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.
Students and researchers now have a fast and reliable way to find influential thinkers from 24 disciplines and 300 sub-disciplines (and growing). If you want to find history’s most influential philsosophers, or the world’s most influential mathematicians currently, now you can.
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List of the most influential people in Economics,
#4651
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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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)
#4685
Alfred Marshall
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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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Emily Greene Balch
1867 - 1961 (94 years)
Emily Greene Balch was an American economist, sociologist and pacifist. Balch combined an academic career at Wellesley College with a long-standing interest in social issues such as poverty, child labor, and immigration, as well as settlement work to uplift poor immigrants and reduce juvenile delinquency.
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Martín de Azpilcueta
1492 - 1586 (94 years)
Martín de Azpilcueta , or Doctor Navarrus, was an important Spanish canonist and theologian in his time, and an early economist who independently formulated the quantity theory of money in 1556. Life He was born in Barásoain, Navarre, and was a relative of Francis Xavier. He obtained a degree in theology at Alcalá, then in 1518 he obtained a degree of doctor in canon law from Toulouse in France. Beginning in 1524, Azpilcueta served in several canon law chairs at the University of Salamanca. From 1538 to 1556, he taught at Coimbra University in Portugal, at the invitation of the kings of Portu...
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Benjamin Anderson
1886 - 1949 (63 years)
Benjamin McAlester Anderson Jr. was an American economist of the Austrian School. Early life and education Benjamin Anderson was born in Columbia, Missouri on May 1, 1886, to Benjamin McLean Anderson, a businessman and politician, and Mary Frances Anderson . When he was sixteen years old, Anderson enrolled in classes at the University of Missouri in his hometown and earned his A.B. in 1906. After receiving his bachelor's degree, Anderson accepted an appointment as professor of political economy and sociology at Missouri Valley College, where he remained for a year before becoming head of the ...
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