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,
#4601
K. S. Isles
1902 - 1977 (75 years)
Keith Sydney Isles was an Australian economist, academic and university administrator. Early life Isles was a son of Tasmanian farmer Sydney Henry Isles and his wife Margaret Ellen Isles, née Knight. His grandfather was a convict transported to Van Diemen's Land. He and his four siblings were born in Bothwell and grew up with their parents in Spring Valley, Oatlands, Tasmania.
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Martin R. Gainsbrugh
1907 - 1977 (70 years)
Martin Reuben Gainsbrugh was an American economist, practicing statistician, writer, and educator, He was vice-president and chief economist of The Conference Board, Adjunct Professor at the New York University, and president of the American Statistical Association in 1961.
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Royal Meeker
1873 - 1953 (80 years)
Royal Meeker was a progressive American economist, born at Quaker Lake, Susquehanna County, Pennsylvania. He graduated from Iowa State College in 1898, then studied with E.R.A. Seligman at Columbia and for a year at the University of Leipzig . His dissertation was entitled History of Shipping Subsidies .
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Theresa Wolfson
1897 - 1972 (75 years)
Theresa Wolfson was an American labor economist and educator. Wolfson is best remembered as the education director of the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union during the second half of the 1920s and as a leader of the workers education movement during the 1930s.
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Anton Julius Butter
1920 - 1989 (69 years)
Anton Julius Butter was a Dutch economist, Associate Professor the Department of Economics of the University of Amsterdam and deputy director of SEO Economic Research. Biography Butter was born in Amsterdam and received his MA in economics at the University of Amsterdam, where he started working as research assistant, and later assistant professor and associate professor at the Department of Economics. He was also researcher at the Foundation for Economic research, later SEO Economic Research, where from 1975 till 1977 he was deputy director as successor of Joop Klant.
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Arthur Salz
1881 - 1963 (82 years)
Arthur Salz was a German professor of sociology and economics who wrote on mercantilism, imperialism, and power. He taught at the University of Heidelberg before being forced to flee Germany because of his Jewish faith. He was familiar with the Stefan George circle and married Sophie Kantorowiz, the sister of historian Ernst Kantorowicz.
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William H. Lough
1881 - Present (145 years)
William Henry Lough, Jr. was an American economist, and professor of finance and transportation at the New York University School of Commerce, known for his work in the field of corporate finance. Biography Lough was born in Dayton, Ohio to William Henry Lough and Esther Green Stubbs. He obtained his AB from the Oshkosh State Normal School in 1899, and his AM from Harvard University in 1902. He married Elizabeth Howe Shepard on August 24, 1907, in De Pere, Wisconsin.
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E. F. Schumacher
1911 - 1977 (66 years)
Ernst Friedrich Schumacher was a German-British statistician and economist who is best known for his proposals for human-scale, decentralised and appropriate technologies. He served as Chief Economic Advisor to the British National Coal Board from 1950 to 1970, and founded the Intermediate Technology Development Group in 1966.
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Jessica Blanche Peixotto
1864 - 1941 (77 years)
Jessica Blanche Peixotto was an American educator and writer. Early life and family Jessica Blanche Peixotto was born in New York City, New York, the daughter of Raphael Levy Maduro Peixotto, a prosperous Ohioan involved in trade with the South, and Myrtillie Jessica Davis, originally of Virginia. She had four brothers: Edgar Davis attorney; Ernest Clifford artist and author; Capt. Eustace Maduro director of public school athletics; and Sidney Salzado social worker .
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Walter Marshall William Splawn
1883 - 1963 (80 years)
Walter Marshall William Splawn was an American lawyer and economist. Splawn was an Arlington, Texas, native, born to William Butler and Mary Marshall Splawn on June 16, 1883. He graduated from Baylor University in 1906 with a bachelor's of arts degree. Splawn taught at his alma mater from 1910 to 1912, then began the practice of law in Fort Worth, Texas. He earned a master's of arts degree at Yale University in 1914, and returned to teach at Baylor in 1916. In 1919, Splawn joined the University of Texas at Austin faculty. While teaching economics in Austin, Splawn completed a doctorate at the University of Chicago in 1921.
