The Most Influential People Across History
Find the most influential people in 24 academic disciplines and numerous subdisciplines
Find famous and important people related to your research. This is an excellent tool for research papers, topic papers, and building a bibliography. Using our influence-based algorithm, our rankings synthesize data from Wikipedia, Wikidata, Semantic Scholar, and CrossRef.
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List of the most influential people in Economics,
#4501
Beatrice Webb
1858 - 1943 (85 years)
Martha Beatrice Webb, Baroness Passfield, was an English sociologist, economist, socialist, labour historian and social reformer. It was Webb who coined the term "collective bargaining". She was among the founders of the London School of Economics and played a crucial role in forming the Fabian Society.
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John Ramsay McCulloch
1789 - 1864 (75 years)
John Ramsay McCulloch was a Scottish economist, author and editor, widely regarded as the leader of the Ricardian school of economists after the death of David Ricardo in 1823. He was appointed the first professor of political economy at University College London in 1828. He wrote extensively on economic policy, and was a pioneer in the collection, statistical analysis and publication of economic data.
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Hjalmar Schacht
1877 - 1970 (93 years)
Hjalmar Schacht was a German economist, banker, centre-right politician, and co-founder of the German Democratic Party. He served as the Currency Commissioner and President of the Reichsbank under the Weimar Republic. He was a fierce critic of his country's post-World War I reparations obligations. He was also central in helping create the group of German industrialists and landowners that pushed Hindenburg to appoint the first NSDAP-led government.
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Lujo Brentano
1844 - 1931 (87 years)
Lujo Brentano was an eminent German economist and social reformer. Biography Lujo Brentano, born in Aschaffenburg into a distinguished German Catholic intellectual family , attended school in Augsburg and Aschaffenburg. He studied in Dublin , Münster, Munich, Heidelberg , Würzburg, Göttingen , and Berlin .
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Richard T. Ely
1854 - 1943 (89 years)
Richard Theodore Ely was an American economist, author, and leader of the Progressive movement who called for more government intervention to reform what they perceived as the injustices of capitalism, especially regarding factory conditions, compulsory education, child labor, and labor unions.
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Nassau William Senior
1790 - 1864 (74 years)
Nassau William Senior , was an English lawyer known as an economist. He was also a government adviser over several decades on economic and social policy on which he wrote extensively. Early life He was born at Compton, Berkshire, the eldest son of Rev. J. R. Senior, vicar of Durnford, Wiltshire. He was educated at Eton College and Magdalen College, Oxford; at university he was a private pupil of Richard Whately, afterwards Archbishop of Dublin with whom he remained connected by ties of lifelong friendship. He took the degree of B.A. in 1811 and became a Vinerian Scholar in 1813.
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Karl Bücher
1847 - 1930 (83 years)
Karl Wilhelm Bücher was a German economist, one of the founders of non-market economics, and the founder of journalism as an academic discipline. Biography Early life Karl Bücher was born in Kirberg, a small village in Hesse, as the son of a small, not very successful brushmaker and farmer; his grandfather Philipp was a cabinet-maker. Karl's mother, Christiane née Dorn, was the daughter of a baker . Bücher attended a private preparatory school with a Pastor in nearby Dauborn and 1863–1866 the Catholic Gymnasium in Hadamar, where he was primus omnium . A former teacher of Bücher's recommende...
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Wilhelm Röpke
1899 - 1966 (67 years)
Wilhelm Röpke was a German economist and social critic, best known as one of the spiritual fathers of the social market economy. A Professor of Economics, first in Jena, then in Graz, Marburg, Istanbul, and finally Geneva, Switzerland, Röpke theorised and collaborated to organise the post-World War II economic re-awakening of the war-wrecked German economy, deploying a program sometimes referred to as the sociological neoliberalism .
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John Rae
1796 - 1872 (76 years)
John Rae , was a Scottish/Canadian economist. Life Rae was one of six children to merchant shipbuilder John Rae and Margaret Cuthbert. He graduating from Marischal College in 1815 with the degree of Master of Arts, followed by two years of medicine at the University of Edinburgh.
