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,
#4901
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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Roy Harrod
1900 - 1978 (78 years)
Sir Henry Roy Forbes Harrod was an English economist. He is best known for writing The Life of John Maynard Keynes and for the development of the Harrod–Domar model, which he and Evsey Domar developed independently. He is also known for his International Economics, a former standard textbook, the first edition of which contained some observations and ruminations that would foreshadow theories developed independently by later scholars .
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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)
#4921
Alfred Marshall
#4922
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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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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Kostiantyn Voblyi
1876 - 1947 (71 years)
Kostiantyn Hryhorovych Voblyi was a Ukrainian economic geographer, scientist economist, professor of the Kyiv University, academician of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences , Vice-president of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences , director of the Institute of Economics . Honored Scientist of Ukraine , awarded the Order of Lenin and the Order of the Red Banner of Labour.
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Morarji Desai
1896 - 1995 (99 years)
Morarji Ranchhodji Desai was an Indian independence activist and politician who served as the 4th Prime Minister of India between 1977 and 1979 leading the government formed by the Janata Party. During his long career in politics, he held many important posts in government such as Chief Minister of Bombay State, Home Minister, Finance Minister and 2nd Deputy Prime Minister of India.
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David Horowitz
1899 - 1979 (80 years)
David Horowitz was an Israeli economist and the first Governor of the Bank of Israel. Biography David Horowitz was born in Drohobych, in Galicia, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, now in Ukraine. He immigrated to Palestine in 1920 and was one of the first members of Hashomer Hatzair.
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