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
Arthur Cecil Pigou
1877 - 1959 (82 years)
Arthur Cecil Pigou was an English economist. As a teacher and builder of the School of Economics at the University of Cambridge, he trained and influenced many Cambridge economists who went on to take chairs of economics around the world. His work covered various fields of economics, particularly welfare economics, but also included business cycle theory, unemployment, public finance, index numbers, and measurement of national output. His reputation was affected adversely by influential economic writers who used his work as the basis on which to define their own opposing views. He reluctantly...
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William Stanley Jevons
1835 - 1882 (47 years)
William Stanley Jevons was an English economist and logician. Irving Fisher described Jevons's book A General Mathematical Theory of Political Economy as the start of the mathematical method in economics. It made the case that economics, as a science concerned with quantities, is necessarily mathematical. In so doing, it expounded upon the "final" utility theory of value. Jevons' work, along with similar discoveries made by Carl Menger in Vienna and by Léon Walras in Switzerland , marked the opening of a new period in the history of economic thought. Jevons's contribution to the marginal ...
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Thorstein Veblen
1857 - 1929 (72 years)
Thorstein Bunde Veblen was an American economist and sociologist who, during his lifetime, emerged as a well-known critic of capitalism. In his best-known book, The Theory of the Leisure Class , Veblen coined the concepts of conspicuous consumption and conspicuous leisure. Historians of economics regard Veblen as the founding father of the institutional economics school. Contemporary economists still theorize Veblen's distinction between "institutions" and "technology", known as the Veblenian dichotomy.
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Gunnar Myrdal
1898 - 1987 (89 years)
Karl Gunnar Myrdal was a Swedish economist and sociologist. In 1974, he received the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences along with Friedrich Hayek for "their pioneering work in the theory of money and economic fluctuations and for their penetrating analysis of the interdependence of economic, social and institutional phenomena." When his wife, Alva Myrdal, received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1982, they became the fourth ever married couple to have won Nobel Prizes, and the first and only to win independent of each other .
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Irving Fisher
1867 - 1947 (80 years)
Irving Fisher was an American economist, statistician, inventor, eugenicist and progressive social campaigner. He was one of the earliest American neoclassical economists, though his later work on debt deflation has been embraced by the post-Keynesian school. Joseph Schumpeter described him as "the greatest economist the United States has ever produced", an assessment later repeated by James Tobin and Milton Friedman.
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David Hume
1711 - 1776 (65 years)
David Hume was a Scottish Enlightenment philosopher, historian, economist, librarian, and essayist, who is best known today for his highly influential system of philosophical empiricism, skepticism, and naturalism. Beginning with A Treatise of Human Nature , Hume strove to create a naturalistic science of man that examined the psychological basis of human nature. Hume followed John Locke in rejecting the existence of innate ideas, concluding that all human knowledge derives solely from experience. This places him with Francis Bacon, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and George Berkeley as an empiric...
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Nicholas Kaldor
1908 - 1986 (78 years)
Nicholas Kaldor, Baron Kaldor , born Káldor Miklós, was a Cambridge economist in the post-war period. He developed the "compensation" criteria called Kaldor–Hicks efficiency for welfare comparisons , derived the cobweb model, and argued for certain regularities observable in economic growth, which are called Kaldor's growth laws. Kaldor worked alongside Gunnar Myrdal to develop the key concept Circular Cumulative Causation, a multicausal approach where the core variables and their linkages are delineated. Both Myrdal and Kaldor examine circular relationships, where the interdependencies betwee...
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Knut Wicksell
1851 - 1926 (75 years)
Johan Gustaf Knut Wicksell was a Swedish economist of the Stockholm school. His economic contributions would influence both the Keynesian and Austrian schools of economic thought. He was married to the noted feminist Anna Bugge.
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John Neville Keynes
1852 - 1949 (97 years)
John Neville Keynes was a British economist and father of John Maynard Keynes. Biography Born in Salisbury, Wiltshire, Keynes was the child of John Keynes and his wife Anna Maynard Neville . He was educated at Amersham Hall School, University College London and Pembroke College, Cambridge, where he became a fellow in 1876. He held a lectureship in Moral Sciences from 1883 to 1911. He was elected as Registrary in 1910, and held that office until 1925.
