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,
#4651
Ludwig Lachmann
1906 - 1990 (84 years)
Ludwig Maurits Lachmann was a German economist, economic theorist and important contributor to the Austrian School of Economics. Lachmann, Israel Kirzner, and Murray Rothbard were the three primary catalysts of the Austrian 'revival', beginning in 1974. He wrote on economic theory, history, and methodology, as well as on the application of Hermeneutics to economic thought, in order to interpret economic phenomena.
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Frank Dunstone Graham
1890 - 1949 (59 years)
Frank Dunstone Graham was an American economist. He was a professor of economics at Princeton University from 1921 to 1945. Graham died in 1949 from a fall at Palmer Stadium during a Princeton Tigers football game.
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Stephen Hymer
1934 - 1974 (40 years)
Stephen Herbert Hymer was a Canadian economist. His research focused on the activities of multinational firms, which was the subject of his PhD dissertation The International Operations of National Firms: A Study of Direct Foreign Investment, presented in 1960, but published posthumously in 1976, by the Department of Economics from Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Charles P. Kindleberger, his thesis supervisor, submitted it for publication, as mentioned by him on the introduction of Hymer's thesis dissertation.
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Arthur Melvin Okun
1928 - 1980 (52 years)
Arthur Melvin "Art" Okun was an American economist. He served as the chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers between 1968 and 1969. Before serving on the C.E.A., he was a professor at Yale University and, afterwards, was a fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C. In 1968 he was elected as a Fellow of the American Statistical Association.
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Douglas Copland
1894 - 1971 (77 years)
Sir Douglas Berry Copland was an Australian academic and economist. Biography Douglas Copland was born in Otago, New Zealand in 1894, the thirteenth of sixteen children. He was raised there and lived there till he was 21. In 1920, at the age of 26, he became Professor of Economics at the University of Tasmania. In 1924 Copland was appointed the Professor of Commerce and first Dean of the Faculty of Economics and Commerce at the University of Melbourne. He was also the Truby Williams Professor of Economics at the University of Melbourne 1944–45.
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Trevor Swan
1918 - 1989 (71 years)
Trevor Winchester Swan was an Australian economist. He is best known for his work on the Solow–Swan growth model, published simultaneously by American economist Robert Solow, for his work on integrating internal and external balance as represented by the Swan Diagram, and for pioneering work in macroeconomic modeling, which predated that of Lawrence Klein but remained unpublished until 1989.
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Joseph S. Davis
1885 - 1975 (90 years)
Joseph Stancliffe Davis was an American economist. He was a professor of economics at Stanford University and a long-time director of the newly established Food Research Institute. In 1944, he served as president of the American Economic Association. He was a member of President Eisenhower's Council of Economic Advisers.
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Rexford Tugwell
1891 - 1979 (88 years)
Rexford Guy Tugwell was an American economist who became part of Franklin D. Roosevelt's first "Brain Trust", a group of Columbia University academics who helped develop policy recommendations leading up to Roosevelt's New Deal. Tugwell served in FDR's administration until he was forced out in 1936. He was a specialist on planning and believed the government should have large-scale plans to move the economy out of the Great Depression because private businesses were too frozen in place to do the job. He helped design the New Deal farm program and the Resettlement Administration that moved subsistence farmers into small rented farms under close supervision.
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Lloyd Metzler
1913 - 1980 (67 years)
Lloyd Appleton Metzler was an American economist best known for his contributions to international trade theory. He was born in Lost Springs, Kansas in 1913. Although most of his career was spent at the University of Chicago, he was not a member of the Chicago school, but rather a Keynesian.
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Clarence Edwin Ayres
1891 - 1972 (81 years)
Clarence Edwin Ayres was the principal thinker in the Texas school of institutional economics during the middle of the 20th century. Life Ayres was born in Lowell, Massachusetts, the son of a Baptist minister. He graduated from Brown University in 1912, and received a Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Chicago in 1917. He taught at Chicago from 1917 until 1920, and then moved on to Amherst College, in Massachusetts, where he taught until 1923. Following a year at Reed College in Portland, Oregon, Ayres became associate editor of the New Republic, where he worked until 1927. In that ye...
