalism was a powerful force for good that inevitably
had the seeds for its own destruction embedded within itself. In his 1942 book, Capitalism, Socialism,
and Democracy, he saw capitalism as leading to increases in wealth, which would then expand the
intellectual class and attack the very foundations for the wealth that made their academic positions
possible in the first place. Schumpeter popularized phrases in economics, such as "creative destruction,"
and further developed our models of entrepreneurship. In 2008 the University of Wuppertal opened the
Schumpeter School of Business and Economics.
38Wassily Leontief (1906-1999)

Wassily Leontief

Wassily Leontief was an American economist known for demonstrating the interconnected nature of the
economy. He described how changes in one branch of the economy can have both unforeseen and
unintended consequences in another area. Early in life his political views brought him into conflict with
his native Russian government. After it became obvious his ideological perspectives would never be
accepted under communism, he fled to Germany in 1925 where he eventually pursued his PhD, but he
later immigrated to the United States. He taught at both Harvard and New York University. His technical
achievements include developing the linear activity model of general equilibrium with its input-output
analysis, describing the Leontief paradox in international trade, and developing the composite
commodity theorem. He won the Noble Prize for showing how inputs for one industry create outputs
for another. He also strongly advocated for increasing the use of data intensive mathematical analysis in
order to make economics more empirical and less theoretical.

Leontief educated some of recent history's most prominent economists. He personally advised four
doctoral students who themselves won the Nobel Prize, including Paul Samuelson, Robert Solow,
Vernon L. Smith, and Thomas Schelling.

39Kenneth Arrow (1921-Present)

Kenneth Arrow

Kenneth Arrow earned his PhD from Columbia before moving on to teach at Harvard and then Stanford.
His academic career has in large part involved unpacking the ideas embedded in his dissertation. In this
work he proves the impossibility theorem, which shows the limitations underlying predicting people's
preferences between options. His groundbreaking work in these fields as well as broader topics in
general equilibrium theory and welfare theory led to him acquiring the Noble Prize in 1972.

Arrow was also the first economist to map how learning curves affect entrepreneurial efficiency. It
seems intuitive to say that producers will learn more about how to produce their product as they do so,
and will, with the passing of time, do so with ever greater efficiency. Nevertheless, Arrow was the first to
prove this phenomenon. His successes have made him a leading figure in post-World War II neo-classical
economics. In addition to his contributions to more typical areas of economic study, he also studied
developing areas of the field such as endogenous growth theory and the economics of information. He is
a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and won the 2004 National Medal of Science.
Arrow was given an honorary doctorate from Uppsala University in Sweden, and is also one of the few
foreign members of the Royal Society.

40Gary Becker (1930-2014)

Gary Becker

Some may roll their eyes at those who acknowledge that something works in practice, but still ponder
how to make it work in theory. Yet, the dominion of knowledge often broadens the boundaries of
knowledge into the unexpected by first securing the cornerstones of common sense. Gary Becker was
both an economist and sociologist at the University of Chicago who systematically explained much
intuitive phenomenon in an academically rigorous way.

Becker incorporated his knowledge of the social sciences into his understanding of economics in
numerous ways. He expanded our conception of what kinds of behaviors count as rational and/or utility
maximizing. For instance, he challenged the long held Marxist belief that an individual benefits himself
via discrimination, he emphasized the central role self-interest plays in economic decision making, and
he recast education as a type of investment. He also studied human capital, altruistic behavior, and the
rotten kid theorem. He received the Nobel Prize in 1992, the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2007,
and the John Bates Clark Award of the American Economic Association in 1967. He served as president
of the same association in 1987. He also helped found an entrepreneurial and charitable consulting
company called the TGG Group.

41Mark Skousen (1947-Present)

Mark Skousen

Mark Skousen was one of those guys that must have made a lot of his classmates extremely jealous.
When he graduated from Brigham Young University in 1972 with a master's in economics, he already
had a fully paid new car, a fiancée, and a job working for the CIA as an economist. He stayed with the
CIA for three years before leaving to edit the Inflation Survival Letter and earn a PhD in economics from
George Washington University. In 2001, he became president of the Foundation for Economic Education
(FEE), the oldest capitalist think tank in America. Skousen developed a yearly conference dedicated to
liberty called Freedom Fest. This is the largest annual collection of libertarian-minded thinkers in the
world. Grantham University renamed its business school, "The Mark Skousen School of Business" in
recognition of his many successes. He was recently named one of the 20 most influential living
economists by Super Scholar, and appointed the Presidential Fellow at Chapman University from 2013-
2016. He has written 19 books on various academic and economic topics. As his fears concerning
inflation and his love of free market capitalism suggest, Skousen is a staunch defender of the Austrian
School.

42Wilhelm Röpke (1899-1966)

Wilhelm Röpke

When looking at the economic juggernaut that Germany became by the latter half of the 20th century
and its status as first amongst equals that it acquired under the Eurozone, one would never know that
Germany had been devastated by two world wars and the worst hyperinflation of any industrial nation.
The intellectual guidance which helped the German people navigate in the wake of such tragedy fell to
men like Wilhelm Röpke. He was a major figure in the ordoliberalist movement. This school of thought
advocated for free trade, but did so while retaining a greater role for central banking than what their
Austrian school counterparts wanted. Nevertheless, he remained critical of intervention laden theories
such as Keynesianism. Röpke wanted the competition of the free market, but at the same time also
advocated for a state run social security system and a strong government to enforce standards of
fairness. His heavy emphasis on human rights led him to increasingly appreciate Catholic social theory
and the general benefits of a spiritually inclined culture. To this day Germany still bears many of the
hallmark features inherent in Röpke's ordoliberalism.

