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,
#4751
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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Michael Polanyi
1891 - 1976 (85 years)
Michael Polanyi was a Hungarian-British polymath, who made important theoretical contributions to physical chemistry, economics, and philosophy. He argued that positivism is a false account of knowing.
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Thomas Sewall Adams
1873 - 1933 (60 years)
Thomas Sewall Adams was an American economist who was Professor of Political Economy at Yale University. He was advisor to the U.S. Treasury Department, and a key architect of the post-WWI fiscal state in the United States.
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Henry Carter Adams
1851 - 1921 (70 years)
Henry Carter Adams was a U.S. economist and Professor of Political Economy and finance at the University of Michigan. Early years Adams was born in Davenport, Iowa on December 31, 1851, son of Ephraim Adams and Elizabeth S.A. Douglass, and grandson of Ephraim Adams, of New Ipswich, New Hampshire. His father was a missionary of the "Iowa Band" from New England. He graduated from Iowa College in 1874, now called Grinnell College, which was co-founded by his father. Adams's middle name Carter acknowledged a benefactor of Grinnell College.
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Colin Clark
1905 - 1989 (84 years)
Colin Grant Clark was a British and Australian economist and statistician who worked in both the United Kingdom and Australia. He pioneered the use of gross national product as the basis for studying national economies.
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Vladas Jurgutis
1885 - 1966 (81 years)
Vladas Jurgutis was a Lithuanian priest, economist, and professor. As the first chairman of the Bank of Lithuania he is unofficially considered to be the "father of the Lithuanian litas." Biography In 1902 Jurgutis graduated from a high school in Palanga and enrolled in the Kaunas Priest Seminary. After graduation in 1906 he continued his studies at the Saint Petersburg Roman Catholic Theological Academy and received a Master's Degree in 1910. From 1910 to 1913 he studied economics at Munich University. In 1913 he served as a priest in Švėkšna and later in Liepāja. During World War I Jurgutis retreated to Russia, where he worked as a pastor in Saratov and Astrakhan.
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Allyn Abbott Young
1876 - 1929 (53 years)
Allyn Abbott Young was an American economist. He was born into a middle-class family in Kenton, Ohio. He died aged 52 in London, his life cut short by pneumonia during an influenza epidemic. He was then at the height of his intellectual powers and current president of Section F of the British Association. Uniquely, Young had also been president of the American Statistical Association and the American Economic Association .
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John Maynard Keynes
1883 - 1946 (63 years)
John Maynard Keynes, 1st Baron Keynes was an English economist and philosopher whose ideas fundamentally changed the theory and practice of macroeconomics and the economic policies of governments. Originally trained in mathematics, he built on and greatly refined earlier work on the causes of business cycles. One of the most influential economists of the 20th century, he produced writings that are the basis for the school of thought known as Keynesian economics, and its various offshoots. His ideas, reformulated as New Keynesianism, are fundamental to mainstream macroeconomics. He is known a...
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Ichiro Nakayama
1898 - 1981 (83 years)
Ichiro Nakayama was a Japanese economist. He graduated from The Tokyo University of Commerce in 1926, and then studied under Joseph Schumpeter in Germany. He was a pioneer of mathematical economics in Japan. After serving as assistant at The Tokyo University of Commerce, he became an assistant professor in 1933, a professor in 1937 and president in 1949 at the same institution. He became Chairman of Central Labor Relations Commission of Japan in 1950, and served as the first Chairman of The Tax Commission of Japan from 1959 to 1965. In 1965 he was appointed as a professor emeritus of Hitotsubashi University.
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Antonio Genovesi
1713 - 1769 (56 years)
Antonio Genovesi was an Italian writer on philosophy and political economy. Biography Son of Salvatore Genovese, a shoemaker, and Adriana Alfinito of San Mango, Antonio Genovesi was born in Castiglione, near Salerno in 1713. He began studying early on under the direction of his father and, at fourteen, under Niccolò Genovesi, a relative, and young doctor from Naples, who taught Antonio peripatetic philosophy for two years, and Cartesian philosophy for another year. When he was eighteen, during his theological studies, he fell in love with a girl from Castiglione, Angela Dragone. His father di...
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Leo Huberman
1903 - 1968 (65 years)
Leo Huberman was an American socialist economist. In 1949 he founded and co-edited Monthly Review with Paul Sweezy. He was the chair of the Department of Social Science at New College, Columbia University; labor editor of the newspaper PM; and the author of the popular history books Man’s Worldly Goods and We, the People: The Drama of America.
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G. Warren Nutter
1923 - 1979 (56 years)
G. Warren Nutter was an American economist, who was known primarily for his work on political economy, industrial concentration, price theory, and Soviet economic history and for cofounding the "Virginia school of political economy."