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Francis Ysidro Edgeworth
1845 - 1926 (81 years)
Francis Ysidro Edgeworth was an Anglo-Irish philosopher and political economist who made significant contributions to the methods of statistics during the 1880s. From 1891 onward, he was appointed the founding editor of The Economic Journal.
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John R. Commons
1862 - 1945 (83 years)
John Rogers Commons was an American institutional economist, Georgist, progressive and labor historian at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Early years John R. Commons was born in Hollansburg, Ohio on October 13, 1862. Commons had a religious upbringing which led him to be an advocate for social justice early in life. Commons was considered a poor student and suffered from a mental illness while studying. He was allowed to graduate without finishing because of the potential seen in his intense determination and curiosity. At this time, Commons became a follower of Henry George's 'single tax' economics.
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John Bates Clark
1847 - 1938 (91 years)
John Bates Clark was an American neoclassical economist. He was one of the pioneers of the marginalist revolution and opponent to the Institutionalist school of economics, and spent most of his career as professor at Columbia University.
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Michał Kalecki
1899 - 1970 (71 years)
Michał Kalecki was a Polish Marxian economist. Over the course of his life, Kalecki worked at the London School of Economics, University of Cambridge, University of Oxford and Warsaw School of Economics and was an economic advisor to the governments of Poland, France, Cuba, Israel, Mexico and India. He also served as the deputy director of the United Nations Economic Department in New York City.
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Thomas Robert Malthus
1766 - 1834 (68 years)
Thomas Robert Malthus was an English economist, cleric, and scholar influential in the fields of political economy and demography. In his 1798 book An Essay on the Principle of Population, Malthus observed that an increase in a nation's food production improved the well-being of the population, but the improvement was temporary because it led to population growth, which in turn restored the original per capita production level. In other words, humans had a propensity to use abundance for population growth rather than for maintaining a high standard of living, a view that has become known as the "Malthusian trap" or the "Malthusian spectre".
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Mary Paley Marshall
1850 - 1944 (94 years)
Mary Marshall was an economist who in 1874 had been one of the first women to take the Tripos examination at Cambridge University – although, as a woman, she had been excluded from receiving a degree. She was one of a group of five women who were the first to be admitted to study at Newnham College, the second women's college to be founded at the University.
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Werner Sombart
1863 - 1941 (78 years)
Werner Sombart was a German economist, historian and sociologist. Head of the "Youngest Historical School," he was one of the leading Continental European social scientists during the first quarter of the 20th century. The term late capitalism is accredited to him. The concept of creative destruction associated with capitalism is also of his coinage. His magnum opus was Der moderne Kapitalismus. It was published in 3 volumes from 1902 through 1927. In Kapitalismus he described four stages in the development of capitalism from its earliest iteration as it evolved out of feudalism, which he cal...
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Richard Jones
1790 - 1855 (65 years)
Richard Jones was an English economist who criticised the theoretical views of David Ricardo and T. R. Malthus on economic rent and population. Life The son of a solicitor, Jones was intended for the legal profession, and was educated at Caius College, Cambridge. Owing to ill-health, he abandoned the idea of the law and took orders soon after leaving Cambridge. For several years he held curacies in Sussex and Kent.
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Antoine Augustin Cournot
1801 - 1877 (76 years)
Antoine Augustin Cournot was a French philosopher and mathematician who also contributed to the development of economics. Biography Antoine Augustin Cournot was born at Gray, Haute-Saône. In 1821 he entered one of the most prestigious Grandes Écoles, the École Normale Supérieure, and, according to Sandmo: in 1823 he took a license degree in mathematics at Sorbonne University. He then became the private secretary of a field marshal who required assistance in writing his memoirs. This position left Cournot with considerable time for his own pursuits. In the course of his ten years in the field marshal's employment he took two doctoral degrees, one in mechanics and one in astronomy.
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Tomás de Mercado
1525 - 1575 (50 years)
Tomás de Mercado was a Spanish Dominican friar and both an economist and a theologian, best known for his book Summa de Tratos y Contratos of 1571. Together with Martín de Azpilcueta he founded the economic tradition of "Iberian monetarism"; both form part of the general intellectual tradition often known as "Late Scholasticism", or the School of Salamanca.