43Israel Kirzner (1930-present)

Israel Kirzner

Israel Kirzner studied under Mises at New York University and eventually became a leading authority on
his mentor's work. He would later spend the majority of his teaching career at the same school. Kirzner's
research covers many topics in both theology and economics. The Liberty Fund has set out to publish his
complete works, which is a project that spans ten volumes. Furthermore, Israel is also a Rabbi and a
leading rabbinic scholar. His most significant economic contributions have studied entrepreneurship.
Whereas neoclassical economics stressed perfect competition, Kirzner criticized this perspective in his
book Competition and Entrepreneurship on the grounds that it under-emphasized the importance of
entrepreneurs. For Kirzner, people compete on a multifaceted level. Competition needs to deal with far
more categories than what traditional inputs, outputs, and supply and demand models can provide.
Under Kirzner's view the entrepreneur takes on a leadership role within the larger, free society, and that
leadership cannot be easily fit into the older perspectives' balancing equations. He received the Global
Award for Entrepreneurship Studies in 2006 as well as an honorary doctorate from the Universidad
Francisco Marroquin. The same university named its Entrepreneurship Center in his honor. He is widely
considered the most respected representative of the Austrian school in the post Hayek world.

44Knut Wicksell (1851-1926)

Knut Wicksell

In many ways the modern central banking system is built in the image of Knut Wicksell. Wicksell was a
Swedish economist born into a wealthy family, but he lost both his parents by the time he was 15.
Inheriting their substantial estate allowed him to dedicate his life to study. At first he focused on physics
and mathematics, but his interests would eventually transition into economics. His biggest contribution
to the field came from his defense of using interest rates to maintain price stability. What Wicksell
argued for at the time was incredibly radical, (remember, the world was still using the simplistic gold
standard), but has since become the norm. Every central bank in the world now, whether that be the
People's Bank of China, the Federal Reserve, the European Central Bank, or any number of others, all
use interest rates to try and hit their target inflation rates. If it had not been for Wicksell, the
justification for letting these institutions exist, let alone dominate the financial markets, would never
have formed.

Wicksell was largely a left-leaning social critic. He supported a social welfare state, and was married to
the famous feminist Anna Bugge. He spent two months in prison for blasphemy after he wrote a satirical
piece criticizing the virgin birth of Jesus. Despite all this, his work also had a substantial impact on the far
more conservative Austrian school, which disagreed with his welfare state agenda but drew from many
of his ideas about interest rates.

45Thorstein B. Veblen (1857-1929)

Thorstein B. Veblen

Thorstein B. Veblen represented a radical departure from previous social thinkers. Whereas many
economists were accustomed to speaking of consumers as rational economic agents constantly making
decisions based off the available evidence, Veblen argued that humans are far more based on instinct.
Whereas the enlightenment thought of man as logical, and uniquely positioned within the natural world,
by Veblen's day scientists were increasingly seeing humanity as just another part of the animal kingdom.
Veblen took substantial training in philosophy and natural history and applied it to economics. Under
his view people were as much guided by sociology and embedded anthropological drives as any rational
inclinations. His social theory criticized capitalism and became one of the leading voices in the
progressive era. He vehemently attacked production for profit, and gave left-leaning thinkers an
alternative to Marxism. He saw society as plagued by a handful of individuals who controlled the means
of production at the expense of everyone else. Veblen is seen as the founder of institutional economics,
a school of thought that emphasizes evolution and the role of institutions in economics. This stood in
stark contrast to classical views that much more heavily emphasized the individual.

46Vernon L. Smith (1927-Present)

Vernon L. Smith

Vernon L. Smith is most famous for developing the field of experimental economics. His approach to the
economic sciences grew out of his early training in electrical engineering (he received his PhD in the field
from Caltech in 1949). Afterwards he earned his doctorate in economics from Harvard in 1955. With this
scientific training undergirding his background in economics, Smith found a unique solution to a typical
problem. He was struggling to explain basic microeconomic theory to his students in a succinct way
while teaching a class in Principles of Economics. He decided to design an experiment the next semester
that would incorporate the students. He wanted them to take part in a mini, simulated economy where
the principles being discussed would guide the students' behavior. The class project was such a success
that Smith began exploring ways to expand this approach. Eventually his colleagues encouraged him to
develop his ideas into a full-blown research methodology, which he did over the course of two
influential articles. Eventually, Smith's work developed into a full-fledged sub-field of economics, and
won him the Nobel Prize in 2002. Smith has tried to translate his economic expertise into practical, real
world change. He has served as an expert for the Copenhagen Consensus, and has been one of the most
active economists in open petition aimed at changing government policy.

