Famous Economists from the United States
- Ben Shalom Bernanke ( bər-NANG-kee; born December 13, 1953) is an American economist at the Brookings Institution who served two terms as Chair of the Federal Reserve, the central bank of the United States, from 2006 to 2014. During his tenure as chair, Bernanke oversaw the Federal Reserve's response to the late-2000s financial crisis. Before becoming Federal Reserve chair, Bernanke was a tenured professor at Princeton University and chaired the department of economics there from 1996 to September 2002, when he went on public service leave. From August 5, 2002 until June 21, 2005, he was a member of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, proposed the Bernanke Doctrine, and first discussed "the Great Moderation" — the theory that traditional business cycles have declined in volatility in recent decades through structural changes that have occurred in the international economy, particularly increases in the economic stability of developing nations, diminishing the influence of macroeconomic (monetary and fiscal) policy. Bernanke then served as chairman of President George W. Bush's Council of Economic Advisers before President Bush nominated him to succeed Alan Greenspan as chairman of the United States Federal Reserve. His first term began February 1, 2006. Bernanke was confirmed for a second term as chairman on January 28, 2010, after being renominated by President Barack Obama, who later referred to him as "the epitome of calm." His second term ended January 31, 2014, when he was succeeded by Janet Yellen on February 3, 2014. Bernanke wrote about his time as chairman of the Federal Reserve in his 2015 book, The Courage to Act, in which he revealed that the world's economy came close to collapse in 2007 and 2008. Bernanke asserts that it was only the novel efforts of the Fed (cooperating with other agencies and agencies of foreign governments) that prevented an economic catastrophe greater than the Great Depression.
- Birthplace: Georgia, USA, Augusta
- Alan Greenspan (; born March 6, 1926) is an American economist who served as Chair of the Federal Reserve of the United States from 1987 to 2006. He currently works as a private adviser and provides consulting for firms through his company, Greenspan Associates LLC. First appointed Federal Reserve chairman by President Ronald Reagan in August 1987, he was reappointed at successive four-year intervals until retiring on January 31, 2006, after the second-longest tenure in the position (behind William McChesney Martin).Greenspan came to the Federal Reserve Board from a consulting career. Although he was subdued in his public appearances, favorable media coverage raised his profile to a point that several observers likened him to a "rock star". Democratic leaders of Congress criticized him for politicizing his office because of his support for Social Security privatization and tax cuts, which they felt would increase the deficit.The easy-money policies of the Fed during Greenspan's tenure have been suggested by some to be a leading cause of the dotcom bubble, and the subprime mortgage crisis (occurring within a year of his leaving the Fed), which, said the Wall Street Journal, "tarnished his reputation." Yale economist Robert Shiller argues that "once stocks fell, real estate became the primary outlet for the speculative frenzy that the stock market had unleashed". Greenspan argues that the housing bubble was not a product of low-interest rates but rather a worldwide phenomenon caused by the precipitous decline in long term interest rates.
- Birthplace: Manhattan, New York City, New York, USA
- Ben Stein, born on November 25, 1944, in Washington D.C., is a man of many talents with a multifaceted career. He began his professional life in the field of law and politics before delving into the entertainment industry. Graduating as valedictorian from Yale Law School in 1970, Stein served as a poverty lawyer in New Haven and Washington D.C., and a trial lawyer at the Federal Trade Commission. His career took a political turn when he became a speechwriter for U.S. Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford. Stein's entrance into the entertainment industry was marked by his role as the monotonous high school teacher in the popular 1986 film Ferris Bueller's Day Off. This iconic role catapulted him into the limelight, leading to a successful acting career with appearances in numerous films and television shows. Not limiting himself to acting, Stein also made his mark as a game show host, notably for the Emmy Award-winning show Win Ben Stein's Money, which aired from 1997 to 2003. In addition to his legal, political, and entertainment endeavors, Stein is a prolific writer. He has authored and co-authored several books spanning different genres, including novels, biographies, and books about finance. His expertise in economics, derived from his early years as a poverty lawyer and a speechwriter, has been showcased in his financial writings. Stein's diverse career, combined with his intellectual prowess and distinct charisma, has solidified his status as a unique figure in both the world of entertainment and beyond.
- Birthplace: Washington, D.C., USA
- Timothy Franz Geithner (; born August 18, 1961) is a former American central banker who served as the 75th United States Secretary of the Treasury under President Barack Obama, from 2009 to 2013. He was the President of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York from 2003 to 2009, following service in the Clinton administration. Since March 2014, he has served as president and managing director of Warburg Pincus, a private equity firm headquartered in New York City.As President of the New York Fed and Secretary of the Treasury, Geithner had a key role in government efforts to recover from the financial crisis of 2007–08 and the Great Recession. At the New York Fed, Geithner helped manage crises involving Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, and the American International Group; as Treasury Secretary, he oversaw allocation of $350 billion under the Troubled Asset Relief Program, enacted during the previous administration in response to the subprime mortgage crisis. Geithner also managed the administration's efforts to restructure regulation of the nation's financial system; attempts to spur recovery of the mortgage market and the automobile industry; demands for protectionism; tax reform; and negotiations with foreign governments on global finance issues.
- Birthplace: New York City, New York, USA
- Thomas Loren Friedman (; born July 20, 1953) is an American political commentator and author. He is a three-time Pulitzer Prize winner who is a weekly columnist for The New York Times. He has written extensively on foreign affairs, global trade, the Middle East, globalization, and environmental issues. He has been criticized for his staunch advocacy of the Iraq War and unregulated trade and his early support of Saudi Royal Prince Mohammed bin Salman.
- Birthplace: St. Louis Park, Minnesota, USA
- Born on January 11, 1755, on the island of Nevis in the British West Indies, Alexander Hamilton's life was a testament to the power of determination and intelligence. Despite facing numerous adversities early in his life, including being orphaned as a child, he managed to carve out an impressive career that significantly shaped the formation of the United States. Hamilton's intellect shone from a young age. Recognized by community leaders in Nevis for his potential, they pooled resources to send him to America for education. He attended King's College (now Columbia University) in New York City. During the American Revolution, Hamilton served as aide-de-camp to General George Washington, displaying exceptional strategic skills and administrative prowess. Post-war, Hamilton's influence further grew as a key contributor to the Federalist Papers, a series of essays advocating for the ratification of the Constitution. In 1789, he was appointed the first Secretary of the Treasury by President Washington, where he implemented financial systems that are still in place today. His vision of a strong central government and industrial economy often clashed with contemporaries like Thomas Jefferson, igniting debates that continue to resonate in American politics. Alexander Hamilton's legacy extends far beyond his untimely death in a duel against Aaron Burr in 1804; his foundational work in establishing modern American fiscal policy and constitutional interpretation leaves an indelible mark on the country's history.