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Abbott Payson Usher
1883 - 1965 (82 years)
Abbott Payson Usher was an American economic historian. The Society for the History of Technology has awarded the Abbot Payson Usher Prize, named in his honor, annually since 1961. In the late 1920s Usher, the American historian Lewis Mumford and the Swiss art historian Sigfried Giedion began to systematically investigate the social consequences of technology. In A History of Mechanical Inventions Usher argued that technological innovation was a slow, collective process with many contributors, not relying on the genius of great inventors.
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Henry Calvert Simons
1899 - 1946 (47 years)
Henry Calvert Simons was an American economist at the University of Chicago. A protégé of Frank Knight, his antitrust and monetarist models influenced the Chicago school of economics. He was a founding author of the Chicago plan for monetary reform that found broad support in the years following the 1930s Depression, which would have abolished the fractional-reserve banking system, which Simons viewed to be inherently unstable. This would have prevented unsecured bank credit from circulating as a "money substitute" in the financial system, and it would be replaced with money created by the ...
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Harry Gordon Johnson
1923 - 1977 (54 years)
Harry Gordon Johnson, was a Canadian economist who studied topics such as international trade and international finance. Nobel laureate James Tobin said about him: "For the economics profession throughout the world, the third quarter of this century was an Age of Johnson. ... It was his impact on his own profession ... that justifies calling the era his Age."
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Abba P. Lerner
1903 - 1982 (79 years)
Abraham "Abba" Ptachya Lerner was a Russian-born American-British economist. Biography Born in Novoselytsia, Bessarabia, Russian Empire, Lerner grew up in a Jewish family, which emigrated to Great Britain when Lerner was three years old. Lerner grew up in London's East End and from age 16 worked as a machinist, a teacher in Hebrew schools, and as an entrepreneur. In 1929, Lerner entered the London School of Economics, where he studied under Friedrich Hayek. A six-month stay at Cambridge in 1934–1935 brought him into contact with John Maynard Keynes. In 1937, Lerner emigrated to the United States.
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Oskar Morgenstern
1902 - 1977 (75 years)
Oskar Morgenstern was a German-born economist. In collaboration with mathematician John von Neumann, he founded the mathematical field of game theory as applied to the social sciences and strategic decision-making .
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Allen Schick
Allen Schick is a governance fellow of the Brookings Institution and also a professor of political science at the Maryland School of Public Policy of University of Maryland, College Park. He is known as an authority on budget theory and the federal budget process, in particular. His book, Congress and Money: Budgeting, Spending, and Taxing, won the D.B. Hardeman Prize in 1982.
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Frederick V. Waugh
1898 - 1974 (76 years)
Frederick Vail Waugh was an American agricultural economist known for his work relating supply, demand, quality, and marketing in the prices of agricultural products, for his understanding of who benefits from volatility in agricultural pricing, and for his advocacy of food stamp and food distribution policies for the poor. He worked for the United States Department of Agriculture from the 1920s to the 1970s.
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Paul Rosenstein-Rodan
1902 - 1985 (83 years)
Paul Narcyz Rosenstein-Rodan was an economist of Jewish origin born in Kraków, who was trained in the Austrian tradition under in Vienna. His early contributions to economics were in pure economic theory – on marginal utility, complementarity, hierarchical structures of wants and the pervasive Austrian School issue of time.
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Edward C. Kirkland
1894 - 1975 (81 years)
Edward Chase Kirkland was an American historian. He was a professor of Economics History at Bowdoin College, and the president of the Organization of American Historians and the American Association of University Professors.
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Margaret G. Reid
1896 - 1991 (95 years)
Margaret Gilpin Reid was an economist in the area of household production, housework and non-market activities. Life Margaret Gilpin Reid was born in 1896 in Cardale, Manitoba in Canada, and completed a degree in Home Economics at the University of Manitoba in 1921. She received her PhD from the University of Chicago in 1931 titled The Economics of Household Production. She taught at Connecticut College, Iowa State College and later the University of Chicago, where she received tenure as a Professor of Home Economics and Economics. She became emeritus in 1961.