Smith worked with the Mercatus Center at George Mason University which ranks highly among The
Most Influential Think Tanks

47Peter Boettke (1960-present)

Peter Boettke
Many scholars dream of becoming the center of an intellectual movement, of being recognized as the
leader in their respective school of thought. A small number of geniuses achieve this in their old age.
And then there are a lucky few like Peter Boettke who accomplish this feat amidst youthful vigor.
Boettke is a professor of economics and philosophy at George Mason University, as well as the director
of the F.A. Hayek Program for Advanced Study in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics at the Mercatus
Center. He has been a visiting scholar at numerous leading institutions such as the Russian Academy of
Sciences in Moscow, the Stockholm School of Economics, the Max Planck Institute, and the Central
European University in Prague. He was also a Fulbright Fellow at the University of Economics in Prague,
Czech Republic. This rapidly rising star with increasingly international appeal has dedicated his time to
defending analytical anarchism. This school of thought envisions a radically libertarian economy where
individuals and institutions operate without any substantial government influence. The law largely exists
to enforce contracts and protect property rights. Under Boettke's view, this extremely free market
position would lead to greater prosperity than a more centralized system.

See our interview with Peter Boettke

Boettke worked with the Mercatus Center at George Mason University which ranks highly among The
Most Influential Think Tanks

48Arthur Pigou (1877-1959)

Arthur Pigou

Arthur Pigou was one of the finest examples of a British gentleman scholar. His opposition to violence
led him to oppose World War I, but his love for his fellow man and his country also led him to volunteer
as an ambulance driver and and go on numerous, dangerous missions. He had many deep criticisms of
Keynes, but nevertheless personally funded the man's work and remained friends with his rival
throughout their lives. This is especially impressive considering how often Keynes criticized him in his
chief work, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money. Pigou was part of the classical
school of thought, and he specialized in welfare economics.

Pigou's most important work is his 1920 book, The Economics of Welfare. This text proposes externality.
Under this view, one can correct a social problem by introducing a tax (now called a Pigovian tax). This
view has been utilized numerous times to correct excess and social ills. Right now its biggest application
is connected to environmentalism, since many would like to implement taxes on behaviors and products
that damage the environment, such as the carbon tax. Pigou spent most of his career at Cambridge
University when Cambridge was highly regarded as the leading economics institution in the world.
49Nassim Nicholas Taleb (1960-Present)

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

There are two kinds of people in the world; those who try to fit our chaotic existence into a semblance
of order, and those who believe that the best one can do is surf the waves of chaos as reality hurls them
at you. The latter group has much to thank Nassim Nicholas Taleb for. Taleb's famous book, The Black
Swan, describes the power of unforeseeable events, and the damage they can wreak on unsuspecting
societies. This Lebanese-American writer and statistician thinks of himself as an epistemologist of
randomness as opposed to a businessman. His work on probability examines the limitations of
knowledge, and likewise proves the importance of anticipating seemingly impossible scenarios.

This extremely skeptical starting point has led Taleb to oppose large scale social theorizing. He has gone
so far as to say that the Nobel Prize in economics should be done away with, for the damage that
economic metanarratives does is immense. Instead, he advances what he calls "robustification" and
"anti-fragility." Not surprisingly, his PhD dissertation focused on the mathematics of derivatives pricing,
which is arguably the most unstable part of the market. Regardless of whether you think Taleb goes too
far in his sweeping rebuttal of most economic theorizing, at the very least this very bright man's words
are a much needed call for sobriety in a market otherwise known for excess.

50Paul Robin Krugman (1953-Present)

Paul Robin Krugman

As a winner of the Nobel Prize and a professor at places like MIT, Princeton, and the Graduate Center of
the City of New York, Paul Krugman is a respected thinker and leader in his field. However, his regular
column with the New York Times and common television appearances also make him a public
intellectual. Part of this public persona is his brilliance, and part of it is his willingness to follow
Keynesian logic to its absolute conclusion in a colorful manner. For instance, in a televised interview in
2011 he stated that faking an alien invasion would end the recession in 18 months as the whole world
undertook aggressive increases in production in order to fight this imaginary foe. Silly illustrations aside,
Krugman's views represent one of the most articulate defenses of contemporary Keynesianism. He
wholeheartedly endorses using government deficit spending to spur slouching economies, and provides
one of the most outspoken voices for the left's political and economic policies.
Krugman's contributions to economics are numerous, but perhaps his most well-known idea addresses
why similar economies are more likely to trade with each other. It is easy to see why two nations that
produce vastly different goods would trade because one nation has a great comparative advantage in a
particular aspect of trade, but how do we explain the preference for trade amongst economies with
similar products? Krugman's answer says that consumers prefer choice across the same kind of product,
and due to the economy of scale it is often cheaper for a region to specialize in the creation of one kind
of product, as opposed to replicating a less specialized and more diverse collection of products across
many regions. The end result is that a country will often specialize in a small number of products instead
of a more jack of all trades approach to production.

Famous economists

A list of famous economists from Adam Smith to John M. Keynes. This page gives a brief summary of the
ideological background and economic viewpoint of these influential economists.

writerAdam Smith (1723-1790) was a Scottish social philosopher and pioneer of classical economics. He
is best known for his work ‘The Wealth of Nations‘ which laid down a framework for the basis of classical
free-market economics. Smith is often referred to as the ‘Father of Economics.’ Smith’s work makes a
strong case for free market economics, but he was also aware of situations where the free market could
be against the public interest, for example, monopolies.

Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832) British philosopher. Bentham was primarily a utilitarian philosopher. But,
he used this philosophy to give insights into economics. Bentham raised the possibility of monetary
expansion to achieve full employment. He was an early advocate of welfare economics – based on the
principle of maximising utility/welfare in society.
vThomas Malthus (1766 – 1834) Malthus was an English rector who was an influential economist in the
early nineteenth century. Best known for his prophecy that the population would grow faster than food.
One of few economists who supported protectionism and the corn laws.

David Ricardo (1772 – 1823) British political economist. Ricardo played a key role in shaping classical
economics, drawing on the work of Adam Smith. Ricardo’s greatest contribution was to argue for free
trade, based on the theory of comparative advantage. This contrasted with the former mercantilist view
of trying to run a trade surplus. Ricardo argued countries should specialise in those industries where
they were relatively better than other countries.

Karl Marx (1818 – 1883) – German philosopher, founder of Marxism. Karl Marx wrote Das Capital and
The Communist Manifesto. Marx argued that Capitalism was inherently unequal and unjust, and would
lead to a revolution as the Proletariat rose up against the capitalist class. Marx created one of the
strongest criticisms of classical/free market economics.

Ronald Coase (1910-2013) British economists who was Professor at University of Chicago. Coase wrote
an influential work on the importance of transaction costs to explain the limitations of firms growing in
size. His other important work was with regard to the problem of externalities and social costs, Coase
suggested that the problem of social cost could be solved (if there are clearly defined property rights) by
market trading amongst the affected parties.

Irving Fisher (1867 – 1947) American neo-classical economist. Fisher’s work on the quantity theory of
money was influential in creating the modern economic school of monetarism. His also did work on debt
deflation during the great depression and the bursting of a credit bubble, which has received renewed
attention since 2008 crisis.

friedrich_hayekFredrich Hayek (1899 – 1992) Austrian / British economist, LSE and Chicago University.
Hayek’s ‘Road to Serfdom’ (1944) is a best-selling defence of classical liberalism and a free market
approach. Hayek criticised state intervention in the economy and also criticised Keynes’ work on
demand management. He is the second most cited economist and is seen as influential in the transition
of Communist Eastern Europe to the free market.
Ludwig von Mises (1881 – 1973) Austrian economist. Mises is credited with the formation of the
Austrian school of economics. This is strongly free market and blames recessions on excess credit and
inefficient government intervention.

John Maynard Keyneswriter (1883 – 1946) one of the most influential economists of the Twentieth
Century. Keynes advocated a role for government to manage aggregate demand and overcome
recessions. His General Theory (1936) laid the foundations of Keynesian economics and the new branch
of macroeconomics.

Milton Friedman (1912 – 2006) American economist from the University of Chicago. Friedman rose to
prominence for his advocacy of monetarism, which was adopted by US and UK governments in the
1980s. Friedman was critical of fiscal policy and government spending. Monetarism placed great faith in
controlling the money supply to control inflation. He also supported free-market reforms, such as
privatisation and de-regulation.

Joan Robinson (1903 – 1983) British economist from University of Cambridge. Robinson made important
contributions to post-Keynesianism arguing for greater state involvement to overcome inequality and
the failings of the free market. In 1933, she coined the term monopsony which looked at monopoly
power of buyers and employers. Robinson also began work on development economics.

John Hicks (1904 – 1989) British economist. Highly influential in strengthening Keynesian
macroeconomic theory through his IS-LM theory of Demand, interest rates and money supply. He also
worked on consumer demand theory in micro-economics. Received the Nobel Prize in economics (1972)
for his work on welfare economics and general equilibrium theory.

E.F. Schumacher (1911 – 1977) British economist. His work ‘Small is Beautiful’ a study of economics as if
people mattered was influential in rethinking attitudes to economics and society. Schumacher was
critical of materialist scientism and advocated giving greater importance to environment and de-
centralisation. He was a pioneering economist for challenging conceptions, such as maximising national
output is always good.

Paul Samuelson (1915 – 2009) American economist, whose textbooks helped explain and popularise
Keynesian theory and modern macroeconomics to a wider audience. Samuelson spent most of his
career at MIT, where he attracted many top economists to join. Samuelson modified elements of
Keynes’ theory incorporating elements of neo-classical theory. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in
Economics (1970) for his work in improving economic methodology, as the Nobel citation reads:

“Samuelson has helped to raise the general analytical and methodological level in economic science.”

Amartya Sen, (1933) Indian economist. Awarded Nobel Prize in Economics (1993) for his work on
welfare economics. Sen has dedicated much of his career to the growing branch of development
economics, such as measuring living standards, social justice and wider issues of social choice theory.
Sen has been referred to as the ‘conscience of economics’ for his work on gender inequality and
poverty.

Muhammad Yunus (1940 – ) Bangladeshi banker and economist. Awarded the Nobel Peace Prize (2006)
for his work in microfinance, a scheme for helping poor people to have greater access to finance at low
interest rates. He developed concepts of micro-credit and micro-finance as an effective way to promote
economic development.

