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
Otto Nathan
1893 - 1987 (94 years)
Otto Nathan was an economist who taught at Princeton University , New York University , Vassar College , and Howard University . Nathan was a close friend of Albert Einstein for many years and was designated by Einstein as co-trustee of his literary estate with Helen Dukas.
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Charles Henry Hull
1864 - 1936 (72 years)
Charles Henry Hull was an American economist and historian. He worked at Cornell University, in Ithaca, New York. In 1900, he was appointed professor of American History. In 1899, he published The Economic Writings of Sir William Petty in two volumes. This edition has become the standard source for referring to the economic writings of Sir William Petty .
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David Littmann
1906 - 1981 (75 years)
David Littmann was an American cardiologist and Harvard Medical School professor and researcher. The name Littmann is well known in the medical field for the patented Littmann Stethoscope reputed for its acoustic performances for auscultation.
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Nicolai Rygg
1872 - 1957 (85 years)
Nicolai Theodorius Nilssen Rygg was a Norwegian economist and Governor of the Central Bank of Norway. Biography He was born in Stavanger as a son of shoemaker Ole Nilssen Rygg and Ane Severine Larsdatter . He was a brother of journalist Andreas Nilsen Rygg. In 1910 he married physician's daughter Agnes Isidore Margrethe Sibbern Møller .
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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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Theodore O. Yntema
1900 - 1985 (85 years)
Theodore Otte Yntema was an American economist specializing in the field of quantitative analysis in finance. Education Yntema graduated summa cum laude in 1921 from Hope College as valedictorian. in 1922, he received his master's degree from the University of Illinois. Yntema received his PhD from the University of Chicago in 1929.
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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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Gerhard Tintner
1907 - 1983 (76 years)
Gerhard Tintner was an Austrian economist who worked most of his career in the United States. Tintner is known for his contributions during the formation years of econometrics as a discipline. In a festschrift in honor of Tintner's 60th birthday, Karl A. Fox lauded Tintner as one of the "foremost econometricians of our time."
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Simon Kuznets
1901 - 1985 (84 years)
Simon Smith Kuznets was an American economist and statistician who received the 1971 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences "for his empirically founded interpretation of economic growth which has led to new and deepened insight into the economic and social structure and process of development."
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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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Frank Ramsey
1903 - 1930 (27 years)
Frank Plumpton Ramsey was a British philosopher, mathematician, and economist who made major contributions to all three fields before his death at the age of 26. He was a close friend of Ludwig Wittgenstein and, as an undergraduate, translated Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus into English. He was also influential in persuading Wittgenstein to return to philosophy and Cambridge. Like Wittgenstein, he was a member of the Cambridge Apostles, the secret intellectual society, from 1921.
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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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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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Richard E. Quandt
1930 - 1974 (44 years)
Richard Emeric Quandt is a Guggenheim Fellowship-winning economist who analyzed the results of the Judgment of Paris wine tasting event with Orley Ashenfelter. Quandt served as a professor of economics at Princeton University. In 1979 he was elected as a Fellow of the American Statistical Association. He was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1991 and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1994. He is current senior adviser to the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
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Alvin Hansen
1887 - 1975 (88 years)
Alvin Harvey Hansen was an American economist who taught at the University of Minnesota and was later a chair professor of economics at Harvard University. Often referred to as "the American Keynes", he was a widely read popular author on economic issues, and an influential advisor to the government on economic policy. Hansen helped create the Council of Economic Advisors and the Social Security system. He is best remembered today for introducing Keynesian economics in the United States in the 1930s and 40s.
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Frank Knight
1885 - 1972 (87 years)
Frank Hyneman Knight was an American economist who spent most of his career at the University of Chicago, where he became one of the founders of the Chicago School. Nobel laureates Milton Friedman, George Stigler and James M. Buchanan were all students of Knight at Chicago. Ronald Coase said that Knight, without teaching him, was a major influence on his thinking. F.A. Hayek considered Knight to be one of the major figures in preserving and promoting classical liberal thought in the twentieth century.
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Edward Chamberlin
1899 - 1967 (68 years)
Edward Hastings Chamberlin was an American economist. He was born in La Conner, Washington, and died in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Chamberlin studied first at the University of Iowa , then pursued graduate studies at the University of Michigan, eventually receiving his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1927.
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Howard Bowen
1908 - 1989 (81 years)
Howard Rothmann Bowen was an American economist and college president, serving as the president of Grinnell College from 1955 to 1964 and as the fourteenth President of the University of Iowa from 1964 to 1969. Bowen then served as president of Claremont Graduate University from 1970 to 1971. He is remembered for the formulation of "Bowen's law," a description of spending in higher education.