- Birthplace: Charlestown, Saint Kitts and Nevis
- Paul Robin Krugman ( (listen) KRUUG-mən; born February 28, 1953) is an American economist who is Distinguished Professor of Economics at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, and a columnist for The New York Times. In 2008, Krugman was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his contributions to New Trade Theory and New Economic Geography. The Prize Committee cited Krugman's work explaining the patterns of international trade and the geographic distribution of economic activity, by examining the effects of economies of scale and of consumer preferences for diverse goods and services.Krugman was previously a professor of economics at MIT, and later at Princeton University. He retired from Princeton in June 2015, and holds the title of professor emeritus there. He also holds the title of Centenary Professor at the London School of Economics. Krugman was President of the Eastern Economic Association in 2010, and is among the most influential economists in the world. He is known in academia for his work on international economics (including trade theory and international finance), economic geography, liquidity traps, and currency crises. Krugman is the author or editor of 27 books, including scholarly works, textbooks, and books for a more general audience, and has published over 200 scholarly articles in professional journals and edited volumes. He has also written several hundred columns on economic and political issues for The New York Times, Fortune and Slate. A 2011 survey of economics professors named him their favorite living economist under the age of 60. As a commentator, Krugman has written on a wide range of economic issues including income distribution, taxation, macroeconomics, and international economics. Krugman considers himself a modern liberal, referring to his books, his blog on The New York Times, and his 2007 book The Conscience of a Liberal. His popular commentary has attracted widespread attention and comments, both positive and negative.
- Birthplace: USA, Albany, New York
- Grover Norquist is an actor who appeared in "13th," "Atlas Shrugged: Who is John Galt?," and "Alpha House."
- Birthplace: Sharon, Pennsylvania, USA
- Benjamin Jerry Cohen is the Louis G. Lancaster Professor of International Political Economy at the University of California, Santa Barbara. At UCSB, where he has been a member of the faculty since 1991, he teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on international political economy. Cohen finished his undergraduate degree in 1959 and his doctorate degree in 1963, both in Economics, at Columbia University. From 1962 to 1964 Cohen was a research economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. From 1964 to 1971 he was an assistant professor in the Economics department at Princeton University. Cohen had been a member of the faculty at Tufts University since 1971 and until he joined the faculty at UCSB he was the William L. Clayton Professor of International Economic Affairs at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University. His research interests mainly involve issues of international monetary and financial relations, and he has written about matters ranging from exchange rates and monetary integration to financial markets and international debt.
- Joseph Eugene Stiglitz (; born February 9, 1943) is an American economist, public policy analyst, and a professor at Columbia University. He is a recipient of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences (2001) and the John Bates Clark Medal (1979). He is a former senior vice president and chief economist of the World Bank and is a former member and chairman of the (US president's) Council of Economic Advisers. He is known for his support of Georgist public finance theory and for his critical view of the management of globalization, of laissez-faire economists (whom he calls "free market fundamentalists"), and of international institutions such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. In 2000, Stiglitz founded the Initiative for Policy Dialogue (IPD), a think tank on international development based at Columbia University. He has been a member of the Columbia faculty since 2001, and received that university's highest academic rank (university professor) in 2003. He was the founding chair of the university's Committee on Global Thought. He also chairs the University of Manchester's Brooks World Poverty Institute. He is a member of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences. In 2009, the President of the United Nations General Assembly Miguel d'Escoto Brockmann, appointed Stiglitz as the chairman of the U.N. Commission on Reforms of the International Monetary and Financial System, where he oversaw suggested proposals and commissioned a report on reforming the international monetary and financial system. He served as chair of the international Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress, appointed by President Sarkozy of France, which issued its report in 2010, Mismeasuring our Lives: Why GDP doesn't add up, and currently serves as co-chair of its successor, the High Level Expert Group on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress. From 2011 to 2014, Stiglitz was president of the International Economic Association (IEA). He presided over the organization of the IEA triennial world congress held near the Dead Sea in Jordan in June 2014.Stiglitz has received more than 40 honorary degrees, including from Cambridge and Harvard, and he has been decorated by several governments including Bolivia, Korea, Colombia, Ecuador, and most recently France, where he was appointed a member of the Legion of Honor, order Officer. In 2011 Stiglitz was named by Time magazine as one of the 100 most influential people in the world. Stiglitz's work focuses on income distribution from a Georgist perspective, asset risk management, corporate governance, and international trade. He is the author of several books, the latest being The Euro: How a Common Currency Threatens the Future of Europe (2016), The Great Divide: Unequal Societies and What We Can Do About Them (2015), Rewriting the Rules of the American Economy: An Agenda for Growth and Shared Prosperity (2015), and Creating a Learning Society: A New Approach to Growth Development and Social Progress (2014).
- Birthplace: USA, Indiana, Gary
- John Kenneth Galbraith (October 15, 1908 – April 29, 2006), also known as Ken Galbraith, was a Canadian-born economist, public official, and diplomat, and a leading proponent of 20th-century American liberalism. His books on economic topics were bestsellers from the 1950s through the 2000s, during which time Galbraith fulfilled the role of public intellectual. As an economist, he leaned toward post-Keynesian economics from an institutionalist perspective.Galbraith was a long-time Harvard faculty member and stayed with Harvard University for half a century as a professor of economics. He was a prolific author and wrote four dozen books, including several novels, and published more than a thousand articles and essays on various subjects. Among his works was a trilogy on economics, American Capitalism (1952), The Affluent Society (1958), and The New Industrial State (1967). Some of his work has been criticized by economists such as Milton Friedman, Paul Krugman, and Robert Solow. Galbraith was active in Democratic Party politics, serving in the administrations of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman, John F. Kennedy, and Lyndon B. Johnson. He served as United States Ambassador to India under the Kennedy administration. His political activism, literary output and outspokenness brought him wide fame during his lifetime. Galbraith was one of the few to receive both the World War II Medal of Freedom (1946) and the Presidential Medal of Freedom (2000) for his public service and contributions to science. The government of France made him a Commandeur de la Légion d'honneur.
- Birthplace: Dunwich Township, Ontario, Canada
- Louis Carl Dobbs (September 24, 1945 – July 18, 2024) was an American conservative[1] political commentator, author and television host who presented Lou Dobbs Tonight from 2003 to 2009 and 2011 to 2021. From 2021 until his death, he hosted The Great America Show on iHeartRadio and loudobbs.com. Dobbs was an early promoter of the Barack Obama birtherism conspiracy theory, which posits that Obama is not a natural born US citizen, a theory also widely promoted by candidate Donald Trump prior to his election in 2016. He is known for anti-immigration views, as well as for various deep state conspiracy theories, and opposition to NAFTA and other trade deals. A Trump confidante, his show is known for its pro-Trump coverage Dobbs resigned from CNN for a short period of time in 1999 but rejoined the network in 2001. He resigned once again in November 2009. In 2011, he joined the Fox Business Network, resuming and anchoring his show, Lou Dobbs Tonight.
- Birthplace: Texas, USA, Childress
- Paul Adolph Volcker Jr. (; born September 5, 1927) is an American economist. He was Chairman of the Federal Reserve under Presidents Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan from August 1979 to August 1987. He is widely credited with ending the high levels of inflation seen in the United States during the 1970s and early 1980s. He was the chairman of the Economic Recovery Advisory Board under President Barack Obama from February 2009 until January 2011.