Paul Krugmanwriter (1953 – ) American economist. Krugman is a Nobel Prize-winning economist for his
work on New Trade Theory. Krugman is also a leading polemist who rose to public prominence for his
attacks on the Bush Presidency. Krugman was a noted critic of austerity and leading advocate for a
resurgence in Keynesian economics.

How 5 Influential Economists Changed Americas History

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BY JON OGG Updated Jun 25, 2019

There is an old joke that is often told about economists: Three economists are hunting ducks. The first
shoots 20 meters ahead of the ducks, the second shoots 20 meters behind the ducks, and the third says,
"Great job! We got them!"

All kidding aside, there are many economists that do incredible jobs and there are some who have made
contributions to financial theory that crossed over into many aspects of social history as well. In this
article, we'll show you five of these economists and explain their impact on society.

1. Adam Smith (1723-1790)

Adam Smith was a Scottish philosopher who became a political economist in the midst of the Scottish
Enlightenment. He is best known for The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) and An Inquiry into the
Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776). The latter, usually referred to as The Wealth of
Nations, is one of the earliest and the most famous treatises on industry and commerce, and one of the
major contributors to modern academic-discipline economics.

Smith entered the University of Glasgow at the age of 15, and studied moral philosophy. His original
interest in Christianity evolved into more of a Deist stance (although this has been challenged).

Smith's arguments against mercantilism and in favor of free trade were a stark challenge to much of the
protectionism, tariffs and gold-hoarding that prevailed in the mid-18th century; today, he's often called
"the father of modern economics." In a world gone global, imagine how much slower life would be had
free, open trade not been encouraged and if hoarding of hard assets (mercantilism) was the norm:
Economic life would be fairly bleak.
At the end of his life, Smith had most of his manuscripts destroyed, and while some survived, the world
never learned the extent of his final thoughts and theories his final notes. (For related reading, see
"What Are Economies of Scale?" and "Economics Basics.")

2. David Ricardo (1772-1823)

A large family could have contributed to Ricardo's drive; he was the third child of 17 children from a
Portuguese Jewish family. His contributions to the study of economics came from a more hands-on
background than Adam Smith's. Ricardo joined his father to work on the London Stock Exchange at the
age of 14, and quickly became successful at speculating in stocks and real estate. After reading Smith's
The Wealth of Nations in 1799 he took an interest in economics, although his first economics article was
published nearly 10 years later.

Ricardo became a member of British Parliament, representing a borough of Ireland in 1819. His greatest
work, "An Essay on the Influence of a Low Price of Corn on the Profits of Stock" (1815) argued to repeal
the corn laws at the time to better spread the wealth, and he followed it with Principles of Political
Economy and Taxation (1817).

Ricardo was best known for the belief that nations should specialize for the greater good. He was also
vocal in carrying forward the argument against protectionism, but he may have made his greatest mark
on rents, taxation, wages and profits by showing that landlords seizing wealth at the expense of laborers
was not beneficial for society.

Ricardo is one of the shorter-lived of the great economists, dying at age 51 in 1823.

3. Alfred Marshall (1842-1924)

Marshall was born in London, and while he originally wanted to be in the clergy, his success at
Cambridge led him into academia. Marshall may be the least recognized of the great economists, as he
did not champion any radical theories. But he is credited with attempting to apply rigorous mathematics
to economics in an attempt to turn economics into more of a science than a philosophy.
Despite his emphasis on math, Marshall strove to make his work accessible to regular people; his
"Economics of Industry" (1879) became widely used in England as curriculum. He also spent almost 10
years working on the more scientific "Principles of Economics" (1890), which proved to be his most
important work. He is most credited with perpetuating supply and demand curves, marginal utility and
marginal production costs into a unified model.

4. John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946)

Historians sometimes refer to John Maynard Keynes as the "giant economist." The six-foot-six Brit
accepted a lectureship at Cambridge that was personally funded by Alfred Marshall, whose supply and
demand curves were the basis for much of Keynes' work. He is particularly remembered for advocating
government spending and monetary policy to mitigate the adverse effects of economic recessions,
depressions and booms.

During World War I, Keynes worked on the credit terms between Britain and its allies, and was a
representative at the peace treaty signed in Versailles. (To read more about his theories, see
"Understanding Supply-Side Economics" and "Formulating Monetary Policy.")

Keynes was almost wiped out personally by the stock market crash of 1929, but he was able to rebuild
his fortune. In 1936, Keynes wrote his seminal work, the "General Theory of Employment, Interest and
Money," which advocated government intervention to promote consumption and investing – and to
alleviate the global Great Depression that was raging at the time ("spend your way out of depression,"
as critics like to call it). This work has been deemed as the launch of modern macroeconomics. (To read
more, see "Macroeconomic Analysis.")

5. Milton Friedman (1912-2006)

Milton Friedman was the last of four children born to Jewish immigrants from Austria-Hungary. After
getting his Bachelor of Arts degree at Rutgers and his Master's at the University of Chicago, he went to
work for the New Deal, a series of programs designed by U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt to provide
relief to and recovery from the effects of the Great Depression. While Friedman was in favor of the New
Deal overall, he was opposed to most government programs and price controls.
Compared to Keynes, Milton Friedman was more of a laissez-faire economist: He was for minimizing the
role of government in a free market. These ideas formed the basis of his book "Capitalism and Freedom"
(1962). He is perhaps best known for promoting free markets and credited with the concept of modern
currency markets, unregulated and unpegged to precious metals standards (reflecting a mantra of
"money is worth what people think it is worth").