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Gottfried Haberler
1900 - 1995 (95 years)
Gottfried von Haberler was an Austrian-American economist. He worked in particular on international trade. One of his major contributions was reformulating the Ricardian idea of comparative advantage in a neoclassical framework, abandoning the labor theory of value for an opportunity cost concept.
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Piero Sraffa
1898 - 1983 (85 years)
Piero Sraffa, FBA was an influential Italian economist who served as lecturer of economics at the University of Cambridge. His book Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities is taken as founding the neo-Ricardian school of economics.
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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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Robert A. Brady
1901 - 1963 (62 years)
Robert Alexander Brady was an American economist who analyzed the dynamics of technological change and the structure of business enterprise. Brady developed a potent analysis of fascism and other emerging authoritarian economic and cultural practices. His essential work is "about power and the organization of power around the logic of technology as operated under capitalism", yielding insights and understanding of modern society's careening path between enhancing or destroying "life and culture".
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Athanasios Asimakopulos
1930 - 1990 (60 years)
Athanasios "Tom" Asimakopulos was a Canadian economist, who was the "William Dow Professor of Political Economy" in the Department of Economics, McGill University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada. His monograph, Keynes's General Theory and Accumulation, reviews important areas of Keynes's General Theory and the theories of accumulation of two of his most distinguished followers, Roy Harrod and Joan Robinson.
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Redvers Opie
1900 - 1984 (84 years)
Redvers Opie was a British economist. On the recommendation of John Maynard Keynes, he became the United Kingdom Treasury representative in Washington, D.C., as Counsellor and economic adviser at the British Embassy, 1939–46, and was one of the five members of the UK delegation to the Bretton Woods Conference, which gave birth to the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.
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Friedrich Lütge
1901 - 1968 (67 years)
Friedrich Lütge was a German economist, social historian and economic historian. He taught at the Leipzig Graduate School of Management and at the University of Leipzig between 1940 and 1947, then moving on to the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich where he taught till a few months before he died. Through his research work between 1949 and 1968 he exercised a great influence on the understanding of economic history in West Germany. Together with Wilhelm Abel and Günther Franz he contributed decisively to research into agrarian history in Germany. He was instrumental in ensuring that soci...
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Heinrich Freiherr von Stackelberg
1905 - 1946 (41 years)
Heinrich Freiherr von Stackelberg was a Nazi economist who contributed to game theory and industrial organization and is known for the Stackelberg leadership model. Stackelberg became a member of the Nazi Party in 1931 and was a Scharführer in the SS. However, his interactions with many German aristocrats who opposed the Nazi regime led to his increased disillusionment with the Nazi movement to the extent that towards the end of his life he no longer supported it.
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Mabel Newcomer
1891 - 1983 (92 years)
Mabel Newcomer was an economics professor at Vassar College from 1917 to 1957. She also taught courses in finance and corporations. Newcomer was known among the Vassar economics department as the best "tax man" during her time there.
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Selig Perlman
1888 - 1959 (71 years)
Selig Perlman was an economist and labor historian at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Background Perlman was born in Białystok in Congress Poland in 1888. His father, Mordecai, was a Jewish merchant who supplied yarn and thread to home weavers and was a friend of Maxim Litvinov's father.
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Edwin W. Kemmerer
1875 - 1945 (70 years)
Edwin Walter Kemmerer was an American economist, who became famous as an economic adviser to foreign governments in many countries , promoting plans based on strong currencies, the gold standard, central banks, central bank independence, and balanced budgets. He helped design the U.S. Federal Reserve System in 1911, edited the American Economic Bulletin and the American Economic Review, and became president of the American Economic Association in 1926.
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Paul Fauconnet
1874 - 1938 (64 years)
Paul Fauconnet was a French sociologist who is best known as a contributor to the L'Année Sociologique. Fauconnet aggregated in philosophy in 1892 and earned his doctorate in philosophy in 1895. He also earned a further doctorate in law in 1920, although his interest in the law was purely scholarly and he never practiced as a lawyer. He became a professor at the faculty of letters in 1907 at the University of Toulouse and later chargé de cours at the faculty of letters in 1921 in Paris, obtaining a chair in 1932. His dissertation was entitled La responsabilité: Etude de sociologie . It adopt...
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John James Deutsch
1911 - 1976 (65 years)
John James Deutsch was a Canadian economist who served as the first chairman of the Economic Council of Canada, and as principal of Queen's University. Born in Quinton, Saskatchewan, and educated at Queen's, he worked in journalism and in government, as well as at the university. In 1947 Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King asked Deutsch to negotiate a trade agreement with the United States, that would have produced a sweeping liberalization of Canada-U.S. trade, had it not in the end been repudiated by King's government. He subsequently became an economics professor at Queen’s, and t...
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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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