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Heinrich Herkner
1863 - 1932 (69 years)
Heinrich Herkner was a German economist as well as a social reformer. Biography Herkner was born in Liberec , Bohemia and died in Berlin, Germany. Herkner studied with Lujo Brentano in Strasbourg. Later he taught as a professor at the universities of Freiburg , Karlsruhe , and Zürich , as well as the Technical University and Frederick William University of Berlin.
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William Morris Leiserson
1883 - 1957 (74 years)
William Morris Leiserson was a labor relations scholar and mediator. Leiserson was a professor, state and federal government administrator, mediator, arbitrator, and a member of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's "brain trust," which developed and wrote legislation such as the Railway Labor Act of 1934.
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George Cyril Allen
1900 - 1982 (82 years)
George Cyril Allen , published as G. C. Allen, was a British economist and academic. He was Brunner Professor of Economic Science at the University of Liverpool from 1933 to 1947, and then Professor of Political Economy at University College London from 1947 to 1967. He wrote on Japanese and British industrial policy.
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Warren M. Persons
1878 - 1937 (59 years)
Warren M. Persons was an American economist. He was an Assistant Professor of Economics at Dartmouth College, and a professor of economics at Colorado College and Harvard University. He was the President of the American Statistical Association in 1923.
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Noel Frederick Hall
1902 - 1983 (81 years)
Sir Noel Frederick Hall was an economist and academic who was one of Britain's earliest post-war specialists in business theory and education. He was Professor of Political Economy at University College London, co-founder of what is now Henley Business School and Principal of Brasenose College, Oxford.
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Thomas Gresham
1519 - 1579 (60 years)
Sir Thomas Gresham the Elder was an English merchant and financier who acted on behalf of King Edward VI and Edward's half-sisters, queens Mary I and Elizabeth I . In 1565 Gresham founded the Royal Exchange in the City of London.
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Edward Gonner
1862 - 1922 (60 years)
Sir Edward Carter Kearsey Gonner KBE was an English economist, Professor of Economic Science at the University of Liverpool. Early life Gonner was born on 5 March 1862 in Mayfair, London, to Peter Kersey Gonner, a silk mercer, and Elizabeth Carter. He attended Merchant Taylors' School in London, before matriculating at Lincoln College, Oxford in 1880, graduating B.A. in 1884.
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Petr Maslov
1867 - 1946 (79 years)
Pyotr Pavlovich Maslov was a Russian Empire and Soviet economist and agriculturist. Biography Maslov attended at the Kharkov Veterinary Institute. He was in contact with the Marxist study circle of Nikolai Fedoseev, a contact which led to his arrest in 1889. He joined the Menshevik faction of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, and became a spokesperson on agrarian reform. He advocated the municipalisation of the land, in order to appeal to the peasantry by expropriating the land without compensation, and making it available to them cheaply, without giving them ownership. This was sim...
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Benjamin Graham
1894 - 1976 (82 years)
Benjamin Graham was a British-born American economist, professor and investor. He is widely known as the "father of value investing", and wrote two of the discipline's founding texts: Security Analysis with David Dodd, and The Intelligent Investor . His investment philosophy stressed investor psychology, minimal debt, buy-and-hold investing, fundamental analysis, concentrated diversification, buying within the margin of safety, activist investing, and contrarian mindsets.
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Hubert Phillips
1891 - 1964 (73 years)
Hubert Phillips was a British economist, journalist, broadcaster, bridge player and organiser, composer of puzzles and quizzes, and the author of some 70 books. Life Education and early career Phillips was educated at Sexey's School, Bruton, and Merton College, Oxford, where he read History and Economics, taking a first class degree. He served in the British Army with the Essex Regiment throughout World War I.
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Rufus Isaacs
1914 - 1981 (67 years)
Rufus Philip Isaacs was a game theorist especially prominent in the 1950s and 1960s with his work on differential games. Biography Isaacs was born on 11 June 1914 in New York City. He worked for the RAND Corporation from 1948 until winter 1954/1955. His investigation stemmed from classic pursuit–evasion type zero-sum dynamic two-player games such as the Princess and monster game. In 1942, he married Rose Bicov, and they had two daughters.
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Robert Liefmann
1874 - 1941 (67 years)
Robert Liefmann was a German economist. He was a professor at Freiburg University. Literary works Kartell, 1905Beteiligungs- und Finanzierungsgeselschaften, 1909"Geld und Gold", 1916Grundsätze der Volkswirtschaftslehre, 2 Vols., 1917-1919"Die Geldvermehrung im Weltkriege und die Beseitigung ihrer Folgen : eine Untersuchung zu den Problemen der Übergangswirtschaft",1918
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Shirley Montag Almon
1935 - 1975 (40 years)
Shirley Montag Almon was an American economist noted for the Almon Lag. Early life and education Almon was born on February 6, 1935, in Saxonburg, Pennsylvania, the oldest of seven children of Harold and Dorothea Montag. She was educated at Goucher College, Baltimore, and then for her PhD at Harvard University . A core element of her PhD was published in Econometrica and introduced the now famous technique for estimating distributed lags.