Friedman's works were even circulated underground during the Cold War, and were the basis for
consumption-tax based economies rather than an income tax- or wealth tax-based. (To find out more
about Friedman's ideas, see "What Is the Quantity Theory of Money?")

Friedman believed that introducing capitalism to totalitarian countries would lead to the betterment of
society and increased political freedom. A winner of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in
1976, he was adamant about the link between money supply and inflation. His speech in 1988 to
Chinese students and scholars in San Francisco, in which he referred to Hong Kong as the best example
of laissez-faire policies. was deemed a direct influence on China's ensuing economic reforms.

The Bottom Line

All of the men we have covered had a profound effect on the world, but only time will tell how they will
impact our current economic thinking – and thoughts about where we head next.

2 comments

By VINCE CABLE, Business Secretary, and YORK MEMBERY

Vince Cable
Vince Cable

From the father of Economic History who developed theories to explain why capitalist economies have
fluctuations and crises - to the greatest economic thinker of the 20th century

Adam Smith argued for free trade, market competition and the morality of private enterprise

Adam Smith argued for free trade, market competition and the morality of private enterprise

1. ADAM SMITH (1723-1790)

A key figure of the Scottish Enlightenment, Smith is the giant on whose shoulders subsequent
economists have stood. He is best known for The Wealth Of Nations, his 1776 landmark book on
economics, published at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution - and was even consulted on economic
matters by Pitt The Elder, the Whig politician and Prime Minister. His arguments for free trade, market
competition and the morality of private enterprise remain as fresh and influential as when written over
200 years ago. That said, Smith - who studied and later taught at Glasgow University - saw only a
limited role for government and was hostile to economic nationalism. However, his arguments have at
times been misinterpreted by free marketeers in recent decades. The fact is that he did not believe in
'laissezfaire' (an earlier French doctrine opposing any government intervention in economic matters) -
he saw government's sole job as to establish law and justice, and provide for the nation's education and
basic infrastructure.

David Ricardo

David Ricardo

Fukuzawa Yukichi

Fukuzawa Yukichi

2. DAVID RICARDO (1772-1823)

British political economist - the third of 17 children from a Sephardic Jewish family of Portuguese origin -
Ricardo was a huge influence on 19th-century economics. After making a fortune as a stockbroker, he
became fascinated by economics - and wrote the influential The Principles Of Political Economy And
Taxation (1817). In it, he dealt with questions of distribution (worker and landlord rewards, etc) and the
link with the value of production: in particular, the idea of economic 'rent', where rewards are greater
than the cost of production. This foreshadowed today's debate about 'fair' pay and rewards. Crucially,
he developed Adam Smith's thinking on free trade, and his work helped the Anti-Corn Law League win
the battle over the Corn Laws (protective duties on corn, designed to protect the landed gentry, which
were repealed in 1846) which established Britain as a free-trading nation.
Yukichi pictured on the 10,000 yen note

Yukichi pictured on the 10,000 yen note

3. FUKUZAWA YUKICHI (1834-1901)

An author, entrepreneur and political theorist, Yukichi's ideas made a lasting impact on Japan following
the 1868 Meiji Revolution, which saw the restoration of imperial rule in Japan and set in train its
economic modernisation. Widely regarded as one of Japan's founding fathers, Yukichi tried to
understand how modern systems and organisations worked and how 'civilisation', including business
enterprise and new technology, could be transplanted to Japan to create economic development. He
was an educator rather than an economist but wrote many books that influenced a generation of
Japanese to embrace a rational and scientific approach to economic, and wider, policy. If it hadn't been
for Yukichi, I suspect the modernisation and industrialisation of Japan, and subsequently the rest of east
Asia, would have probably been longer in coming.

4. KARL MARX (1818-1883)

Karl Marx

Karl Marx, who spent much of his life in London (and is buried in Highgate Cemetery), developed
theories to explain why capitalist economies - which he opposed - have fluctuations and crises

OK, Marx might now be remembered as a revolutionary advocate of communism - he co-wrote The
Communist Manifesto - but he was a leading 19th-century economist in the 'classical' tradition. Indeed,
in many ways he is the father of Economic History, having developed explanations for the evolution of
the economic structure from feudalism to capitalism. The German philosopher, sociologist and
economist, who spent much of his life in London (and is buried in Highgate Cemetery), developed
theories to explain why capitalist economies - which he opposed - have fluctuations and crises.
However, despite his belief in capitalism's self-destructive tendencies, much of his economic thinking
stands up to scrutiny. Had it not been for The Communist Manifesto, I think Western commentators
would recognise more readily today his role in advancing economic thinking.