- Birthplace: USA, Cape May, New Jersey
- Milton Friedman (; July 31, 1912 – November 16, 2006) was an American economist who received the 1976 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his research on consumption analysis, monetary history and theory and the complexity of stabilization policy. With George Stigler and others, Friedman was among the intellectual leaders of the second generation of Chicago school of economics, a methodological movement at the University of Chicago's Department of Economics, Law School and Graduate School of Business from the 1940s onward. Several students and young professors who were recruited or mentored by Friedman at Chicago went on to become leading economists, including Gary Becker, Robert Fogel, Thomas Sowell and Robert Lucas Jr.Friedman's challenges to what he later called "naive Keynesian" theory began with his 1950s reinterpretation of the consumption function. In the 1960s, he became the main advocate opposing Keynesian government policies and described his approach (along with mainstream economics) as using "Keynesian language and apparatus" yet rejecting its "initial" conclusions. He theorized that there existed a "natural" rate of unemployment and argued that unemployment below this rate would cause inflation to accelerate. He argued that the Phillips curve was in the long run vertical at the "natural rate" and predicted what would come to be known as stagflation. Friedman promoted an alternative macroeconomic viewpoint known as "monetarism" and argued that a steady, small expansion of the money supply was the preferred policy. His ideas concerning monetary policy, taxation, privatization and deregulation influenced government policies, especially during the 1980s. His monetary theory influenced the Federal Reserve's response to the global financial crisis of 2007–2008.Friedman was an advisor to Republican President Ronald Reagan and Conservative British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. His political philosophy extolled the virtues of a free market economic system with minimal intervention. He once stated that his role in eliminating conscription in the United States was his proudest accomplishment. In his 1962 book Capitalism and Freedom, Friedman advocated policies such as a volunteer military, freely floating exchange rates, abolition of medical licenses, a negative income tax and school vouchers and opposed the war on drugs. His support for school choice led him to found the Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice, later renamed EdChoice.Friedman's works include monographs, books, scholarly articles, papers, magazine columns, television programs and lectures and cover a broad range of economic topics and public policy issues. His books and essays have had global influence, including in former communist states. A survey of economists ranked Friedman as the second-most popular economist of the 20th century following only John Maynard Keynes and The Economist described him as "the most influential economist of the second half of the 20th century ... possibly of all of it".
- Birthplace: New York City, New York
- Herbert Simon may refer to: Herbert A. Simon (1916–2001), American political scientist and economist Herbert Simon (real estate) (born 1934), American real estate developer
- Birthplace: Milwaukee, Wisconsin
- Thomas Sowell (; born June 30, 1930) is an American economist and social theorist who is currently a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. Sowell was born in North Carolina, but grew up in Harlem, New York. He dropped out of Stuyvesant High School and served in the United States Marine Corps during the Korean War. He received a bachelor's degree, graduating magna cum laude from Harvard University in 1958 and a master's degree from Columbia University in 1959. In 1968, he earned his doctorate in economics from the University of Chicago. Sowell has served on the faculties of several universities, including Cornell University and University of California, Los Angeles. He has also worked for think tanks such as the Urban Institute. Since 1980, he has worked at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. He writes from a libertarian conservative perspective, advocating supply-side economics. Sowell has written more than thirty books (a number of which have been reprinted in revised editions), and his work has been widely anthologized. He is a National Humanities Medal recipient for innovative scholarship which incorporated history, economics and political science.
- Birthplace: Gastonia, North Carolina
- Austan Dean Goolsbee (born August 18, 1969) is an American economist who is currently the Robert P. Gwinn Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business. Goolsbee formerly served as the Chair of the Council of Economic Advisers and was a member of the cabinet of President Barack Obama.Goolsbee served on the three-member Council of Economic Advisers from the start of the Obama Administration. He advised President Obama during his 2004 U.S. Senate race and was senior economic policy adviser during the 2008 Obama Presidential Campaign. He took over in September 2010 as the Council's chair, replacing Christina Romer, who had left to return to a teaching position at the University of California at Berkeley. On June 6, 2011, he announced that he was departing the administration and returning to the University of Chicago.Since January 2013 he has been a strategic partner at 32 Advisors. He leads their Economic Intelligence practice.
- Birthplace: Texas, USA, Waco
- Richard Keith "Dick" Armey (; born July 7, 1940) is an American economist and politician. He was a U.S. Representative from Texas's 26th congressional district (1985–2003) and House Majority Leader (1995–2003). He was one of the engineers of the "Republican Revolution" of the 1990s, in which Republicans were elected to majorities of both houses of Congress for the first time in four decades. Armey was one of the chief authors of the Contract with America. Armey is also an author and former economics professor. After his retirement from Congress, he has worked as a consultant, advisor, and lobbyist.
- Birthplace: Cando, North Dakota, USA
- Daniel Ellsberg (April 7, 1931 – June 16, 2023) was an American economist, activist, and former United States military analyst who, while employed by the RAND Corporation, precipitated a national political controversy in 1971 when he released the Pentagon Papers, a top-secret Pentagon study of the U.S. government decision-making in relation to the Vietnam War, to The New York Times and other newspapers. Ellsberg was charged under the Espionage Act of 191, ending with a total maximum sentence of 115 years. Due to governmental misconduct and illegal evidence-gathering, and the defense by Leonard Boudin and Harvard Law School professor Charles Nesson, Judge William Matthew Byrne Jr. dismissed all charges against Ellsberg on May 11, 1973. He is also known for having formulated an important example in decision theory, the Ellsberg paradox, his extensive studies on nuclear weapons and nuclear policy, and for having voiced support for WikiLeaks, Chelsea Manning, and Edward Snowden.
- Birthplace: Chicago, Illinois, USA
- Elizabeth Ellery Bailey is an American economist. She is John C. Hower Professor of Business and Public Policy, at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and has been Director of Altria since 1989.
- Walter Edward Williams (born March 31, 1936) is an American economist, commentator, and academic. He is the John M. Olin Distinguished Professor of Economics at George Mason University, as well as a syndicated columnist and author known for his classical liberal and libertarian conservative views. His writings frequently appear on Townhall.com, WND, and Jewish World Review.
- Birthplace: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
- Andrew Michael Spence (born November 7, 1943, Montclair, New Jersey) is a Canadian American economist and recipient of the 2001 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, along with George Akerlof and Joseph E. Stiglitz, for their work on the dynamics of information flows and market development.
- Birthplace: Montclair, New Jersey
- Lawrence Alan Kudlow (born August 20, 1947) is an American financial analyst and former television host serving as Director of the National Economic Council under President Donald Trump since 2018.Kudlow began his career as a junior financial analyst at the New York Federal Reserve. He soon left government to work on Wall Street at Paine Webber and Bear Stearns as a financial analyst. In 1981, after previously volunteering and working for left-wing politicians and causes, Kudlow joined the administration of Ronald Reagan as associate director for economics and planning in the Office of Management and Budget.After leaving the Reagan Administration during the second term, Kudlow returned to Wall Street and Bear Stearns, serving as the firm's chief economist from 1987 until 1994. During this time, he also advised the gubernatorial campaign of Christine Todd Whitman on economic issues. In the late 1990s, after a publicized battle with cocaine and alcohol addiction, Kudlow left Wall Street to become an economic media commentator – first with National Review, and later hosting several shows on CNBC. Kudlow returned to politics in 2018, serving as Gary Cohn's replacement at the National Economic Council.