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Daniel Jack
1901 - 1984 (83 years)
Daniel Thomson Jack was a British political economist who was Professor of Economics at the University of Durham. Jack graduated from the University of Glasgow. He was appointed to the East Africa Royal Commission .
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George William Daniels
1878 - 1937 (59 years)
George William Daniels was a British political economist and historian who was vice-president of the Chetham Society and President of the Manchester Statistical Society. Career Daniels was born in Manchester and educated at the Victoria University of Manchester where he gained his Master of Arts and Master of Commerce degrees and was later appointed Stanley Jeavons Professor of Political Economy. He worked with the economists John Jewkes and Harry Campion.
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Jordi Brandts
#4782
Emanuel Herrmann
1839 - 1902 (63 years)
Emanuel Alexander Herrmann was an Austrian national economist. He is considered the decisive last in an international line of inventors of the postal card. Life and work After graduating with a law doctorate from the University of Vienna, Emanuel Herrmann, the son of the Bezirkshauptmann of Klagenfurt, entered the civil service in the Austrian ministry of commerce and qualified for a university career as a "Privatdozent" in the field of national economics. He was also a professor at the renowned Theresian Military Academy in Wiener Neustadt and from 1882 for twenty years professor of nat...
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Ilyas Burney
1890 - 1959 (69 years)
Professor Muhammad Ilyas Burney was the first head of Department of Economics at Osmania University, Hyderabad, India. He published about 40 books in Urdu, Persian, Arabic and English. He wrote the first book about Economics in Urdu, for which Sir Muhammad Iqbal complimented him in 1917. His other books in economics included Ilm ul Maaeshat , Muqaddima e Maashiyat and Indian Economics.
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James Anderson of Hermiston
1739 - 1808 (69 years)
James Anderson FRSE FSAScot was a Scottish agriculturist, journalist and economist. A member of the Edinburgh Philosophical Society, Anderson was a prominent figure in the Scottish Enlightenment. He invented the Scotch plough. As a writer he adopted the nom de plume of Agricola.
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Pyotr Lyashchenko
1876 - 1955 (79 years)
Pyotr Ivanovich Lyashchenko was a Russian and Soviet economist and a specialist in the field of economy, agriculture and history of the national economy of Russia and the Soviet Union. Professor Lyashchenko was the rector of Tomsk Imperial University in 1916.
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James L. Hayes
1915 - 1989 (74 years)
James L. Hayes was an American educator, dean of the School of Business Administration at Duquesne University, and former president of the American Management Association. Biography Born in 1915, Hayes obtained his A.B. degree from St. Bernard's College in Rochester, New York, now St. Bernard's School of Theology and Ministry, and his M.A. in economics from St. Bonaventure University in 1937.
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Henry Walcott Farnam
1853 - 1933 (80 years)
Henry Walcott Farnam was an American economist. Background The son of railroad executive Henry Farnam, he attended Yale University graduating with a bachelor's degree in 1874, and then studied towards a M.A. in Roman law and economics in 1876. Like many American economists of the late 19th century, Farnam then went to Germany to study under the leading figures of the German historical school. Farnam earned a PhD from the University of Strasbourg in 1878.
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David McCord Wright
1909 - 1968 (59 years)
David McCord Wright was an American economist and educator at the University of Georgia. He was a graduate of Harvard University. Personal Wright was born in Savannah, Georgia. He married Caroline Noble Jones and had three children: Anna, Antony and Peter.
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Balthasar H. Meyer
1866 - 1954 (88 years)
Balthasar Henry Meyer was an American government official and professor of economics and sociology. He served for 28 years as a member of the Interstate Commerce Commission. Early life Meyer was born near Mequon, Wisconsin, the son of Henry and Louise Meyer. He attended Oshkosh State Normal School, receiving his bachelor's degree, and then took two degrees, including his doctorate in 1897, from the University of Wisconsin, after doing graduate work at the University of Berlin in 1894–95.
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Karl Marlo
1810 - 1865 (55 years)
Karl Marlo, pseudonym of Karl Georg Winkelblech , was a German professor, scientist, chemist and state socialist. Life Marlo was born in Ensheim near Mainz. After finishing his studies in natural sciences and chemistry in Giessen, he became a private tutor in Marburg and, from 1839, a Professor of Chemistry at the Higher Trade School at Kassel, Hesse.
