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,
#4551
Kermit Gordon
1916 - 1976 (60 years)
Kermit Gordon was Director of the United States Bureau of the Budget during the administration of John F. Kennedy. He continued to serve in this capacity in the Lyndon Johnson administration. He oversaw the creation of the first budgets for Johnson's Great Society domestic agenda. Gordon was a member of the Council of Economic Advisors, 1961–1962. After he retired from government service, he joined the Brookings Institution, first as vice president and then as its president for nearly a decade . During his tenure, Brookings developed a left-of-center reputation chiefly because Gordon was a...
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John Thomas Madden
1882 - 1948 (66 years)
John Thomas Madden A.M., C.P.A., Ph.D. was an educator and business leader who served as the dean of NYU School of Business, introduced much of the modern procurement process, and served as president of Theta Nu Epsilon from 1926-1932 and Beta Alpha Psi, the finance, accounting and information systems fraternity from 1930–1932.
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Kozo Uno
1897 - 1977 (80 years)
Kozo Uno was a Japanese economist and is considered one of the most important theorists on the field of Marx's theory of value. He is an influential Marxist economist in Japan, where his school of thought is called the Uno School . His main work Principles of Economics [経済原論] was published in 1950-52. Among his scholars are Thomas T. Sekine and Makoto Itoh.
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William Harold Hutt
1899 - 1988 (89 years)
William Harold Hutt was an English economist who described himself as a classical economist. Early life Hutt was born into a working-class, but educated family in London, where his father was a compositor. After he completed high school during the height of the First World War, he began training as a pilot, but abandoned his training at the end of the war.
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Viktor Valentinovich Novozhilov
1892 - 1970 (78 years)
Viktor Valentinovich Novozhilov was a Soviet economist and mathematician, known for his development of techniques for the mathematical analysis of economic phenomena. He was awarded the Lenin Prize and served as head of the Laboratory for Economic Assessment Systems at the Leningrad office of the Central Economic Mathematical Institute.
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Gustaf Åkerman
1888 - 1959 (71 years)
Johan Gustaf Åkerman was a Swedish economist who was Professor of Political Economy in what was to later become the University of Gothenburg. He was the elder brother to Swedish economist Johan Henrik Åkerman. His work, in particular the Åkerman problem, played in an important role in the development of Wicksell's work on the role of capital. And was, according to Velupillai, one of the first to approach the problem of fixed capital as a joint product - work that was later developed by Piero Sraffa and John von Neumann
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Maurice Bourguin
1856 - 1910 (54 years)
Maurice Marie Victor Bourguin was a French professor of Law. Bouguin started his career at the University of Douai where he taught administrative law. He moved to the University of Lille Works "Des rapports entre Proudhon et Marx" in Revue d'Economie Politique, Paris, March 1893, Vol. 7, No. 3 pp 177–207La mesure de la valeur et la monnaie Les systèmes socialistes et l'évolution économique
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William Allison Shimer
1894 - 1983 (89 years)
William Allison Shimer was an American professor of philosophy. From 1932 to 1943 he served as the first editor of the Phi Beta Kappa Society's literary journal, The American Scholar. After a stint as president of Marietta College, he spent the latter part of his life teaching in Hawaii and working for the World Brotherhood, an international organization founded under the auspices of the National Conference of Christians and Jews.
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Tord Palander
1902 - 1972 (70 years)
Tord Folkeson Palander was a Swedish economist. His Ph.D. thesis, Beiträge zur Standortstheorie , completed in 1935 at the Stockholm University College, laid foundations to regional science. Palander first studied chemical engineering at the Royal Institute of Technology, and graduated in 1926. He then started to study economics at the Stockholm University College. In 1941, Palander became a professor at the Gothenburg School of Business, Economics and Law, and in 1948 at the University of Uppsala.
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Alfons Goldschmidt
1879 - 1940 (61 years)
Alfons Goldschmidt was a German journalist, economist and university lecturer. Alfons was born in Gelsenkirchen. He was finance editor for Rudolf Mosse's Berliner Tageblatt, and held the chair of economics at the University of Leipzig.