- Birthplace: New Jersey, USA
- Stanley Fischer (Hebrew: סטנלי פישר; born October 15, 1943) is an Israeli American economist and former vice chairman of the Federal Reserve. Born in Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia), he holds dual citizenship in Israel and the United States. He served as governor of the Bank of Israel from 2005 to 2013. He previously served as chief economist at the World Bank. On January 10, 2014, United States President Barack Obama nominated Fischer to be Vice-Chairman of the US Federal Reserve Board of Governors. On September 6, 2017, Stanley Fischer announced that he was resigning as Vice-Chairman for personal reasons effective October 13, 2017.
- Birthplace: Mazabuka, Zambia
- Antony Cyril Sutton (February 14, 1925 – June 17, 2002) was a British and American economist, historian, professor, and writer.
- Birthplace: London, United Kingdom
- George Pratt Shultz (born December 13, 1920) is an American economist, politician, and businessman. He served in various positions under three different Republican presidents. Along with Elliot Richardson, he is one of two individuals to serve in four different Cabinet positions. He played a major policy role in shaping the foreign policy of the Ronald Reagan administration. In the 2010s, Shultz was a prominent figure in the scandal around biotech firm Theranos, continuing to support it as a board member in the face of mounting evidence of fraud. Born in New York City, he graduated from Princeton University before serving in the United States Marine Corps during World War II. After the war, Shultz earned a PhD in industrial economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He taught at MIT from 1948 to 1957, taking a leave of absence in 1955 to take a position on President Dwight D. Eisenhower's Council of Economic Advisers. After serving as dean of the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business, he accepted President Richard Nixon's appointment as United States Secretary of Labor. In that position, he imposed the Philadelphia Plan on construction contractors who refused to accept black members, marking the first use of racial quotas by the federal government. In 1970, he became the first director of the Office of Management and Budget, and he served in that position until his appointment as United States Secretary of the Treasury in 1972. In that role, Shultz supported the Nixon shock (which sought to revive the ailing economy in part by abolishing the gold standard) and presided over the end of the Bretton Woods system. Shultz left the Nixon administration in 1974 to become an executive at Bechtel. After becoming president and director of that company, he accepted President Ronald Reagan's offer to serve as United States Secretary of State. He held that office from 1982 to 1989. Shultz pushed for Reagan to establish relations with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, which led to a thaw between the United States and the Soviet Union. He opposed the U.S. aid to rebels trying to overthrow the Sandinistas using funds from an illegal sale of weapons to Iran that led to the Iran–Contra affair. Shultz retired from public office in 1989 but remained active in business and politics. He served as an informal adviser to George W. Bush and helped formulate the Bush Doctrine of preemptive war. He served on the Global Commission on Drug Policy, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger's Economic Recovery Council, and on the boards of Bechtel and the Charles Schwab Corporation. Since 2013, he has repeatedly advocated for a revenue-neutral carbon tax as the most economically sound means of mitigating anthropogenic climate change. He is a member of the Hoover Institution, the Institute for International Economics, the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, and other groups. Since the death of William Thaddeus Coleman Jr., Shultz is the oldest living former U.S. Cabinet member.
- Birthplace: New York City, USA, New York
- Winona LaDuke (born August 18, 1959) is an American environmentalist, economist, and writer, known for her work on tribal land claims and preservation, as well as sustainable development. In a December 2018 interview she also described herself as an industrial hemp grower.In 1996 and 2000, she ran for Vice President as the nominee of the Green Party of the United States, on a ticket headed by Ralph Nader. She is the executive director of Honor the Earth, a Native environmental advocacy organization that played an active role in the Dakota Access Pipeline protests.
- Birthplace: Los Angeles, USA, California
- Robert Bernard Reich (; born June 24, 1946) is an American economist, professor, author, and political commentator. He served in the administrations of Presidents Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, and Bill Clinton. He was Secretary of Labor from 1993 to 1997. He was a member of President Barack Obama's economic transition advisory board. Reich has been the Chancellor's Professor of Public Policy at the Goldman School of Public Policy at UC Berkeley since January 2006. He was formerly a professor at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government and professor of social and economic policy at the Heller School for Social Policy and Management of Brandeis University. He has also been a contributing editor of The New Republic, The American Prospect (also chairman and founding editor), Harvard Business Review, The Atlantic, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal. Reich is a political commentator on programs including Erin Burnett OutFront, CNN Tonight, Anderson Cooper's AC360, Hardball with Chris Matthews, This Week with George Stephanopoulos, CNBC's Kudlow & Company, and APM's Marketplace. In 2008, Time magazine named him one of the Ten Best Cabinet Members of the century, and The Wall Street Journal in 2008 placed him sixth on its list of Most Influential Business Thinkers. He was appointed a member of President-elect Barack Obama's economic transition advisory board. Until 2012, he was married to British-born lawyer Clare Dalton, with whom he has two sons, Sam and Adam.He has published 18 books, including the best-sellers The Work of Nations, Reason, Saving Capitalism, Supercapitalism, Aftershock: The Next Economy and America's Future, and a best-selling e-book, Beyond Outrage. He is also chairman of Common Cause and writes his own blog about the political economy at Robertreich.org. The Robert Reich–Jacob Kornbluth film Saving Capitalism was selected to be a Netflix Original, and debuted in November 2017, and their film Inequality for All won a U.S. Documentary Special Jury Award for Achievement in Filmmaking at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival in Utah.
- Birthplace: USA, Scranton, Pennsylvania
- James David Wolfensohn, KBE, AO (born 1 December 1933) is an Australian-American lawyer, investment banker, and economist who served as the ninth president of the World Bank Group (1995–2005). He was born in Sydney, Australia, and is a graduate of the University of Sydney and Harvard Business School; he was also an Olympic fencer. He worked for various companies in Britain and the United States before forming his own investment firm. Wolfensohn became an American citizen in 1980, requiring him to renounce his Australian citizenship although he eventually regained it in 2010. He served two terms as President of the World Bank on the nomination of U.S. President Bill Clinton, and has since held various positions with charitable organisations.
- Birthplace: Sydney, Australia
- Thorstein Veblen (30 July 1857 – 3 August 1929) was a Norwegian-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 (1899), Veblen coined the concept 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. As a leading intellectual of the Progressive Era in the United States of America, Veblen attacked production for profit. His emphasis on conspicuous consumption greatly influenced economists who engaged in non-Marxist critiques of capitalism and of technological determinism.
- Birthplace: Cato, Wisconsin
- Elaine Lan Chao (Chinese: 趙小蘭; pinyin: Zhào Xiǎolán; born March 26, 1953) is the United States Secretary of Transportation who assumed her office on January 31, 2017. A member of the Republican Party, Chao was previously Secretary of Labor under President George W. Bush from 2001 to 2009. Born in Taipei to Chinese parents who had left mainland China following the Chinese Civil War, Chao immigrated to the United States at age 8. Her father founded the Foremost Group, which eventually became a major shipping corporation. Chao was raised on Long Island, New York and subsequently attended Mount Holyoke College and Harvard Business School. She worked for a number of financial institutions before being appointed to several senior positions in the Department of Transportation under Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush, including Deputy Secretary. She next served as Director of the Peace Corps. Chao was president of the United Way of America from 1992 to 1996. While not in government, Chao has served on several boards of directors and worked for The Heritage Foundation and the Hudson Institute, two conservative think-tanks. Chao served as Secretary of Labor for the duration of George W. Bush's presidency and serves as Secretary of Transportation under President Donald Trump. Chao was the first Asian American woman and the first Chinese American in U.S. history to be appointed to a President's Cabinet. Chao married Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell in 1993.