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Werner Stark
1909 - 1985 (76 years)
Werner Stark was a sociologist and economist, who made important contributions to the sociology of knowledge, the sociology of religion, and the history of economic thought. Biography Werner Stark was born in Marienbad, Austrian Empire , to parents of Jewish origin. His father, Adolf Stark, was a physician for a miners' union and a socialist city council member. His birth was registered by the rabbi of Marienbad, but he was raised as an atheist. After completing his secondary education in Marienbad, he enrolled in the University of Hamburg to study economics and social sciences. While there, he met his wife-to be, Kate Franck who was also a student at the University.
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Otto Eckstein
1927 - 1984 (57 years)
Otto Eckstein was a German-American economist. He was a key developer and proponent of the theory of core inflation , which proposed that in determining accurate metrics of long run inflation, the transitory price changes of items subject to volatile pricing, such as food and energy, are to be excluded from computation.
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Joseph A. Pechman
1918 - 1989 (71 years)
Joseph Aaron Pechman was a highly influential economist and taxation scholar in the United States. He graduated from the City College of New York and the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He served as president of the American Economic Association and was a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He was also a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.
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Max O. Lorenz
1876 - 1959 (83 years)
Max Otto Lorenz was an American economist who developed the Lorenz curve in an undergraduate essay. He published a paper on this when he was a doctoral student at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. His doctoral thesis was on 'The Economic Theory of Railroad Rates' and made no reference to perhaps his most famous paper. The term "Lorenz curve" for the measure Lorenz invented was coined by Willford I. King in 1912.
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Karl William Kapp
1910 - 1976 (66 years)
Karl William Kapp was a German-American economist and professor of economics at the City University of New York and later the University of Basel. Kapp's main contribution was the development of a theory of social costs that captures urgent socio-ecological problems and proposes preventative policies based on the precautionary principle. His theory is in the tradition of various heterodox economic paradigms, such as ecological economics, Marxian economics, social economics, and institutional economics. As such, Kapp's theory of social costs was an ongoing debate with neoclassical economics and the rise of neoliberalism.
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Edwin E. Witte
1887 - 1960 (73 years)
Edwin Emil Witte was an economist who focused on social insurance issues for the state of Wisconsin and for the Committee on Economic Security. While the executive director of the President's Committee on Economic Security under U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, he developed during 1934 the policies and the legislation that became the Social Security Act of 1935. Because of this he is sometimes called "the father of Social Security".
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John B. Condliffe
1891 - 1981 (90 years)
John Bell Condliffe was a New Zealand economist, university professor and economic consultant. Lauded for the decisive role he played in international NGOs in the interwar period, he was one of New Zealand's best-known international economists.
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Morris Copeland
1895 - 1989 (94 years)
Morris Albert Copeland was a US economist who criticized 20th-century macroeconomic theory, and who contributed to the development of modern flow of funds theory. Life Born and raised in Rochester New York, Copeland began his university education at Amherst with an interest in philosophy and Greek. Late in his undergraduate studies he encountered teachers Walter W. Stewart and Walton Hamilton and became fascinated with social accounting and economics. After graduating in 1917 he went on to the University of Chicago for his graduate studies where he came under the influence of Wesley Mitchell, a man who he came to regard as his mentor and good friend.
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Henry Ludwell Moore
1869 - 1958 (89 years)
Henry Ludwell Moore was an American economist known for his pioneering work in econometrics. Paul Samuelson named Moore as one of the several "American saints in economics" born after 1860. Biography Moore was born in Charles County, Maryland, the first of 15 children. He received a B.A. from Randolph-Macon College in 1892 and a Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University in 1896. His thesis was on von Thünen's theory of the natural wage. The visiting lecturers included Simon Newcomb and J. B. Clark and he may have learned some mathematical economics from them. While doing the Ph.D., he spent a year at the University of Vienna.