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Henry Clay
1883 - 1954 (71 years)
Sir Henry Clay was a British economist and Warden of Nuffield College, Oxford. Clay was educated at the Bradford Grammar School and University College, Oxford. Between 1917 and 1919 Clay worked as a temporary civil servant at the Ministry of Labour, where he worked closely with Harold Butler. From 1919 and 1921 he was a fellow of New College, Oxford. In 1922 he became the Stanley Jevons Professor of Political Economy at the University of Manchester; in 1927 he became Professor of Social Economics at the University of Manchester. Between 1930 and 1944 he worked as an economic adviser to the Ba...
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Paul Brandon Barringer
1857 - 1941 (84 years)
Paul Brandon Barringer was an American physician and college administrator, the sixth president of Virginia Tech, serving from September 1, 1907 through July 1, 1913. He was also chairman of the faculty at the University of Virginia from 1895 through 1903. He made major changes to the medical curriculum at U.Va, adding requirements for clinical training, as was common in Europe.
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Stanislav Strumilin
1877 - 1974 (97 years)
Stanislav Gustavovich Strumilin was a Soviet economist and statistician. He played a leading role in the analysis of the planned economy of the Soviet type, including modeling, development of the five year planss and calculation of national income. His particular contributions include the "Strumilin index", a measure of labor productivity, and the "norm coefficient", relating to analysis of investment activity.
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Vida Dutton Scudder
1861 - 1954 (93 years)
Julia Vida Dutton Scudder was an American educator, writer, and welfare activist in the social gospel movement. Early life She was born in Madurai, India, on December 15, 1861, the only child of David Coit Scudder and Harriet Louise Scudder. After her father, a Congregationalist missionary, was accidentally drowned in 1862, she and her mother returned to the family home in Boston. Apart from travel in Europe, she attended private secondary schools in Boston, and was graduated from the Boston Girl's Latin School in 1880. Scudder then entered Smith College, where she received her BA degree i...
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T. S. Ashton
1889 - 1968 (79 years)
Thomas Southcliffe Ashton was an English economic historian. He was professor of economic history at the London School of Economics at the University of London from 1944 until 1954, and Emeritus Professor until his death in 1968. His best known work is the 1948 textbook The Industrial Revolution , which put forth a positive view on the benefits of the era.
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Adolph Lowe
1893 - 1995 (102 years)
Adolph Lowe was a German sociologist and economist. His best known student was Robert Heilbroner. He was born in Stuttgart and died in Wolfenbüttel. Major publications of Adolph Lowe Arbeitslosigkeit und Kriminalität, 1914."Zur Methode der Kriegswirtschaftsgesetzgebung", 1915, Die Hilfe"Die freie Konkurrenz", 1915, Die HilfeWirtschaftliche Demobilisierung, 1916."Mitteleuropäische Demobilisierung", 1917, Wirtschaftszeitung der Zentralmächte."Die ausführende Gewalt in der Ernährungspolitik", 1917, Europäische Staats- und Wirtschaftszeitung"Die Massenpreisung im System der Volksernährung", 1917,...
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Feliks Młynarski
1884 - 1972 (88 years)
Feliks Młynarski was a Polish banker, philosopher and economist. Biography Feliks Młynarski was born to Jan Młynarski, a school teacher, and Honorate née Dziurzyńska. He attended a gymnasium in Jarosław, but because of his involvement in organizing meetings in favor of Polish independence, he was expelled by the Austrian authorities, and had to finish his secondary education at a school in Sanok, in 1903.
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Luigi Fontana Russo
1868 - 1953 (85 years)
Luigi Fontana Russo was an Italian economist and lecturer. Career Since 1907 he taught trade policy and customs law at the University of Rome. It was part of the school luzzattiana. From 1913 to 1919 he was Rector of the Royal Institute of Business Studies and Administrative Sapienza University of Rome. From 1928 he taught economic policy. He continued teaching until 1938. He was also President of the Bank of Italy. He organized the Federation of Italian owners.
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Karl Marx
1818 - 1883 (65 years)
Karl Marx was a German-born philosopher, economist, political theorist, historian, sociologist, journalist, and revolutionary socialist. His best-known works are the 1848 pamphlet The Communist Manifesto and the three-volume ; the latter employs his critical approach of historical materialism in an analysis of capitalism and represents his greatest intellectual achievement. Marx's ideas and theories and their subsequent development, collectively known as Marxism, have exerted enormous influence on modern intellectual, economic and political history.