Despite his belief in capitalism's self-destructive tendencies, much of Marx's economic thinking stands
up to scrutiny

Despite his belief in capitalism's self-destructive tendencies, much of Marx's economic thinking stands
up to scrutiny
One of Amartya Sen's key contributions was a book on famine whose essential point was that it
originates in a shortage of income rather than food

One of Amartya Sen's key contributions was a book on famine whose essential point was that it
originates in a shortage of income rather than food

5. AMARTYA SEN (1933-)

Among the most important events of my lifetime has been the economic emergence through rapid
growth of major developing countries - most notably China and India, but also Korea, Brazil and Mexico
among others. A variety of fine economists have contributed to understanding growth and development
in the late 20th century: among them Sen, the Indian Nobel Laureate (he was awarded the 1998 Nobel
Prize in Economic Sciences). One of the Bengal-born economist's key contributions was a book on
famine whose essential point was that it originates in a shortage of income rather than food. More
recently he has sought to inject an ethical dimension into economic thinking. It's interesting to note that
not only are nations like India now making their mark economically, so are their economists.

John Maynard Keynes

John Maynard Keynes

John Maynard Keynes

John Maynard Keynes

6. JOHN MAYNARD KEYNES (1883-1946)

The greatest economic thinker of the 20th century, Keynes (a Liberal incidentally) challenged
fundamentally the idea that market economies will automatically adjust to create full employment.
After working at the Treasury during World War I, he was its chief representative at the post-war Paris
peace conference, but resigned in protest at the harshness of the planned reparations. In the Twenties
he developed radical plans for dealing with unemployment through deficit financing and state
intervention. His insistence on the central role that uncertainty plays in economic decisions foreshadows
much of the current interest in behavioural economics. While his basic economic framework - in which
short-term economic growth (and employment) depends on 'aggregate demand' (consumption,
investment and net exports) is built into many of our forecasting models today. Later on, he participated
in the Bretton Woods conference (which looked at how to establish a post-war monetary system that
would avoid further economic crises) that led to the creation of the International Monetary Fund and
the World Bank. Admittedly, he went out of fashion in recent decades when inflation was a bigger worry
than unemployment. However, the present crisis has led to something of a revival in Keynesian thinking,
and his insights into how international imbalances should be tackled remain highly relevant.
Milton Friedman is associated with two big ideas which have inspired the Chicago School of Economics

Milton Friedman is associated with two big ideas which have inspired the Chicago School of Economics

Joseph Schumpeter is responsible for the idea of capitalism as a (positive) source of 'creative
destruction'

Joseph Schumpeter is responsible for the idea of capitalism as a (positive) source of 'creative
destruction'

7. MILTON FRIEDMAN (1912-2006)

Wrongly described as the antithesis and an opponent of Keynes, Friedman is associated essentially with
two big ideas which have inspired the Chicago School of Economics. One is an uncompromising
restatement and development of Adam Smith's views on the merits of free markets. He made the case
for floating exchange rates (as Britain has had since Black Wednesday in 1992) - but the translation of
this idea into a belief in 'efficient' financial markets has been severely tested (perhaps to destruction) in
the recent financial crisis. His other major contribution, the quantity theory of money - given its first
clear statement by the great Scottish thinker David Hume - linking money supply to inflation, was
embraced in the Eighties by Mrs Thatcher's government with mixed results. It has, however, moved back
to centre stage in the current crisis as central banks have fought recession (and the risks of deflation) by
means of aggressive monetary policy: minimal interest rates and expanding money supply via
quantitative easing.

8. JOSEPH SCHUMPETER (1883-1950)

The Austrian-American economist and political scientist is responsible for the idea of capitalism as a
(positive) source of 'creative destruction'. Technology and capitalism together drive change and growth -
but traditional freemarket thinking would worry about monopolies (albeit temporary) such as
Microsoft's software platforms, which are based on intellectual property protection of an innovation.
However, Schumpeter, who moved to the USA in 1932, saw the process as benign. He believed that such
'monopoly rents' encouraged innovation and investment, which are essential to growth. Modern
capitalism - often based on competition between innovative giant companies - is somewhat closer to the
Schumpeter model than Adam Smith's. Incidentally, Schumpeter's followers are a part of the so-called
Austrian School, which is highly critical of the orthodox (Keynesian and Friedmanite) attempt to fight the
current crisis through reflationary fiscal and monetary policy. They believe banks, governments and
individuals have no alternative but to learn from their mistakes, not be rescued from them.c

9. DANIEL KAHNEMAN (1934-)

Daniel Kahneman, an Israeli-American psychologist - not an economist - did much of the pioneering
work in the fascinating field of 'behavioural economics'

Daniel Kahneman, an Israeli-American psychologist - not an economist - did much of the pioneering
work in the fascinating field of 'behavioural economics'

Perhaps the most radical change in direction in economics in recent decades has been the emergence of
'behavioural economics'. And Kahneman, an Israeli-American psychologist - not an economist - did much
of the pioneering work in this fascinating field. Traditional economics, from Smith and Ricardo to Marx,
Keynes and Friedman, has been based on general theories which treat it as a branch of natural science.
But people are not like atoms, or plants, or rats in mazes. They learn and adapt (or we hope they do),
invalidating models based on past behaviour. However, people also hang on to irrational habits and
seemingly perverse ways of evaluating choices, confounding those economists who premise their
models on 'rational economic man'. Some economists have retaliated by applying economic rationality
to explain non-economic problems such as crime and punishment, prostitution and marriage patterns.