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Wesley Clair Mitchell
1874 - 1948 (74 years)
Wesley Clair Mitchell was an American economist known for his empirical work on business cycles and for guiding the National Bureau of Economic Research in its first decades. Mitchell was referred to as Thorstein Veblen's "star student."
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James Mill
1773 - 1836 (63 years)
James Mill was a Scottish historian, economist, political theorist and philosopher. He is counted among the founders of the Ricardian school of economics. He also wrote The History of British India and was one of the prominent historians to take a colonial approach. He was the first writer to divide Indian history into three parts: Hindu, Muslim and British, a classification which has proved surpassingly influential in the field of Indian historical studies.
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Karl Polanyi
1886 - 1964 (78 years)
Karl Paul Polanyi , was an Austro-Hungarian economic anthropologist, economic sociologist, and politician, best known for his book The Great Transformation, which questions the conceptual validity of self-regulating markets.
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Paul A. Baran
1909 - 1964 (55 years)
Paul Alexander Baran was an American Marxist economist. In 1951 Baran was promoted to full professor at Stanford University and Baran was the only tenured Marxian economist in the United States until his death in 1964. Baran wrote The Political Economy of Growth in 1957 and co-authored Monopoly Capital with Paul Sweezy.
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Dennis Robertson
1890 - 1963 (73 years)
Sir Dennis Holme Robertson was an English economist who taught at Cambridge and London Universities. Biography Robertson, the son of a Church of England clergyman, was born in Lowestoft and educated as a scholar of Eton and at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he read Classics and Economics, graduating in 1912.
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Maurice Dobb
1900 - 1976 (76 years)
Maurice Herbert Dobb was an English economist at Cambridge University and a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. He is remembered as one of the pre-eminent Marxist economists of the 20th century. Biography Dobb was born on 24 July 1900 in London, the son of Walter Herbert Dobb and the former Elsie Annie Moir. He and his family lived in the London suburb of Willesden. He was educated at Charterhouse School in Surrey, an elite British public school.
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Ralph George Hawtrey
1879 - 1975 (96 years)
Sir Ralph George Hawtrey was a British economist, and a close friend of John Maynard Keynes. He was a member of the Cambridge Apostles, the University of Cambridge intellectual secret society. He took a monetary approach towards the economic ups and downs of industry and commerce, advocating changes in the money supply through adjustment in the bank rate of interest, foreshadowing the later work of Keynes. In the 1920s, he advocated what was later called the Treasury View. He also advanced in 1931 the concept that became known as the multiplier, a coefficient showing the effect of a change in...
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William Beveridge
1879 - 1963 (84 years)
William Henry Beveridge, 1st Baron Beveridge, was a British economist and Liberal politician who was a progressive and social reformer who played a central role in designing the British welfare state. His 1942 report Social Insurance and Allied Services served as the basis for the welfare state put in place by the Labour government elected in 1945.
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Beatrice Webb
1858 - 1943 (85 years)
Martha Beatrice Webb, Baroness Passfield, was an English sociologist, economist, socialist, labour historian and social reformer. It was Webb who coined the term "collective bargaining". She was among the founders of the London School of Economics and played a crucial role in forming the Fabian Society.
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John Ramsay McCulloch
1789 - 1864 (75 years)
John Ramsay McCulloch was a Scottish economist, author and editor, widely regarded as the leader of the Ricardian school of economists after the death of David Ricardo in 1823. He was appointed the first professor of political economy at University College London in 1828. He wrote extensively on economic policy, and was a pioneer in the collection, statistical analysis and publication of economic data.
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Hjalmar Schacht
1877 - 1970 (93 years)
Hjalmar Schacht was a German economist, banker, centre-right politician, and co-founder of the German Democratic Party. He served as the Currency Commissioner and President of the Reichsbank under the Weimar Republic. He was a fierce critic of his country's post-World War I reparations obligations. He was also central in helping create the group of German industrialists and landowners that pushed Hindenburg to appoint the first NSDAP-led government.
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Lujo Brentano
1844 - 1931 (87 years)
Lujo Brentano was an eminent German economist and social reformer. Biography Lujo Brentano, born in Aschaffenburg into a distinguished German Catholic intellectual family , attended school in Augsburg and Aschaffenburg. He studied in Dublin , Münster, Munich, Heidelberg , Würzburg, Göttingen , and Berlin .