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Herbert Furth
1899 - 1995 (96 years)
Josef Herbert Furth was Austrian and American jurist and economist. He was the son of Ernestine von Fürth, née "Kisch", the founder and leader of the women's suffrage movement in Austria. In 1938, after Austria's annexation to Nazi Germany Furth emigrated to the United States.
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Holbrook Working
1895 - 1985 (90 years)
Holbrook Working was an American professor of economics and statistics at Stanford University's Food Research Institute known for his contributions on hedging, on the theory of futures prices, on an early theory of market maker behavior, and on the theory of storage .
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Stanisław Swianiewicz
1899 - 1997 (98 years)
Stanisław Swianiewicz was a Polish economist and historian. A veteran of the Polish-Soviet War, he was during World War II a survivor of the Katyn massacre and an eyewitness of the transport of Polish prisoners-of-war to the forests outside Smolensk by the NKVD.
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Paolo Baffi
1911 - 1989 (78 years)
Paolo Baffi was an Italian academic, banker, and economist. He was the Governor of Bank of Italy from 1975 to 1979. Biography He was born at Broni. He became governor of the Bank of Italy in 1975, succeeding Guido Carli. His appointment was supported by both the government parties and the main opposition force, the Communist Party.
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Ernest B. Price
1890 - 1973 (83 years)
Ernest Batson Price was an American diplomat, university professor, military officer, and businessman. He spent over twenty years in China and witnessed first-hand warlord power struggles, the growth of Japanese militarism, America's post-war diplomacy, China's civil war, and the profound social change that followed. As a result of this first-hand experience, Price was one of America's foremost authorities on Chinese language, culture, and politics from the early nineteen twenties through the mid nineteen fifties.
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Erik Lindahl
1891 - 1960 (69 years)
Erik Lindahl was a Swedish economist. He was professor of economics at Uppsala University 1942–58 and in 1956–59 he was the President of the International Economic Association. He was an also an advisor to the Swedish government and the central bank, and in 1943 was elected as a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. Lindahl posed the question of financing public goods in accordance with individual benefits. The quantity of the public good satisfies the requirement that the aggregate marginal benefit equals the marginal cost of providing the good.
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John Ulric Nef
1899 - 1988 (89 years)
John Ulric Nef, Jr. was an American economic historian, and the co-founder of the University of Chicago's Committee on Social Thought. He was associated with the University of Chicago for over half a century, and co-founded the Committee there in 1941.
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A. E. Levett
1881 - 1932 (51 years)
Ada Elizabeth Levett , known professionally as A. E. Levett, was an Oxford-educated native of Bodiam, Sussex, who became a pioneering woman economic historian specialising in medieval feudalism. Levett was Vice Principal of St Hilda's College, Oxford, and later took up an appointment to a history chair at Westfield College at the University of London.
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Siegfried von Ciriacy-Wantrup
1906 - 1980 (74 years)
Siegfried von Ciriacy-Wantrup was a German academic. Born in Langenberg, Germany in 1906. After doing his master's work in Illinois, he returned to Bonn to get his Ph.D. in 1931. In 1936, he left Nazi Germany for the United States, arriving at UC Berkeley and the Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics in 1938.
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Alvin Saunders Johnson
1874 - 1971 (97 years)
Alvin Saunders Johnson was an American economist and a co-founder and first director of The New School. Biography Alvin Johnson was born near Homer, Nebraska. He was educated at the University of Nebraska and Columbia . Afterwards, he was employed in various positions at Columbia, the University of Nebraska, the University of Texas, the University of Chicago, Stanford, and at Cornell after 1913.