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Ladislaus Bortkiewicz
1868 - 1931 (63 years)
Ladislaus Josephovich Bortkiewicz was a Russian economist and statistician of Polish ancestry. He wrote a book showing how the Poisson distribution, a discrete probability distribution, can be useful in applied statistics, and he made contributions to mathematical economics. He lived most of his professional life in Germany, where he taught at Strassburg University and Berlin University .
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Henry Schultz
1893 - 1938 (45 years)
Henry Schultz was an American economist, statistician, and one of the founders of econometrics. Paul Samuelson named Schultz as one of the several "American saints in economics" born after 1860. Life Henry Schultz was born on September 4, 1893, in a Polish Jewish family in Sharkawshchyna, in the Russian Empire . " Schultz's family - father, mother with their 2 sons - Henry and his brother Joseph moved to New York City in the United States. Henry Schultz completed his primary education, as well as undergraduate studies at the College of the City of New York, receiving a BA in 1916. For gradu...
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Gino Zappa
1879 - 1960 (81 years)
Gino Zappa was an Italian economist and one of the most important figures in the fields of economics and accounting in the twentieth century. Biography He was a professor at Bocconi University in Milan and University Ca'Foscari of Venice, where he was also Rector. Zappa dedicated his life to the study of business economics. Pietro Onida, Pasquale Saraceno, Tommaso Zerbi, Giordano Dell'Amore, Ugo Caprara, Aldo Amaduzzi, Giorgio Pivato, Ettore Lorusso, Carlo Masini, Lino Azzini, Luigi Guatri, Arnaldo Marcantonio and others would later expand his ideas.
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William Trufant Foster
1879 - 1950 (71 years)
William Trufant Foster was an American educator and economist, whose theories were especially influential in the 1920s. He was the first president of Reed College. Early life and education Foster was born in Boston, Massachusetts, on January 18, 1879. He attended Roxbury High School in Boston. He graduated from Harvard University with an A.B. in 1901 and an A.M. in 1904.
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Eli Heckscher
1879 - 1952 (73 years)
Eli Filip Heckscher was a Swedish political economist and economic historian who was a professor at the Stockholm School of Economics. He is known for the Heckscher–Ohlin theorem, an influential model of international trade that predicts that capital-abundant countries export capital-intensive goods, while labor-abundant countries export the labor-intensive goods.
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B. R. Ambedkar
1891 - 1956 (65 years)
Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar was an Indian jurist, economist, social reformer and political leader who headed the committee drafting the Constitution of India from the Constituent Assembly debates, served as Law and Justice minister in the first cabinet of Jawaharlal Nehru, and inspired the Dalit Buddhist movement after renouncing Hinduism.
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Austin Robinson
1897 - 1993 (96 years)
Sir Edward Austin Gossage Robinson, was a University of Cambridge economist. He was an undergraduate at Christ's College, Cambridge, and a fellow of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge. A close associate of John Maynard Keynes, Robinson served as assistant editor during Keynes's time as editor of The Economic Journal; following Keynes's retirement in 1944, Robinson took over the joint editorship with Roy Harrod. He was at the centre of economic policy-making during and after the Second World War, holding posts in the Cabinet Office, the Ministry of Production and the Board of Trade. Robinson sp...
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William Cunningham
1849 - 1919 (70 years)
William Cunningham was a Scottish economic historian and Anglican priest. He was a proponent of the historical method in economics and an opponent of free trade. Early life and education Cunningham was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, the third son of James Cunningham, Writer to the Signet. Educated at the Edinburgh Institution , the Edinburgh Academy, the University of Edinburgh, and Trinity College, Cambridge, he graduated BA in 1873, having gained first-class honours in the Moral Science tripos.
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R. H. Tawney
1880 - 1962 (82 years)
Richard Henry Tawney was an English economic historian, social critic, ethical socialist, Christian socialist, and important proponent of adult education. The Oxford Companion to British History explained that Tawney made a "significant impact" in these "interrelated roles". A. L. Rowse goes further by insisting that "Tawney exercised the widest influence of any historian of his time, politically, socially and, above all, educationally".