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Richard T. Ely
1854 - 1943 (89 years)
Richard Theodore Ely was an American economist, author, and leader of the Progressive movement who called for more government intervention to reform what they perceived as the injustices of capitalism, especially regarding factory conditions, compulsory education, child labor, and labor unions.
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Nassau William Senior
1790 - 1864 (74 years)
Nassau William Senior , was an English lawyer known as an economist. He was also a government adviser over several decades on economic and social policy on which he wrote extensively. Early life He was born at Compton, Berkshire, the eldest son of Rev. J. R. Senior, vicar of Durnford, Wiltshire. He was educated at Eton College and Magdalen College, Oxford; at university he was a private pupil of Richard Whately, afterwards Archbishop of Dublin with whom he remained connected by ties of lifelong friendship. He took the degree of B.A. in 1811 and became a Vinerian Scholar in 1813.
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Karl Bücher
1847 - 1930 (83 years)
Karl Wilhelm Bücher was a German economist, one of the founders of non-market economics, and the founder of journalism as an academic discipline. Biography Early life Karl Bücher was born in Kirberg, a small village in Hesse, as the son of a small, not very successful brushmaker and farmer; his grandfather Philipp was a cabinet-maker. Karl's mother, Christiane née Dorn, was the daughter of a baker . Bücher attended a private preparatory school with a Pastor in nearby Dauborn and 1863–1866 the Catholic Gymnasium in Hadamar, where he was primus omnium . A former teacher of Bücher's recommende...
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Wilhelm Röpke
1899 - 1966 (67 years)
Wilhelm Röpke was a German economist and social critic, best known as one of the spiritual fathers of the social market economy. A Professor of Economics, first in Jena, then in Graz, Marburg, Istanbul, and finally Geneva, Switzerland, Röpke theorised and collaborated to organise the post-World War II economic re-awakening of the war-wrecked German economy, deploying a program sometimes referred to as the sociological neoliberalism .
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John Rae
1796 - 1872 (76 years)
John Rae , was a Scottish/Canadian economist. Life Rae was one of six children to merchant shipbuilder John Rae and Margaret Cuthbert. He graduating from Marischal College in 1815 with the degree of Master of Arts, followed by two years of medicine at the University of Edinburgh.
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Ladislaus Bortkiewicz
1868 - 1931 (63 years)
Ladislaus Josephovich Bortkiewicz was a Russian economist and statistician of Polish ancestry. He wrote a book showing how the Poisson distribution, a discrete probability distribution, can be useful in applied statistics, and he made contributions to mathematical economics. He lived most of his professional life in Germany, where he taught at Strassburg University and Berlin University .
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Henry Schultz
1893 - 1938 (45 years)
Henry Schultz was an American economist, statistician, and one of the founders of econometrics. Paul Samuelson named Schultz as one of the several "American saints in economics" born after 1860. Life Henry Schultz was born on September 4, 1893, in a Polish Jewish family in Sharkawshchyna, in the Russian Empire . " Schultz's family - father, mother with their 2 sons - Henry and his brother Joseph moved to New York City in the United States. Henry Schultz completed his primary education, as well as undergraduate studies at the College of the City of New York, receiving a BA in 1916. For gradu...
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Gino Zappa
1879 - 1960 (81 years)
Gino Zappa was an Italian economist and one of the most important figures in the fields of economics and accounting in the twentieth century. Biography He was a professor at Bocconi University in Milan and University Ca'Foscari of Venice, where he was also Rector. Zappa dedicated his life to the study of business economics. Pietro Onida, Pasquale Saraceno, Tommaso Zerbi, Giordano Dell'Amore, Ugo Caprara, Aldo Amaduzzi, Giorgio Pivato, Ettore Lorusso, Carlo Masini, Lino Azzini, Luigi Guatri, Arnaldo Marcantonio and others would later expand his ideas.
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William Trufant Foster
1879 - 1950 (71 years)
William Trufant Foster was an American educator and economist, whose theories were especially influential in the 1920s. He was the first president of Reed College. Early life and education Foster was born in Boston, Massachusetts, on January 18, 1879. He attended Roxbury High School in Boston. He graduated from Harvard University with an A.B. in 1901 and an A.M. in 1904.