- Birthplace: Taipei, Taiwan
- Jagdish Natwarlal Bhagwati (born July 26, 1934) is an Indian-born American economist. He is a University Professor of economics and law at Columbia University. Bhagwati is notable for his research in international trade and for his advocacy of free trade.
- Birthplace: Mumbai, India
- Lawrence Henry Summers (born November 30, 1954) is an American economist, former Vice President of Development Economics and Chief Economist of the World Bank (1991–93), senior U.S. Treasury Department official throughout President Clinton's administration (ultimately Treasury Secretary, 1999–2001), and former director of the National Economic Council for President Obama (2009–2010). He is a former president of Harvard University (2001–2006), where he is currently (as of March, 2017) a professor and director of the Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government.Born in New Haven, Connecticut, Summers became a professor of economics at Harvard University in 1983. He left Harvard in 1991, working as the Chief Economist at the World Bank from 1991 to 1993. In 1993, Summers was appointed Undersecretary for International Affairs of the United States Department of the Treasury under the Clinton Administration. In 1995, he was promoted to Deputy Secretary of the Treasury under his long-time political mentor Robert Rubin. In 1999, he succeeded Rubin as Secretary of the Treasury. While working for the Clinton administration Summers played a leading role in the American response to the 1994 economic crisis in Mexico, the 1997 Asian financial crisis, and the Russian financial crisis. He was also influential in the Harvard Institute for International Development and American-advised privatization of the economies of the post-Soviet states, and in the deregulation of the U.S financial system, including the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act. Following the end of Clinton's term, Summers served as the 27th President of Harvard University from 2001 to 2006. Summers resigned as Harvard's president in the wake of a no-confidence vote by Harvard faculty, which resulted in large part from Summers's conflict with Cornel West, financial conflict of interest questions regarding his relationship with Andrei Shleifer, and a 2005 speech in which he suggested that the under-representation of women in science and engineering could be due to a "different availability of aptitude at the high end", and less to patterns of discrimination and socialization. Remarking upon political correctness in institutions of higher education, Summers said in 2016: There is a great deal of absurd political correctness. Now, I'm somebody who believes very strongly in diversity, who resists racism in all of its many incarnations, who thinks that there is a great deal that's unjust in American society that needs to be combated, but it seems to be that there is a kind of creeping totalitarianism in terms of what kind of ideas are acceptable and are debatable on college campuses. After his departure from Harvard, Summers worked as a managing partner at the hedge fund D. E. Shaw & Co., and as a freelance speaker at other financial institutions, including Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Merrill Lynch and Lehman Brothers. Summers rejoined public service during the Obama administration, serving as the Director of the White House United States National Economic Council for President Barack Obama from January 2009 until November 2010, where he emerged as a key economic decision-maker in the Obama administration's response to the Great Recession. After his departure from the NEC in December 2010, Summers has worked in the private sector and as a columnist in major newspapers. In mid-2013, his name was widely floated as the potential successor to Ben Bernanke as the Chairman of the Federal Reserve, though Obama eventually nominated Federal Reserve Vice-Chairwoman Janet Yellen for the position. As of 2017, Summers retains his Harvard University status as former president emeritus and Charles W. Eliot University Professor.
- Birthplace: New Haven, Connecticut, USA
- Peter Richard Orszag (born December 16, 1968) is an American banker and economist. He is the CEO of Financial Advisory at Lazard, effective June 2019. He was previously the firm’s Head of North American M&A and Global Co-Head of Healthcare.Orszag previously served as a Vice Chairman of Corporate and Investment Banking and Chairman of the Financial Strategy and Solutions Group at Citigroup. Before joining Citigroup, he was a Distinguished Visiting Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and a contributing columnist for the New York Times Op-Ed page. Prior to that, he was the 37th Director of the Office of Management and Budget under President Barack Obama and had also served as the Director of the Congressional Budget Office. Orszag is a member of the National Academy of Medicine of the National Academies of Sciences. He serves on the Boards of Directors of the Peterson Institute for International Economics, the Mount Sinai Hospital, the Russell Sage Foundation, New Visions for Public Schools in New York, and Ideas42.
- Birthplace: Boston, Massachusetts, USA
- Vernon Lomax Smith (born January 1, 1927) is an American economist and professor of business economics and law at Chapman University. He was formerly a professor of economics and law at George Mason University, and a board member of the Mercatus Center. He was also a founding board member of the Center for Growth and Opportunity at Utah State University.Smith shared the 2002 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences with Daniel Kahneman for his contributions to Behavioral Economics.Smith is the founder and president of the International Foundation for Research in Experimental Economics, a Member of the Board of Advisors for The Independent Institute, a Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute in Washington D.C.. In 2004 Smith was honored with an honorary doctoral degree at Universidad Francisco Marroquín, the institution that named the Vernon Smith Center for Experimental Economics Research after him.
- Birthplace: Wichita, Kansas
- Deirdre Nansen McCloskey (born September 11, 1942 in Ann Arbor, Michigan), is the Distinguished Professor of Economics, History, English, and Communication at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC). She is also adjunct professor of Philosophy and Classics there, and for five years was a visiting Professor of philosophy at Erasmus University, Rotterdam. Since October 2007 she has received six honorary doctorates. In 2013, she received the Julian L. Simon Memorial Award from the Competitive Enterprise Institute for her work examining factors in history that led to advancement in human achievement and prosperity. Her main research interests include the origins of the modern world, the misuse of statistical significance in economics and other sciences, and the study of capitalism, among many others.
- Birthplace: Ann Arbor, Michigan
- Harry Dexter White (October 9, 1892 – August 16, 1948) 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 while at the same time he passed numerous secrets to the Soviet Union, which was an American ally for part of the time and an adversary at other times.He was the senior American official at the 1944 Bretton Woods conference that established the postwar economic order. He dominated the conference and imposed his vision of post-war financial institutions over the objections of John Maynard Keynes, the British representative. At Bretton Woods, White was a major architect of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank. White was accused in 1948 of spying for the Soviet Union, which he adamantly denied. Although he was never a Communist party member, his status as a Soviet informant was later confirmed by declassified FBI documents related to the interception and decoding of Soviet communications, known as the Venona Project.
- Birthplace: Boston, Massachusetts, USA
- William Forsyth Sharpe (born June 16, 1934) is an American economist. He is the STANCO 25 Professor of Finance, Emeritus at Stanford University's Graduate School of Business, and the winner of the 1990 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. Sharpe was one of the originators of the capital asset pricing model. He created the Sharpe ratio for risk-adjusted investment performance analysis, and he contributed to the development of the binomial method for the valuation of options, the gradient method for asset allocation optimization, and returns-based style analysis for evaluating the style and performance of investment funds.