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John Law
1671 - 1729 (58 years)
John Law was a Scottish-French economist who distinguished money, a means of exchange, from national wealth dependent on trade. He served as Controller General of Finances under the Duke of Orleans, who was regent for the juvenile Louis XV of France. In 1716, Law set up a private Banque Générale in France. A year later it was nationalised at his request and renamed as Banque Royale. The private bank had been funded mainly by John Law and Louis XV; three-quarters of its capital consisted of government bills and government-accepted notes, effectively making it the nation's first central bank. Backed only partially by silver, it was a fractional reserve bank.
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Otto Neurath
1882 - 1945 (63 years)
Otto Karl Wilhelm Neurath was an Austrian-born philosopher of science, sociologist, and political economist. He was also the inventor of the ISOTYPE method of pictorial statistics and an innovator in museum practice. Before he fled his native country in 1934, Neurath was one of the leading figures of the Vienna Circle.
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Bernard Mandeville
1670 - 1733 (63 years)
Bernard Mandeville, or Bernard de Mandeville , was an Anglo-Dutch philosopher, political economist and satirist. Born in Rotterdam, he lived most of his life in England and used English for most of his published works. He became famous for The Fable of the Bees.
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Gustav Cassel
1866 - 1945 (79 years)
Karl Gustav Cassel was a Swedish economist and professor of economics at Stockholm University. Cassel was among the most prominent economists in the world in the interwar period. Cassel was influential in Swedish debates about central planning in the early 20th century. Prior to World War I, Cassel held classical liberal views but shifted towards conservative liberalism in the interwar period.
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William Ashley
1860 - 1927 (67 years)
Sir William James Ashley was an English economic historian. His major intellectual influence was in organising economic history in Great Britain and introducing the ideas of the leading German economic historians, especially Gustav von Schmoller and the historical school of economic history. His chief work is The Economic Organisation of England, still a set text on many A-level and University syllabuses.
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Roy Harrod
1900 - 1978 (78 years)
Sir Henry Roy Forbes Harrod was an English economist. He is best known for writing The Life of John Maynard Keynes and for the development of the Harrod–Domar model, which he and Evsey Domar developed independently. He is also known for his International Economics, a former standard textbook, the first edition of which contained some observations and ruminations that would foreshadow theories developed independently by later scholars .
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Charles Gide
1847 - 1932 (85 years)
Charles Gide was a French economist and historian of economic thought. He was a professor at the University of Bordeaux, at Montpellier, at Université de Paris and finally at Collège de France. His nephew was the author André Gide.
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Frank Fetter
1863 - 1949 (86 years)
Frank Albert Fetter was an American economist of the Austrian School. Fetter's treatise, The Principles of Economics, contributed to an increased American interest in the Austrian School, including the theories of Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk, Friedrich von Wieser, and Ludwig von Mises.
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Étienne Laspeyres
1834 - 1913 (79 years)
Ernst Louis Étienne Laspeyres was a German economist. He was Professor ordinarius of economics and statistics or State Sciences and cameralistics in Basel, Riga, Dorpat , Karlsruhe, and finally for 26 years in Gießen. Laspeyres was the scion of a Huguenot family of originally Gascon descent which had settled in Berlin in the 17th century, and he emphasised the Occitan pronunciation of his name as a link to his Gascon origins.
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William Ewart Gladstone
1809 - 1898 (89 years)
William Ewart Gladstone was a British statesman and Liberal politician. In a career lasting over 60 years, he served for 12 years as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, spread over four non-consecutive terms beginning in 1868 and ending in 1894. He also served as Chancellor of the Exchequer four times, for over 12 years.
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Alexander Rüstow
1885 - 1963 (78 years)
Alexander Rüstow was a German sociologist and economist. In 1938 he originated the term neoliberalism at the Colloque Walter Lippmann. He was one of the fathers of the "Social Market Economy" that shaped the economy of West Germany after World War II. He is the grandnephew of Wilhelm Rüstow, the grandson of Cäsar Rüstow and the father of Dankwart Rustow.