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Alfred Marshall
1842 - 1924 (82 years)
Alfred Marshall was an English economist, and was one of the most influential economists of his time. His book Principles of Economics was the dominant economic textbook in England for many years. It brought the ideas of supply and demand, marginal utility, and costs of production into a coherent whole. He is known as one of the founders of neoclassical economics.
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John Hicks
1904 - 1989 (85 years)
Sir John Richard Hicks was a British economist. He is considered one of the most important and influential economists of the twentieth century. The most familiar of his many contributions in the field of economics were his statement of consumer demand theory in microeconomics, and the IS–LM model , which summarised a Keynesian view of macroeconomics. His book Value and Capital significantly extended general-equilibrium and value theory. The compensated demand function is named the Hicksian demand function in memory of him.
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Vilfredo Pareto
1848 - 1923 (75 years)
Vilfredo Federico Damaso Pareto was an Italian polymath . He made several important contributions to economics, particularly in the study of income distribution and in the analysis of individuals' choices. He was also responsible for popularising the use of the term "elite" in social analysis.
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Ludwig von Mises
1881 - 1973 (92 years)
Ludwig Heinrich Edler von Mises was an Austrian–American Austrian School economist, historian, logician, and sociologist. Mises wrote and lectured extensively on the societal contributions of classical liberalism and the power of consumers. He is best known for his work on praxeology studies comparing communism and capitalism.
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Joan Robinson
1903 - 1983 (80 years)
Joan Violet Robinson was a British economist known for her wide-ranging contributions to economic theory. One of the most prominent economists of the century, Joan Robinson incarnated the "Cambridge School" in most of its guises in the 20th century: she started as a cutting-edge Marshallian and after 1936; as one of the earliest and most ardent Keynesians and finally as one of the leaders of the Neo-Ricardian and Post Keynesian schools. Robinson's contributions to economics are far too numerous to elucidate fairly. Unlike most economists, she was not a "one idea" person, but rather made many many fundamental contributions to very different areas of economics.
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Léon Walras
1834 - 1910 (76 years)
Marie-Esprit-Léon Walras was a French mathematical economist and Georgist. He formulated the marginal theory of value and pioneered the development of general equilibrium theory. Walras is best known for his book Éléments d'économie politique pure, a work that has contributed greatly to the mathematization of economics through the concept of general equilibrium. The definition of the role of the entrepreneur found in it was also taken up and amplified by Joseph Schumpeter.
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Carl Menger
1840 - 1921 (81 years)
Carl Menger von Wolfensgrün was an Austrian economist and the founder of the Austrian School of economics. Menger contributed to the development of the theories of marginalism and marginal utility, which rejected cost-of-production theory of value, such as developed by the classical economists such as Adam Smith and David Ricardo. As a departure from such, he would go on to call his resultant perspective, the subjective theory of value.
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Arthur Cecil Pigou
1877 - 1959 (82 years)
Arthur Cecil Pigou was an English economist. As a teacher and builder of the School of Economics at the University of Cambridge, he trained and influenced many Cambridge economists who went on to take chairs of economics around the world. His work covered various fields of economics, particularly welfare economics, but also included business cycle theory, unemployment, public finance, index numbers, and measurement of national output. His reputation was affected adversely by influential economic writers who used his work as the basis on which to define their own opposing views. He reluctantly...
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William Stanley Jevons
1835 - 1882 (47 years)
William Stanley Jevons was an English economist and logician. Irving Fisher described Jevons's book A General Mathematical Theory of Political Economy as the start of the mathematical method in economics. It made the case that economics, as a science concerned with quantities, is necessarily mathematical. In so doing, it expounded upon the "final" utility theory of value. Jevons' work, along with similar discoveries made by Carl Menger in Vienna and by Léon Walras in Switzerland , marked the opening of a new period in the history of economic thought. Jevons's contribution to the marginal ...
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Thorstein Veblen
1857 - 1929 (72 years)
Thorstein Bunde Veblen was an American economist and sociologist who, during his lifetime, emerged as a well-known critic of capitalism. In his best-known book, The Theory of the Leisure Class , Veblen coined the concepts of conspicuous consumption and conspicuous leisure. Historians of economics regard Veblen as the founding father of the institutional economics school. Contemporary economists still theorize Veblen's distinction between "institutions" and "technology", known as the Veblenian dichotomy.