- Birthplace: Boston, Massachusetts
- Jeffrey David Sachs (; born November 5, 1954) is an American economist, academic, public policy analyst and former director of The Earth Institute at Columbia University, where he holds the title of University Professor, the highest rank Columbia bestows on its faculty. He is known as one of the world's leading experts on economic development and the fight against poverty. Sachs is the Quetelet Professor of Sustainable Development at Columbia's School of International and Public Affairs and a professor of health policy and management at Columbia's School of Public Health. As of 2017, he serves as special adviser to the United Nations (UN) Secretary-General António Guterres on the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), a set of 17 global goals adopted at a UN summit meeting in September 2015. He held the same position under the previous UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon and prior to 2016 a similar advisory position related to the earlier Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), eight internationally sanctioned objectives to reduce extreme poverty, hunger and disease by the year 2015. In connection with the MDGs, he had first been appointed special adviser to the UN Secretary-General in 2002 during the term of Kofi Annan.In 1995, Sachs became a member of the International Advisory Council of the Center for Social and Economic Research (CASE). He is co-founder and chief strategist of Millennium Promise Alliance, a nonprofit organization dedicated to ending extreme poverty and hunger. From 2002 to 2006, he was director of the United Nations Millennium Project's work on the MDGs. He is director of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network and co-editor of the World Happiness Report with John F. Helliwell and Richard Layard. In 2010, he became a commissioner for the Broadband Commission for Sustainable Development, whose stated aim is to boost the importance of broadband in international policy. Sachs has written several books and received many awards.
- Birthplace: Detroit, Michigan, USA
- Robert Cox Merton (born July 31, 1944) is an American economist, Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences laureate, and professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management, known for his pioneering contributions to continuous-time finance, especially the first continuous-time option pricing model, the Black–Scholes formula. In 1993 Merton co-founded hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management. In 1997 he received the Nobel Prize for his contributions in Economics.
- Birthplace: New York City, New York
- Evsey David Domar (Russian: Евсей Давидович Домашевицкий, Domashevitsky; April 16, 1914 – April 1, 1997) was a Russian American economist, famous as co-author of the Harrod–Domar model.
- Birthplace: Łódź, Poland
- Ludwig Heinrich Edler von Mises (German: [ˈluːtvɪç fɔn ˈmiːzəs]; 29 September 1881 – 10 October 1973) was an Austrian School economist, historian, and sociologist. Mises wrote and lectured extensively on behalf of classical liberalism. He is best known for his work on praxeology, a study of human choice and action. Mises emigrated from Austria to the United States in 1940. Since the mid-20th century, the libertarian movement in the United States has been strongly influenced by Mises's writings. Mises's student Friedrich Hayek viewed Mises as one of the major figures in the revival of liberalism in the post-war era. Hayek's work "The Transmission of the Ideals of Freedom" (1951) pays high tribute to the influence of Mises in the 20th century libertarian movement.Mises's Private Seminar was a leading group of economists. Many of its alumni, including Hayek and Oskar Morgenstern, emigrated from Austria to the United States and Great Britain. Mises has been described as having approximately seventy close students in Austria. The Ludwig von Mises Institute was founded in the United States to continue his teachings.
- Birthplace: Lviv, Ukraine
- Henry George (September 2, 1839 – October 29, 1897) was an American political economist and journalist. His writing was immensely popular in the 19th century, and sparked several reform movements of the Progressive Era. His writings also inspired the economic philosophy known as Georgism, based on the belief that people should own the value they produce themselves, but that the economic value derived from land (including natural resources) should belong equally to all members of society. His most famous work, Progress and Poverty (1879), sold millions of copies worldwide, probably more than any other American book before that time. The treatise investigates the paradox of increasing inequality and poverty amid economic and technological progress, the cyclic nature of industrialized economies, and the use of rent capture such as land value tax and other anti-monopoly reforms as a remedy for these and other social problems. The mid-20th century labor economist and journalist George Soule wrote that George was "By far the most famous American economic writer," and "author of a book which probably had a larger world-wide circulation than any other work on economics ever written."
- Birthplace: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
- Daniel Kahneman (; Hebrew: דניאל כהנמן; born March 5, 1934) is an Israeli-American psychologist and economist notable for his work on the psychology of judgment and decision-making, as well as behavioral economics, for which he was awarded the 2002 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences (shared with Vernon L. Smith). His empirical findings challenge the assumption of human rationality prevailing in modern economic theory. With Amos Tversky and others, Kahneman established a cognitive basis for common human errors that arise from heuristics and biases (Kahneman & Tversky, 1973; Kahneman, Slovic & Tversky, 1982; Tversky & Kahneman, 1974), and developed prospect theory (Kahneman & Tversky, 1979). In 2011, he was named by Foreign Policy magazine to its list of top global thinkers. In the same year, his book Thinking, Fast and Slow, which summarizes much of his research, was published and became a best seller.He is professor emeritus of psychology and public affairs at Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School. Kahneman is a founding partner of TGG Group, a business and philanthropy consulting company. He was married to cognitive psychologist and Royal Society Fellow Anne Treisman, who died on February 9, 2018.In 2015, The Economist listed him as the seventh most influential economist in the world.
- Birthplace: Tel Aviv, Israel
- John Charles Harsanyi (Hungarian: Harsányi János Károly; May 29, 1920 – August 9, 2000) was a Hungarian-American economist. He is best known for his contributions to the study of game theory and its application to economics, specifically for his developing the highly innovative analysis of games of incomplete information, so-called Bayesian games. He also made important contributions to the use of game theory and economic reasoning in political and moral philosophy (specifically utilitarian ethics) as well as contributing to the study of equilibrium selection. For his work, he was a co-recipient along with John Nash and Reinhard Selten of the 1994 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. According to György Marx, he was one of The Martians.
- Birthplace: Budapest, Hungary
- Edith Abbott (September 26, 1876 – July 28, 1957) was an American economist, social worker, educator, and author. Abbott was born in Grand Island, Nebraska. Edith Abbott was a pioneer in the profession of social work with an educational background in economics. She was a leading activist in social reform with the ideals that humanitarianism needed to be embedded in education. Abbott was also in charge of implementing social work studies to the graduate level. Though she was met with resistance on her work with social reform at the University of Chicago, she ultimately was successful and was elected as the school's dean in 1924, making her the first female dean in the United States. Abbott was foremost an educator and saw her work as a combination of legal studies and humanitarian work which shows in her social security legislation. She is known as an economist who pursued implementing social work at the graduate level. Her younger sister was Grace Abbott. Social work will never become a profession—except through the professional schools The Edith Abbott Memorial Library, in Grand Island, Nebraska, is named after her.
- Birthplace: Grand Island, Nebraska
- Martin Stuart Feldstein ( FELD-styne, November 25, 1939 – June 11, 2019) was an American economist. He was the George F. Baker Professor of Economics at Harvard University, and the president emeritus of the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER). He served as President and Chief Executive Officer of the NBER from 1978 through 2008 (with the exception of 1982 to 1984). From 1982 to 1984, Feldstein served as chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers and as chief economic advisor to President Ronald Reagan (where his deficit hawk views clashed with Reagan administration large military expenditure policies). He was also a member of the Washington-based financial advisory body the Group of Thirty from 2003.