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August Lösch
1906 - 1945 (39 years)
August Lösch was a German economist, known for his seminal contributions to regional science and urban economics. Born in Öhringen, Württemberg, Lösch obtained his doctorate from the University of Bonn in 1932. His magnum opus, Die räumliche Ordnung der Wirtschaft , appeared in 1940.
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Karl Knies
1821 - 1898 (77 years)
Karl Gustav Adolf Knies was a German economist of the historical school of economics, best known as the author of Political Economy from the Standpoint of the Historical Method . Knies taught at the University of Heidelberg for over 30 years, and was perhaps the most theoretically oriented economist of the older historical school.
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Alfred Weber
1868 - 1958 (90 years)
Carl David Alfred Weber was a German economist, geographer, sociologist and theoretician of culture whose work was influential in the development of modern economic geography. Life Alfred Weber, younger brother of the well-known sociologist Max Weber, was born in Erfurt and raised in Charlottenburg. From 1907 to 1933, he was a professor at the University of Heidelberg. Weber started his career as a lawyer and worked as a sociologist and cultural philosopher.
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Arthur Lyon Bowley
1869 - 1957 (88 years)
Sir Arthur Lyon Bowley, FBA was an English statistician and economist who worked on economic statistics and pioneered the use of sampling techniques in social surveys. Early life Bowley's father, James William Lyon Bowley, was a minister in the Church of England. He died at the age of 40 when Arthur was one, leaving Arthur's mother as mother or stepmother to seven children. Arthur was educated at Christ's Hospital, and won a scholarship to Trinity College, Cambridge to study mathematics. He graduated as Tenth Wrangler.
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Vladimir Lenin
1870 - 1924 (54 years)
Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov , better known as Vladimir Lenin, was a Russian revolutionary, politician, and political theorist. He served as the first and founding head of government of Soviet Russia from 1917 to 1924 and of the Soviet Union from 1922 to 1924. Under his administration, Russia, and later the Soviet Union, became a one-party socialist state governed by the Communist Party. Ideologically a Marxist, his developments to the ideology are called Leninism.
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Edwin Cannan
1861 - 1935 (74 years)
Edwin Cannan was a British economist and historian of economic thought. He taught at the London School of Economics from 1895 to 1926. Biography Edwin Cannan was the younger son of David Alexander Cannan and artist Jane Dorothea Claude. His mother died at the age of 38 of tuberculosis in Madeira, Portugal 18 days after her son Edwin was born.
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Georg Friedrich Knapp
1842 - 1926 (84 years)
Georg Friedrich Knapp was a German economist who in 1905 published The State Theory of Money, which founded the chartalist school of monetary theory, which argues that money's value derives from its issuance by an institutional form of government rather than spontaneously through relations of exchange.
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William Phillips
1914 - 1975 (61 years)
#4538
Alfred Marshall
#4539
G. D. H. Cole
1889 - 1959 (70 years)
George Douglas Howard Cole was an English political theorist, economist, and historian. As a believer in common ownership of the means of production, he theorised guild socialism . He belonged to the Fabian Society and was an advocate for the co-operative movement.
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Herbert J. Davenport
1861 - 1931 (70 years)
Herbert Joseph Davenport was an American economist and critic of the Austrian School, educator and author. Biography Born in Vermont, Davenport studied at the University of Chicago for a year or so under Thorstein Veblen, with whom he formed a lifelong friendship. His studies were apparently motivated, like many other revolutionary political economists of his time, by a desire to find the flaws in socialism.
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Henry Wallich
1914 - 1988 (74 years)
Henry Christopher Wallich was a German American economist who served as a member of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors from 1974 to 1986. He previously served as a member of the Council of the Economic Advisers under President Dwight D. Eisenhower. Wallich also held a professorship of economics at Yale University. He was best known as an economic columnist for Newsweek magazine, from 1965 until he joined The Federal Reserve. For a period he wrote one week in three, with Milton Friedman and Paul Samuelson, with their 1967 columns earning the magazine a Gerald Loeb Special Award in 1968.