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Gabriel Hauge
1914 - 1981 (67 years)
Gabriel Hauge was a prominent American bank executive and economist. Hauge served as assistant to the president for economic affairs during the administration of Dwight D. Eisenhower. Background Gabriel Hauge was born in Hawley, Minnesota. He was the son of Reverend Søren G. Hauge, a Lutheran minister and an immigrant from Sandane in Sogn og Fjordane, Norway. Hauge earned a B.A. from Concordia College in 1935, an M.A. from Harvard University in 1938, and his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1947.
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Fredy Perlman
1934 - 1985 (51 years)
Fredy Perlman was an American author, publisher, and activist. His best-known work, Against His-Story, Against Leviathan!, retells the historical rise of state domination through the Hobbesian metaphor of the Leviathan.
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Federico Caffè
1914 - 1987 (73 years)
Federico Caffè was a notable Italian economist from the Keynesian School. Early life Caffè graduated in Business Sciences from the University of Rome La Sapienza in 1936. After World War II, he spent one year in the United Kingdom studying at the London School of Economics. During that period, he came in contact with the Keynesian Economics and saw up close the policies implemented by the then Labour government. Back in Italy, he started his career working at the Bank of Italy, later becoming a teacher at the University of Messina. From 1959 he taught Economic and Financial Policy at the Univ...
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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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Kostiantyn Voblyi
1876 - 1947 (71 years)
Kostiantyn Hryhorovych Voblyi was a Ukrainian economic geographer, scientist economist, professor of the Kyiv University, academician of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences , Vice-president of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences , director of the Institute of Economics . Honored Scientist of Ukraine , awarded the Order of Lenin and the Order of the Red Banner of Labour.
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Morarji Desai
1896 - 1995 (99 years)
Morarji Ranchhodji Desai was an Indian independence activist and politician who served as the 4th Prime Minister of India between 1977 and 1979 leading the government formed by the Janata Party. During his long career in politics, he held many important posts in government such as Chief Minister of Bombay State, Home Minister, Finance Minister and 2nd Deputy Prime Minister of India.
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David Horowitz
1899 - 1979 (80 years)
David Horowitz was an Israeli economist and the first Governor of the Bank of Israel. Biography David Horowitz was born in Drohobych, in Galicia, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, now in Ukraine. He immigrated to Palestine in 1920 and was one of the first members of Hashomer Hatzair.
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Yehuda Grunfeld
1930 - 1960 (30 years)
Yehuda Grunfeld was an econometrician in the late 1950s. Personal life Grunfeld was born on March 11, 1930. On July 16, 1960, the 30-year-old drowned while rescuing his son from an undertow off the coast of Israel.
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Robert F. Hoxie
1868 - 1916 (48 years)
Robert Franklin Hoxie was an American economist, known for his work on labor history. Personal Hoxie was born in Edmeston, New York to Solomon and Lucy Hoxie. He married Lucy Bennett in 1898 and they had no children. Suffering from ill-health most of his life, it is believed that in a mood of deep depression he ended his own life at the age of 48.
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William Blake
1774 - 1852 (78 years)
William Blake was an English classical economist who contributed to the early theory of purchasing power parity. Life He was born in London on 31 January 1774, the son of William and Alicia Blake. He was educated at Charterhouse School, and entered Trinity College, Cambridge in 1789. He graduated B.A. in 1793 as 7th wrangler, became a Fellow of the college in 1795, and graduated M.A. in 1796. Giving up his fellowship in 1797, he entered Lincoln's Inn, and was called to the bar in 1799.
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Harry A. Millis
1873 - 1948 (75 years)
Harry Alvin Millis was an American civil servant, economist, and educator and who was prominent in the first four decades of the 20th century. He was a prominent educator, and his writings on labor relations were described at his death by several prominent economists as "landmarks". Millis is best known for serving on the "first" National Labor Relations Board, an executive-branch agency which had no statutory authority. He was also the second chairman of the "second" National Labor Relations Board, where he initiated a number of procedural improvements and helped stabilize the Board's enfor...
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