Hyman Minsky described with uncanny accuracy the seven stages of a boom and bust cycle which we
have now seen enacted in our own country

Hyman Minsky described with uncanny accuracy the seven stages of a boom and bust cycle which we
have now seen enacted in our own country

10. HYMAN MINSKY(1919-1996)

The Western world has been painfully reminded over the past three years of the way capitalist
economies - especially their banks - can be caught in speculative financial bubbles which burst with
disastrous effects.

The South Sea Bubble (which saw shares in an 18th-century British company soar before crashing) was
an early example of such an event. The philosopher John Stuart Mill wrote about cycles leading to bank
collapses and ensuing 'credit crunches' in the 19th century - and Minsky was the best analyst of the
problem in recent times.

Sometimes described as a post-Keynesian economist (because he supports some government

intervention), the American described with uncanny accuracy the seven stages of a boom and bust cycle
which we have now seen enacted in our own country.
The Coalition Government is now seeking to manage the consequences and to stop another Minsky
cycle developing.

VINCE CABLE PICTURE BYLINE: Geraint Lewis/Writer Pictures

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Through a glass brightly: A TV made from a single pane of glass, psychedelic effects you could host a
love-in to

'I was an easy target, I had a weird, funny face and I hardly ever spoke... I'd get punched, hit, kicked,
shouted at. And I believed it. I was a pleb, an idiot, a fool. That's who I was,' said Lee Evans

'I was bullied everywhere I went by the kids, the teachers... I was an easy target': The extraordinary trials
and triumphs of Lee Evans, comedy's great survivor
'I was voted the 30th sexiest Welshwoman. That was in a poll a few years ago. I'm not sure how
flattering that's meant to be. I was number one the year after,' said Alex Jones

'People always want to talk to me outside the toilets in supermarkets': The world according to Alex
Jones

Hugh Howey released the first Wool story as an ebook in 2011

This year's 'Fifty Shades of Grey'? How you could follow Wool author Hugh Howey's success in the ebook
market

What do you go to America for? When The Great Gatsby comes out in May, this will expand to include
the distinctly Dorset-like charms of Nantucket

From The Great Gatsby and the Brothers Grimm to pandas and gourmet pandering: Ten travel trends for
2013

The very first Porsche 911 set the tone for the next 50 years, with its sloping back, distinctive circular
headlights and slanted windscreen

Celebrating 50 years of the world's best-loved sports car: The Porsche 911

A Halifax bomber during a raid on an oil refinery in the Ruhr in 1944 (pictured on the right)

World War II's ticking timebombs: How the RAF is helping to find and destroy unexploded wartime
bombs - in Germany

Inside the Dacia Duster Ambiance dCi reminded me of a Nineties Range Rover, with the same hard
plastics and straight lines

JAMES MARTIN: When it comes to car crushes, there's none weirder than a bargain-basement SUV, built
in India by Romanians

The Fiat Panda 4x4 looks like a city car but packs real cross-country skills

JAMES MARTIN: The big boys may scoff, but I loved the diminutive yet surprisingly agile Fiat Panda 4x4

The Jaguar XF Sportbrake: sporty but with a good pedigree

JAMES MARTIN: A posh but sporty estate, the Jaguar XF Sportbrake certainly has British pedigree

The ¿fruit¿ of the speaker tree ¿ ie, the speakers ¿ hang down from hooks, supported by plastic-and-
fabric-wrapped copper cables

Hi-tech speakers - or art installation? No, it's a £15,000 speaker system

The Döttling Fortress is a high-security, motorised safe

Where would an oligarch keep his valuables... in a £120,000 luxury safe of course

Anissa Helou is about to open Koshari Street, a small, hole-in-the-wall restaurant on St Martins Lane in
the West End, serving up the Egyptian classic koshari

TOM PARKER BOWLES: Pharaoh's finest: An introduction to koshari - an Egyptian street food

Bacon, alongside ham, is salt pork's greatest incarnation, cut from the belly (streaky) and loin (back) of
the pig

TOM PARKER BOWLES: Winning streak: Rasher bashers beware... bacon's worth more than its salt

An aristocrat among shellfish: You really want to do as little as possible with scallops, so the flavour can
shine through

TOM PARKER BOWLES: The Nijinksy of the sea bed: Scallops are sublime in the sea and equally good on
the plate

Supermarkets and indies are taking risks stocking wines we've never heard of at attractive prices

OLLY SMITH: Try some new wild flavours in the wine aisles this Spring

Wine that goes with chocolate? There are a few...

OLLY SMITH: Days of wine and chocolate

Tonight, I debated this debacle live with Bowling For Columbine film-maker Michael Moore. And in the
middle of the show, Yoko Ono sent us both a tweet

THE INSIDER: Yoko Ono tweeted, 'Over a million people have been killed by guns in the USA since John
Lennon was shot in 1980'

'Hi, Piers,' Simon Cowell said, giving me a bear hug. 'Wow, have we put on a little bit of weight?' This
was true. We both have

THE INSIDER: 'Ahhh,' purred Simon Cowell, like a contented lion after a satisfying kill. 'This is one of the
greatest moments of my life!'

'We're here to work, and it's bloody hard work. It's no fun running about in the baking heat all day,' said
Philip Glenister (pictured with Marc Warren, Max Beesley and John Simm)

Who let the dogs out? Living it up in Cape Town with Mad Dogs John Simm, Philip Glenister, Marc
Warren and Max Beesley

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