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James Laurence Laughlin
1850 - 1933 (83 years)
James Laurence Laughlin was an American economist and professor at Cornell University, Harvard University, and the University of Chicago, who helped to found the Federal Reserve System and was "one of the most ardent defenders of the gold standard."
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Clément Juglar
1819 - 1905 (86 years)
Clément Juglar was a French doctor and statistician. Juglar cycles He was one of the first to develop an economic theory of business cycles. He identified the fixed investment cycle of six to ten years that is now associated with his name. Within the Juglar cycle one can observe oscillations of investments into fixed capital and not just changes in the level of employment of the fixed capital , as is observed with respect to Kitchin cycles.
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Franz Oppenheimer
1864 - 1943 (79 years)
Franz Oppenheimer was a German Jewish sociologist and political economist, who published also in the area of the fundamental sociology of the state. Life and career After studying medicine in Freiburg and Berlin, Oppenheimer practiced as a physician in Berlin from 1886 to 1895. From 1890 onwards, he began to concern himself with sociopolitical questions and social economics. After his activity as a physician, he was editor-in-chief of the magazine Welt am Morgen, where he became acquainted with Friedrich Naumann, who was, at the time, working door-to-door for different daily papers.
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Fred M. Taylor
1855 - 1932 (77 years)
Fred Manville Taylor was a U.S. economist and educator best known for his contribution to the theory of market socialism. He taught mostly history at Albion College from 1879 to 1892. He taught in the department of economics at University of Michigan from 1892 to 1929 after receiving his Ph.D. in political philosophy there in 1888. His Principles of Economics went through 9 editions. Of a libertarian ideology, he was noted as a clear and rigorous expositor of economic theory in the partial-equilibrium lineage of Alfred Marshall.
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John Maurice Clark
1884 - 1963 (79 years)
John Maurice Clark was an American economist whose work combined the rigor of traditional economic analysis with an "institutionalist" attitude. Clark was a pioneer in developing the notion of workable competition and the theoretical basis of modern Keynesian economics, including the concept of the economic multiplier.
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Ferdinand Tönnies
1855 - 1936 (81 years)
Ferdinand Tönnies was a German sociologist, economist, and philosopher. He was a significant contributor to sociological theory and field studies, best known for distinguishing between two types of social groups, Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft . He co-founded the German Society for Sociology together with Max Weber and Georg Simmel and many other founders. He was president of the society from 1909 to 1933, after which he was ousted for having criticized the Nazis. Tönnies was regarded as the first proper German sociologist and published over 900 works, contributing to many areas of sociology and philosophy.
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Ragnar Nurkse
1907 - 1959 (52 years)
Ragnar Wilhelm Nurkse was an Estonian-American economist and policy maker mainly in the fields of international finance and economic development. He is considered the pioneer of Balanced Growth Theory.
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Evsei Liberman
1897 - 1981 (84 years)
Evsei Grigorievich Liberman was a Soviet economist who lived in Kharkov, Ukrainian SSR. He is noted as the architect of the Soviet economic reform of 1965, also known as "Libermanism". Biography Liberman was born in Slavuta, Russian Empire, in a wealthy Jewish family. He was a graduate of Kiev University, Faculty of Law in 1920 and Kharkiv Institute of Engineering and Economics, Machine-Building Faculty in 1933. During 1920s he worked as a researcher at the Kharkiv Institute of Labor. He taught at the Kharkiv Institute of National Economy in 1920s, Kharkiv Engineering and Economic Institute in 1930s-1950-s, the Kharkiv V.I.
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Harry Dexter White
1892 - 1948 (56 years)
Harry Dexter White was a senior U.S. Treasury department official. Working closely with the Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau Jr., he helped set American financial policy toward the Allies of World War II. He was later accused of espionage by passing information to the Soviet Union.
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