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Frederick Albert Cleveland
1865 - 1946 (81 years)
Frederick Albert Cleveland was a United States economist. Biography He graduated from DePauw University in 1890. He studied for the bar, but gave up practice in 1896 and thereafter gave his entire attention to economics, pursuing special studies in economics first at the University of Chicago and then at the University of Pennsylvania .
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F. W. Taussig
1859 - 1940 (81 years)
Frank William Taussig was an American economist who is credited with creating the foundations of modern trade theory. Early life He was born on December 28, 1859, in St. Louis, Missouri, the son of William Taussig and Adele Wuerpel. His parents encouraged his literary and musical interests, and he played the violin at an early age. He was educated in the St. Louis public schools and at Smith Academy in that same city. He then went to Washington University in St. Louis but, after a year transferred to Harvard from where he graduated in 1879.
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Hermann Roesler
1834 - 1894 (60 years)
Carl Friedrich Hermann Roesler was a German legal scholar, economist, and foreign advisor to the Meiji period Empire of Japan. Biography Early life Life in Japan In 1878, Roesler was invited by the government of Japan to serve as an advisor on international law to the Foreign Ministry. One compelling reason for his choice to move to Japan was due to his conversion to Roman Catholicism in 1878, Roesler faced dismissal from service in Mecklenburg due to his religion. A timely meeting with Japanese ambassador to Germany, Aoki Shūzō introduced Roesler to a new opportunity, and Roesler became on...
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Wilhelm Neurath
1840 - 1901 (61 years)
Wilhelm Neurath was an Austrian political economist of the late nineteenth century. He was professor of economics at the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences in Vienna. He was the father of Otto Neurath.
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Arthur Twining Hadley
1856 - 1930 (74 years)
Arthur Twining Hadley was an American economist who served as President of Yale University from 1899 to 1921. Biography Hadley was born in New Haven, Connecticut, the son of James Hadley, Professor of Greek at Yale 1851–1872, and his wife, née Anne Loring Morris. He graduated from Yale College in 1876, where he was a member of DKE and Skull and Bones, and received prizes in English, classics and astronomy. He then studied political science at Yale , and at the University of Berlin under Adolph Wagner. He was a tutor at Yale in 1879–1883, instructor in political science in 1883–1886, professo...
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Otmar Emminger
1911 - 1986 (75 years)
Otmar Emminger was a German economist who served as the president of the Deutsche Bundesbank from 1977 to 1979. Early life and education Emminger was born in Augsburg on 2 March 1911. In 1934, he received a PhD from the University of Munich.
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Edward Webster Bemis
1860 - 1930 (70 years)
Edward Webster Bemis was an American economist and a public utility expert. He was a proponent of municipal ownership. Biography He graduated from Amherst College in 1880, and received a degree of PhD in 1885 at Johns Hopkins University after over three years' advanced work in economics and history. In 1887 he suggested the use of literacy test as a device to restrict the total number of immigrants coming into the United States. He was a pioneer lecturer in the university extension system, 1887–88; professor of economics and history, Vanderbilt University, 1889–1892; and associate professor of economics, University of Chicago, 1892-1895.
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Nikola Stoyanov
1874 - 1967 (93 years)
Nikola Stoyanov Mitov was a Bulgarian scientist, economist and financier. He was in charge of the Bulgarian Government Debt Directorate for much of the interwar period and as such, he led the prolonged negotiations over the country's foreign debt. The agreements helped stabilise the country's national currency and contributed to the economic growth Bulgaria experienced prior to World War II. Between 1929 and 1944, Stoyanov was editor-in-chief of the authoritative journal of the Bulgarian Economic Society. He was also a prominent member of various organisations of Macedonian immigrants to Bul...
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Fred Hirsch
1931 - 1978 (47 years)
Fred Hirsch was an Austrian-born British economist and professor of international studies at the University of Warwick. Biography He was born in Vienna. In 1934, after the Austrian Civil War, his family emigrated to Britain. Hirsch graduated with first class honours from the London School of Economics in 1952 before working as a financial journalist on The Banker and The Economist . He was a senior adviser to the International Monetary Fund, from 1966 to 1972 where he worked on international monetary problems.
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Rifa'a at-Tahtawi
1801 - 1873 (72 years)
Rifa'a Rafi' at-Tahtawi was an Egyptian writer, teacher, translator, Egyptologist, and intellectual of the Nahda . One of the first Egyptian travellers to France in the nineteenth century, Tahtawi published in 1834 a detailed account of his 5-year-long stay in France, Takhlīṣ al-ʾibrīz fī talkhīṣ Bārīz , and from then on became one of the first Egyptian scholars to write about Western culture in an attempt to bring about a reconciliation and an understanding between Islamic and Christian civilizations.
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