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Peter DeMarzo
1900 - Present (126 years)
Peter M. DeMarzo is an American economist. He was educated at the University of California, San Diego. Upon graduating with a bachelor's degree in 1984, DeMarzo pursued graduate study at Stanford University, finishing his master's degree and doctorate in 1984 and 1989, respectively. DeMarzo began teaching at the Kellogg School of Management in 1989, and remained on the faculty at Northwestern University through 1997. Between 1995 and 1997, he was a visiting assistant professor at Stanford, after which he secured an associate professorship at the Haas School of Business of the University of California, Berkeley.
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Frederick Macaulay
1882 - 1970 (88 years)
Frederick Robertson Macaulay was a Canadian economist of the Institutionalist School. He is known for introducing the concept of bond duration. Macaulay's contributions also include a mammoth empirical study of the time series behavior of interest rates published in 1938 and a study of short selling on the New York Stock Exchange . The term "Macaulay duration" is named after him.
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Charles F. Roos
1901 - 1958 (57 years)
Charles Frederick Roos was an American economist who made contributions to mathematical economics. He was one of the founders of the Econometric Society together with American economist Irving Fisher and Norwegian economist Ragnar Frisch in 1930. He served as Secretary-Treasurer during the first year of the Society and was elected as President in 1948. He was director of research of the Cowles Commission from September 1934 to January 1937.
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Abram Lincoln Harris
1899 - 1963 (64 years)
Abram Lincoln Harris, Jr. was an American economist, academic, anthropologist and a social critic of the condition of blacks in the United States. Considered by many as the first African American to achieve prominence in the field of economics, Harris was also known for his heavy influence on black radical and neo-conservative thought in the United States. As an economist, Harris is most famous for his 1931 collaboration with political scientist Sterling Spero to produce a study on African-American labor history titled The Black Worker and his 1936 work The Negro as Capitalist, in which he criticized black businessmen for not promoting interracial trade.
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Albert B. Wolfe
1876 - 1967 (91 years)
Albert Benedict Wolfe was an American economist. Life Wolfe was born in 1876. He died in 1967. Career He has served as a president of the American Economic Association. Bibliography Some of his books are:Readings in social problems Savers' surplus and the interest rateSocial problems, an analytical outline for students Works committees and Joint industrial councils
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Leland H. Jenks
1892 - 1976 (84 years)
Leland Hamilton Jenks was an American economic historian, Professor of economics and sociology at Wellesley College, and Professor at Columbia University, where he taught economic history. He is known for his work on the economic history of the migration of British capital and of the American railroad in the 19th century.
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Eveline M. Burns
1900 - 1985 (85 years)
Eveline Mabel Richardson Burns was an American economist, writer and instructor. Born Eveline Mabel Richardson in London, England, she was the only child of Eveline Maud Falkner and Frederick Haig Richardson. Her mother died following her birth, so her father remarried and had three more children. Eveline attended Seatham Secondary School, then entered the London School of Economics at age 16 and graduated in 1920, earning a B.S. with first class honors. In 1922 she married the economist Arthur Robert Burns and the couple emigrated to the United States. After the award of her Ph.D. in 1926, she gained a Laura Spelman Rockefeller Fellowship.
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Edwin Griswold Nourse
1883 - 1974 (91 years)
Edwin Griswold Nourse was an American economist who served as the first chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers from 1946 to 1949. He met a species of extraterrestrial self titled "The Grays" in the summer of 1952.
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Walter Eucken
1891 - 1950 (59 years)
Walter Eucken was a German economist of the Freiburg school and father of ordoliberalism. He is closely linked with the development of the concept of "social market economy". Early life Walter Eucken was born on 17 January 1891 in Jena in Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach , as son of the philosopher Rudolf Eucken , who won the 1908 Nobel Prize in Literature and his wife, Irene , a painter. Walter had one sister and one brother, the chemist/physicist Arnold Eucken.
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Harold F. Williamson
1901 - 1989 (88 years)
Harold Francis Williamson Sr. was an American business historian, and Professor of American and European economic history at Northwestern University, most known for his 1963 work on the history of the American petroleum industry.