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Eli Heckscher
1879 - 1952 (73 years)
Eli Filip Heckscher was a Swedish political economist and economic historian who was a professor at the Stockholm School of Economics. He is known for the Heckscher–Ohlin theorem, an influential model of international trade that predicts that capital-abundant countries export capital-intensive goods, while labor-abundant countries export the labor-intensive goods.
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B. R. Ambedkar
1891 - 1956 (65 years)
Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar was an Indian jurist, economist, social reformer and political leader who headed the committee drafting the Constitution of India from the Constituent Assembly debates, served as Law and Justice minister in the first cabinet of Jawaharlal Nehru, and inspired the Dalit Buddhist movement after renouncing Hinduism.
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Austin Robinson
1897 - 1993 (96 years)
Sir Edward Austin Gossage Robinson, was a University of Cambridge economist. He was an undergraduate at Christ's College, Cambridge, and a fellow of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge. A close associate of John Maynard Keynes, Robinson served as assistant editor during Keynes's time as editor of The Economic Journal; following Keynes's retirement in 1944, Robinson took over the joint editorship with Roy Harrod. He was at the centre of economic policy-making during and after the Second World War, holding posts in the Cabinet Office, the Ministry of Production and the Board of Trade. Robinson sp...
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William Cunningham
1849 - 1919 (70 years)
William Cunningham was a Scottish economic historian and Anglican priest. He was a proponent of the historical method in economics and an opponent of free trade. Early life and education Cunningham was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, the third son of James Cunningham, Writer to the Signet. Educated at the Edinburgh Institution , the Edinburgh Academy, the University of Edinburgh, and Trinity College, Cambridge, he graduated BA in 1873, having gained first-class honours in the Moral Science tripos.
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R. H. Tawney
1880 - 1962 (82 years)
Richard Henry Tawney was an English economic historian, social critic, ethical socialist, Christian socialist, and important proponent of adult education. The Oxford Companion to British History explained that Tawney made a "significant impact" in these "interrelated roles". A. L. Rowse goes further by insisting that "Tawney exercised the widest influence of any historian of his time, politically, socially and, above all, educationally".
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John Law
1671 - 1729 (58 years)
John Law was a Scottish-French economist who distinguished money, a means of exchange, from national wealth dependent on trade. He served as Controller General of Finances under the Duke of Orleans, who was regent for the juvenile Louis XV of France. In 1716, Law set up a private Banque Générale in France. A year later it was nationalised at his request and renamed as Banque Royale. The private bank had been funded mainly by John Law and Louis XV; three-quarters of its capital consisted of government bills and government-accepted notes, effectively making it the nation's first central bank. Backed only partially by silver, it was a fractional reserve bank.
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Otto Neurath
1882 - 1945 (63 years)
Otto Karl Wilhelm Neurath was an Austrian-born philosopher of science, sociologist, and political economist. He was also the inventor of the ISOTYPE method of pictorial statistics and an innovator in museum practice. Before he fled his native country in 1934, Neurath was one of the leading figures of the Vienna Circle.
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Bernard Mandeville
1670 - 1733 (63 years)
Bernard Mandeville, or Bernard de Mandeville , was an Anglo-Dutch philosopher, political economist and satirist. Born in Rotterdam, he lived most of his life in England and used English for most of his published works. He became famous for The Fable of the Bees.
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Gustav Cassel
1866 - 1945 (79 years)
Karl Gustav Cassel was a Swedish economist and professor of economics at Stockholm University. Cassel was among the most prominent economists in the world in the interwar period. Cassel was influential in Swedish debates about central planning in the early 20th century. Prior to World War I, Cassel held classical liberal views but shifted towards conservative liberalism in the interwar period.
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William Ashley
1860 - 1927 (67 years)
Sir William James Ashley was an English economic historian. His major intellectual influence was in organising economic history in Great Britain and introducing the ideas of the leading German economic historians, especially Gustav von Schmoller and the historical school of economic history. His chief work is The Economic Organisation of England, still a set text on many A-level and University syllabuses.
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