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Gunnar Myrdal
1898 - 1987 (89 years)
Karl Gunnar Myrdal was a Swedish economist and sociologist. In 1974, he received the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences along with Friedrich Hayek for "their pioneering work in the theory of money and economic fluctuations and for their penetrating analysis of the interdependence of economic, social and institutional phenomena." When his wife, Alva Myrdal, received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1982, they became the fourth ever married couple to have won Nobel Prizes, and the first and only to win independent of each other .
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Irving Fisher
1867 - 1947 (80 years)
Irving Fisher was an American economist, statistician, inventor, eugenicist and progressive social campaigner. He was one of the earliest American neoclassical economists, though his later work on debt deflation has been embraced by the post-Keynesian school. Joseph Schumpeter described him as "the greatest economist the United States has ever produced", an assessment later repeated by James Tobin and Milton Friedman.
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David Hume
1711 - 1776 (65 years)
David Hume was a Scottish Enlightenment philosopher, historian, economist, librarian, and essayist, who is best known today for his highly influential system of philosophical empiricism, skepticism, and naturalism. Beginning with A Treatise of Human Nature , Hume strove to create a naturalistic science of man that examined the psychological basis of human nature. Hume followed John Locke in rejecting the existence of innate ideas, concluding that all human knowledge derives solely from experience. This places him with Francis Bacon, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and George Berkeley as an empiric...
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Nicholas Kaldor
1908 - 1986 (78 years)
Nicholas Kaldor, Baron Kaldor , born Káldor Miklós, was a Cambridge economist in the post-war period. He developed the "compensation" criteria called Kaldor–Hicks efficiency for welfare comparisons , derived the cobweb model, and argued for certain regularities observable in economic growth, which are called Kaldor's growth laws. Kaldor worked alongside Gunnar Myrdal to develop the key concept Circular Cumulative Causation, a multicausal approach where the core variables and their linkages are delineated. Both Myrdal and Kaldor examine circular relationships, where the interdependencies betwee...
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Knut Wicksell
1851 - 1926 (75 years)
Johan Gustaf Knut Wicksell was a Swedish economist of the Stockholm school. His economic contributions would influence both the Keynesian and Austrian schools of economic thought. He was married to the noted feminist Anna Bugge.
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John Neville Keynes
1852 - 1949 (97 years)
John Neville Keynes was a British economist and father of John Maynard Keynes. Biography Born in Salisbury, Wiltshire, Keynes was the child of John Keynes and his wife Anna Maynard Neville . He was educated at Amersham Hall School, University College London and Pembroke College, Cambridge, where he became a fellow in 1876. He held a lectureship in Moral Sciences from 1883 to 1911. He was elected as Registrary in 1910, and held that office until 1925.
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Francis Ysidro Edgeworth
1845 - 1926 (81 years)
Francis Ysidro Edgeworth was an Anglo-Irish philosopher and political economist who made significant contributions to the methods of statistics during the 1880s. From 1891 onward, he was appointed the founding editor of The Economic Journal.
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John R. Commons
1862 - 1945 (83 years)
John Rogers Commons was an American institutional economist, Georgist, progressive and labor historian at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Early years John R. Commons was born in Hollansburg, Ohio on October 13, 1862. Commons had a religious upbringing which led him to be an advocate for social justice early in life. Commons was considered a poor student and suffered from a mental illness while studying. He was allowed to graduate without finishing because of the potential seen in his intense determination and curiosity. At this time, Commons became a follower of Henry George's 'single tax' economics.
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John Bates Clark
1847 - 1938 (91 years)
John Bates Clark was an American neoclassical economist. He was one of the pioneers of the marginalist revolution and opponent to the Institutionalist school of economics, and spent most of his career as professor at Columbia University.
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Michał Kalecki
1899 - 1970 (71 years)
Michał Kalecki was a Polish Marxian economist. Over the course of his life, Kalecki worked at the London School of Economics, University of Cambridge, University of Oxford and Warsaw School of Economics and was an economic advisor to the governments of Poland, France, Cuba, Israel, Mexico and India. He also served as the deputy director of the United Nations Economic Department in New York City.