- Birthplace: New York City, New York, USA
- Janet Louise Yellen (born August 13, 1946) is an American economist who was the 15th chair of the Federal Reserve from 2014 to 2018, the first woman to hold the role. She is a professor emerita at Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley. She was vice-chair from 2010 to 2014. President Joe Biden has announced that he will nominate Yellen to serve in his Cabinet as United States Secretary of the Treasury. Yellen was a member of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors from 1994 to 1997 and again from 2010 to 2018. She chaired the Council of Economic Advisers under President Bill Clinton from 1997 to 1999 and was the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco from 2004 to 2010. In 2014, Yellen was nominated by President Barack Obama to succeed Ben Bernanke as chair of the Federal Reserve. She served one term from 2014 to 2018 and was not re-appointed by President Donald Trump.
- Birthplace: New York City, USA, New York
- John Rogers Commons (October 13, 1862 – May 11, 1945) was an American institutional economist, Georgist, progressive and labor historian at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
- Birthplace: Hollansburg, Ohio
- Elinor Claire "Lin" Ostrom (née Awan; August 7, 1933 – June 12, 2012) was an American political economist whose work was associated with the New Institutional Economics and the resurgence of political economy. In 2009, she was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for her "analysis of economic governance, especially the commons", which she shared with Oliver E. Williamson. To date, she remains the only woman to win the Nobel Prize in Economics.After graduating with a B.A. and Ph.D. from UCLA, Ostrom lived in Bloomington, Indiana, and served on the faculty of Indiana University, with a late-career affiliation with Arizona State University. She was Distinguished Professor at Indiana University and the Arthur F. Bentley Professor of Political Science and co-director of the Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis at Indiana University, as well as research professor and the founding director of the Center for the Study of Institutional Diversity at Arizona State University in Tempe. She was a lead researcher for the Sustainable Agriculture and Natural Resource Management Collaborative Research Support Program (SANREM CRSP), managed by Virginia Tech and funded by USAID. Beginning in 2008, she and her husband Vincent Ostrom advised the journal Transnational Corporations Review.
- Birthplace: Los Angeles, California
- David Director Friedman (born February 12, 1945) is an American economist, physicist, legal scholar, and libertarian theorist. He is known for his textbook writings on microeconomics and the libertarian theory of anarcho-capitalism, which is the subject of his most popular book, The Machinery of Freedom. Besides The Machinery of Freedom, he has authored several other books and articles, including Price Theory: An Intermediate Text (1986), Law's Order: What Economics Has to Do with Law and Why It Matters (2000), Hidden Order: The Economics of Everyday Life (1996), and Future Imperfect (2008).
- Birthplace: New York City, New York
David M. Kreps
Age: 74David Marc "Dave" Kreps (born 1950 in New York) is a game theorist and economist and professor at the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University. He is known for his analysis of dynamic choice models and non-cooperative game theory, particularly the idea of sequential equilibrium, which he developed with Stanford Business School colleague Robert B. Wilson. He earned his A.B. from Dartmouth College in 1972 and his Ph.D. from Stanford in 1975. Kreps won the John Bates Clark Medal in 1989. He was awarded an honorary Ph.D. by the Université Paris-Dauphine in 2001. With colleagues Paul Milgrom and Robert B. Wilson, he was awarded the 2018 John J. Carty Award for the Advancement of Science. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences. He has also written many books, including Microeconomics for Managers, A Course in Microeconomic Theory, and Game Theory and Economic Modeling.- Birthplace: New York City, New York
- Robert Alan Jarrow is the Ronald P. and Susan E. Lynch Professor of Investment Management at the Johnson Graduate School of Management, Cornell University. Professor Jarrow is a co-creator of the Heath–Jarrow–Morton framework for pricing interest rate derivatives, a co-creator of the reduced form Jarrow–Turnbull credit risk models employed for pricing credit derivatives, and the creator of the forward price martingale measure. These tools and models are now the standards utilized for pricing and hedging in major investment and commercial banks.He is on the advisory board of Mathematical Finance – a journal he co-started in 1989. He is also an associate or advisory editor for numerous other journals and serves on the board of directors of several firms and professional societies. He is currently both an IAFE senior fellow and an FDIC senior fellow. He has served as Managing Director for Research of Kamakura Corporation since 1995. Professor Jarrow has been the recipient of numerous prizes and awards including the CBOE Pomerance Prize for Excellence in the Area of Options Research, the Graham and Dodd Scrolls Award, and the 1997 International Association of Financial Engineers IAFE/SunGard Financial Engineer of the Year Award. He is included in both the Fixed Income Analysts Society Hall of Fame and Risk Magazine’s 50 member Hall of Fame. Publications include five books - Options Pricing, Finance Theory, Modeling Fixed Income Securities and Interest Rate Options (second edition), Derivative Securities (second edition), and And Introduction to Derivative Securities, Financial Markets, and Risk Management - as well as over 100 publications in leading finance and economic journals. He graduated magna cum laude from Duke University in 1974 with a major in mathematics, received an MBA from the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College in 1976 with highest distinction, and in 1979 he obtained a PhD in finance from the MIT Sloan School of Management under Robert C. Merton.
- Simon Newcomb (March 12, 1835 – July 11, 1909) was a Canadian–American astronomer, applied mathematician and autodidactic polymath, who was Professor of Mathematics in the U.S. Navy and at Johns Hopkins.Though he had little conventional schooling, he made important contributions to timekeeping as well as other fields in applied mathematics such as economics and statistics in addition to writing a science fiction novel.
- Birthplace: Wallace, Nova Scotia
John R. Lott Jr.
Age: 66John Richard Lott Jr. (born May 8, 1958) is an American economist, political commentator, and gun rights advocate. Lott was formerly employed at various academic institutions including the University of Chicago, Yale University, the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of Maryland, College Park, and at the American Enterprise Institute conservative think tank. As of 2017, he is a contributor for FoxNews.com, the Hill, and the president of the Crime Prevention Research Center, a nonprofit he founded in 2013. Lott holds a Ph.D. in economics from UCLA. He has written for both academic and popular publications. He has authored books such as More Guns, Less Crime, The Bias Against Guns, and Freedomnomics. He is best known as an advocate in the gun rights debate, particularly his arguments against restrictions on owning and carrying guns. Newsweek referred to Lott as "The Gun Crowd's Guru."- Tobias Jacob "Toby" Moskowitz (born February 3, 1971) is an American financial economist and a professor at the Yale School of Management. He was the winner of the 2007 American Finance Association (AFA) Fischer Black Prize, awarded to a leading finance scholar under the age of 40.
- Birthplace: West Lafayette, Wabash Township, Indiana
- James McGill Buchanan Jr. (; October 3, 1919 – January 9, 2013) was an American economist known for his work on public choice theory (included in his most famous work, co-authored with Gordon Tullock, The Calculus of Consent, 1962), for which he received the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1986. Buchanan's work initiated research on how politicians' and bureaucrats' self-interest, utility maximization, and other non-wealth-maximizing considerations affect their decision-making. He was a member of the Board of Advisors of The Independent Institute, a member (and for a time president) of the Mont Pelerin Society, a Distinguished Senior Fellow of the Cato Institute, and professor at George Mason University.