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Robert Lekachman
1920 - 1989 (69 years)
Robert Lekachman was an American progressive economist and academic noted for his interest in social justice. He was noted for his interpretation of John Maynard Keynes's General Theory, a topic of several of his books.
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Leo Wolman
1890 - 1961 (71 years)
Leo Wolman was a noted American economist whose work focused on labor economics. He also served on a number of important boards and commissions for the federal government. Early life Wolman was born in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1890 to Morris and Yetta Wolman, first generation Polish-Jewish immigrants to the United States. He attended Johns Hopkins University, receiving his A.B. degree in 1911 and his Ph.D. in political economy in 1913.
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Vera Lutz
1912 - 1976 (64 years)
Vera Constance Lutz, , was a British economist. She was married to the German economist Friedrich Lutz. Career Smith was born in Kent, England, and studied at the London School of Economics between 1930 and 1935 for a PhD. In 1937, she married German economist Friedrich Lutz, and the couple moved to Princeton University prior to the start of the Second World War, and moved to Zurich in 1951. Lutz's main areas of study were credit theory, economic development theory and labour economics. Vera and Friedrich's 1951 work Theory of Investment of the Firm was said to have "greatly influenced modern capital theory, and would remain a major source of reference for the next decade".
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James Harvey Rogers
1886 - 1939 (53 years)
James Harvey Rogers was Yale University Sterling Professor of Economics from 1931 until his death in 1939. He was an adviser to President Franklin D. Roosevelt on monetary economics from 1933 to 1934. He was a student of Irving Fisher and Vilfredo Pareto and is considered Fisher's closest disciple and a proto-Keynesian.
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Ferdynand Zweig
1896 - 1988 (92 years)
Ferdynand Zweig was a Polish sociologist and economist noted for his studies of the British working classes. Life in Poland Zweig was born in 1896 in the Polish city of Krakow into a middle-class Jewish family. He studied at the Universities of Krakow and Vienna, took a Doctor of Law degree, and taught economics in Poland in the 1930s, eventually being appointed to the Chair of Political Economy at the University of Krakow. He and his family escaped the country during the German occupation in 1939, fleeing through Romania, France and the Soviet Union, but one daughter was captured in France a...
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Edward H. Litchfield
1914 - 1968 (54 years)
Edward Harold Litchfield was an American educator and the twelfth Chancellor of the University of Pittsburgh. He is best known for a major expansion of the university, but also a failure to raise sufficient capital to fund such growth, eventually leading to his resignation in July 1965.
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Isaiah Leo Sharfman
1886 - 1969 (83 years)
Isaiah Leo Sharfman was an American economist. He was a professor at the University of Michigan from 1914 to 1955 and served as the president of the American Economic Association in 1945. Early life and education Sharfman was born into a Jewish family in the Russian Empire and came to the United States in 1894. He attended Boston Latin School and Harvard University, graduating with an B. A. in 1907 and LL.B. in 1910. He was an assistant in economics at Harvard College while studying for his degree in law.
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Elmer Ellis
1901 - 1989 (88 years)
Elmer Ellis was an American educator and fourteenth president of the University of Missouri from 1955 to 1966, and first president of the University of Missouri System. He was instrumental in the expansion of the university to include the University of Missouri–Kansas City and University of Missouri–St. Louis. Ellis Library was named in his honor.
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Ingvar Svennilson
1908 - 1972 (64 years)
Sven Ingvar Svennilson was a Swedish economist that became known for his theories in planned economics. He was a member of the Stockholm School of Economic Thought. From 1969–1971, he was a member of the committee that selects the laureates for the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences, the Economics Prize Committee.
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Wallace Brett Donham
1877 - 1954 (77 years)
Wallace Brett Donham was an American organizational theorist, professor of business administration and the second dean of the Harvard Business School, from 1919 to 1942. The use of case studies in the HBS education curriculum was greatly expanded during Donham's time as dean.
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Ralph C. Davis
1894 - Present (132 years)
Ralph Currier Davis was an American industrial and consulting engineer, Professor of Business Organization at Ohio State University, and organizational theorist. He is known for his work on top management, especially his 1951 extension of Henri Fayol's work.
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