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Thomas Robert Malthus
1766 - 1834 (68 years)
Thomas Robert Malthus was an English economist, cleric, and scholar influential in the fields of political economy and demography. In his 1798 book An Essay on the Principle of Population, Malthus observed that an increase in a nation's food production improved the well-being of the population, but the improvement was temporary because it led to population growth, which in turn restored the original per capita production level. In other words, humans had a propensity to use abundance for population growth rather than for maintaining a high standard of living, a view that has become known as the "Malthusian trap" or the "Malthusian spectre".
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Mary Paley Marshall
1850 - 1944 (94 years)
Mary Marshall was an economist who in 1874 had been one of the first women to take the Tripos examination at Cambridge University – although, as a woman, she had been excluded from receiving a degree. She was one of a group of five women who were the first to be admitted to study at Newnham College, the second women's college to be founded at the University.
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Werner Sombart
1863 - 1941 (78 years)
Werner Sombart was a German economist, historian and sociologist. Head of the "Youngest Historical School," he was one of the leading Continental European social scientists during the first quarter of the 20th century. The term late capitalism is accredited to him. The concept of creative destruction associated with capitalism is also of his coinage. His magnum opus was Der moderne Kapitalismus. It was published in 3 volumes from 1902 through 1927. In Kapitalismus he described four stages in the development of capitalism from its earliest iteration as it evolved out of feudalism, which he cal...
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Richard Jones
1790 - 1855 (65 years)
Richard Jones was an English economist who criticised the theoretical views of David Ricardo and T. R. Malthus on economic rent and population. Life The son of a solicitor, Jones was intended for the legal profession, and was educated at Caius College, Cambridge. Owing to ill-health, he abandoned the idea of the law and took orders soon after leaving Cambridge. For several years he held curacies in Sussex and Kent.
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Antoine Augustin Cournot
1801 - 1877 (76 years)
Antoine Augustin Cournot was a French philosopher and mathematician who also contributed to the development of economics. Biography Antoine Augustin Cournot was born at Gray, Haute-Saône. In 1821 he entered one of the most prestigious Grandes Écoles, the École Normale Supérieure, and, according to Sandmo: in 1823 he took a license degree in mathematics at Sorbonne University. He then became the private secretary of a field marshal who required assistance in writing his memoirs. This position left Cournot with considerable time for his own pursuits. In the course of his ten years in the field marshal's employment he took two doctoral degrees, one in mechanics and one in astronomy.
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Tomás de Mercado
1525 - 1575 (50 years)
Tomás de Mercado was a Spanish Dominican friar and both an economist and a theologian, best known for his book Summa de Tratos y Contratos of 1571. Together with Martín de Azpilcueta he founded the economic tradition of "Iberian monetarism"; both form part of the general intellectual tradition often known as "Late Scholasticism", or the School of Salamanca.
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Wesley Clair Mitchell
1874 - 1948 (74 years)
Wesley Clair Mitchell was an American economist known for his empirical work on business cycles and for guiding the National Bureau of Economic Research in its first decades. Mitchell was referred to as Thorstein Veblen's "star student."
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James Mill
1773 - 1836 (63 years)
James Mill was a Scottish historian, economist, political theorist and philosopher. He is counted among the founders of the Ricardian school of economics. He also wrote The History of British India and was one of the prominent historians to take a colonial approach. He was the first writer to divide Indian history into three parts: Hindu, Muslim and British, a classification which has proved surpassingly influential in the field of Indian historical studies.
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Karl Polanyi
1886 - 1964 (78 years)
Karl Paul Polanyi , was an Austro-Hungarian economic anthropologist, economic sociologist, and politician, best known for his book The Great Transformation, which questions the conceptual validity of self-regulating markets.
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Paul A. Baran
1909 - 1964 (55 years)
Paul Alexander Baran was an American Marxist economist. In 1951 Baran was promoted to full professor at Stanford University and Baran was the only tenured Marxian economist in the United States until his death in 1964. Baran wrote The Political Economy of Growth in 1957 and co-authored Monopoly Capital with Paul Sweezy.
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Dennis Robertson
1890 - 1963 (73 years)
Sir Dennis Holme Robertson was an English economist who taught at Cambridge and London Universities. Biography Robertson, the son of a Church of England clergyman, was born in Lowestoft and educated as a scholar of Eton and at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he read Classics and Economics, graduating in 1912.
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