- Birthplace: Murfreesboro, Tennessee
- Christina Duckworth Romer (née Duckworth; born December 25, 1958) is the Class of 1957 Garff B. Wilson Professor of Economics at the University of California, Berkeley and a former chair of the Council of Economic Advisers in the Obama administration. She resigned from her role on the Council of Economic Advisers on September 3, 2010.After her nomination and before the Obama administration took office, Romer worked with economist Jared Bernstein to co-author the administration's plan for recovery from the 2008 recession. In a January 2009 video presentation, she discussed details of the job creation program that the Obama administration submitted to Congress.
- Birthplace: Alton, Illinois, USA
- Harry Igor “The Rock” Ansoff (рус. Игорь Ансов; original surname is Ansov) (December 12, 1918 – July 14, 2002) was a Russian American applied mathematician and business manager. He is known as the father of strategic management.
- Birthplace: Vladivostok, Russia
- George Arthur Akerlof (born June 17, 1940) is an American economist who is a university professor at the McCourt School of Public Policy at Georgetown University and Koshland Professor of Economics Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley. He won the 2001 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences (shared with Michael Spence and Joseph E. Stiglitz).
- Birthplace: New Haven, Connecticut
Robert Higgs
Age: 80Robert Higgs (born 1 February 1944) is an American economic historian and economist combining material from Public Choice, the New institutional economics, and the Austrian school of economics; and describes himself as a libertarian anarchist in political and legal theory and public policy. His writings in economics and economic history have most often focused on the causes, means, and effects of government power and growth.Walter Block
Age: 83Walter Edward Block (born August 21, 1941) is an American Austrian School economist and anarcho-capitalist theorist. He currently holds the Harold E. Wirth Eminent Scholar Endowed Chair in Economics at the J. A. Butt School of Business at Loyola University New Orleans, and is a senior fellow of the Ludwig von Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama. He is best known for his 1976 book Defending the Undefendable, which takes contrarian positions in defending acts which are illegal or disreputable but Block argues are actually victimless crimes or benefit the public.- Birthplace: New York City, New York
- Lauchlin Bernard Currie (October 8, 1902 – December 23, 1993) worked as White House economic adviser to President Franklin Roosevelt during World War II (1939–45). From 1949-53, he directed a major World Bank mission to Colombia and related studies. Information from the Venona project, a counter-intelligence program undertaken by agencies of the United States government, references him in nine partially decrypted cables sent by agents of the Soviet Union. He became a Colombian citizen after the United States refused to renew his passport in 1954 due to doubts of his loyalty to the United States engendered by testimony of former Communist agents and information in the Venona decrypts.
- Birthplace: Canada
- Eric Steven Lander (born February 3, 1957), a mathematician and geneticist, is a Professor of Biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), former member of the Whitehead Institute, and founding director of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. He was co-chair of U.S. President Barack Obama's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology.
- Birthplace: New York City, New York
- Richard Gordon "Dick" Darman (May 10, 1943 – January 25, 2008) was an American businessman and government official who served in senior positions during the presidencies of Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush.
- Birthplace: Charlotte, North Carolina, USA
- Douglas Robert Casey (born May 5, 1946, in Chicago, Illinois) is an American writer, speculator, and the founder and chairman of Casey Research. He describes himself as an anarcho-capitalist influenced by the works of novelist Ayn Rand.
- Simon Smith Kuznets (; Russian: Семён Абра́мович Кузне́ц, IPA: [sʲɪˈmʲɵn ɐˈbraməvʲɪtɕ kʊzʲˈnʲɛts]; April 30, 1901 – July 8, 1985) 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." Kuznets made a decisive contribution to the transformation of economics into an empirical science and to the formation of quantitative economic history.
- Birthplace: Pinsk, Belarus
- Kamer Daron Acemoğlu (Turkish: [daˈɾon adʒeˈmoːɫu]; born September 3, 1967) is a Turkish-born American economist who has taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) since 1993. He is currently Elizabeth and James Killian Professor of Economics at MIT. He was named Institute Professor in 2019. Born to Armenian parents in Istanbul, Acemoglu was educated in the UK and completed his PhD at the London School of Economics (LSE) at 25. He lectured at LSE for a year before joining the MIT. He was awarded the John Bates Clark Medal in 2005. Acemoglu is best known for his work on political economy. He has authored hundreds of papers, many of which are co-authored with his long-time collaborators Simon Johnson and James A. Robinson. With Robinson, he authored Economic Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy (2006) and Why Nations Fail (2012). The latter, an influential book on the role that institutions play in shaping nations' economic outcomes, prompted wide scholarly and media commentary. Described as a centrist, he believes in a regulated market economy. He regularly comments on political issues, economic inequality, and a variety of specific policies. Acemoglu ranked third, behind Paul Krugman and Greg Mankiw, in the list of "Favorite Living Economists Under Age 60" in a 2011 survey among American economists. In 2015 he was named the most cited economist of the past 10 years per Research Papers in Economics (RePEc) data.
- Birthplace: Istanbul, Turkey
Wolfgang G. Schwanitz
Age: 69Wolfgang G. Schwanitz is a German-American Middle East historian. He is a specialist in comparative studies of modern international relations between the United States, the Middle East, and Europe. Schwanitz is known for his research on relations between Arabs, Jews, and Germans, and on the history of German relations with the Middle East.Stephen Moore
Age: 64Stephen Moore (born February 16, 1960) is an American writer and television commentator on economic issues. He co-founded and served as president of the Club for Growth from 1999 to 2004. Moore is a former member of the Wall Street Journal editorial board. He worked at the Heritage Foundation during the period from 1983 to 1987 and again since 2014. Moore advised Herman Cain's 2012 presidential campaign and Donald Trump's 2016 presidential campaign.Moore advocates tax cuts and other supply-side policies. Moore's columns have appeared in outlets such as the Wall Street Journal, The Washington Times, The Weekly Standard and National Review. In 2017, he left Fox News Channel to join CNN as a senior economic analyst, leaving that position in early 2019. Along with Larry Kudlow, Moore advised the Trump administration during the writing and passage of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act.On March 15, 2019, President Donald Trump announced that Moore would be nominated to serve as a governor of the Federal Reserve. On May 2, 2019, Moore withdrew his name from consideration.- Birthplace: Chicago, Illinois
- Franco Modigliani (1918 - 2003) was an Italian-American economist and the recipient of the 1985 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics. He was a professor at University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, Carnegie Mellon University, and MIT Sloan School of Management.
- Birthplace: Rome, Italy
- Susan Carleton Athey (born November 29, 1970) is an American economist. She is The Economics of Technology Professor at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. Prior to joining Stanford, she was a professor at Harvard University. She is the first female winner of the John Bates Clark Medal. She currently serves as a long-term consultant to Microsoft as well as a consulting researcher to Microsoft Research.
- Birthplace: Boston, Massachusetts
- Abram Lincoln Harris, Jr. (January 17, 1899 – November 6, 1963) was an American economist, academic, anthropologist and a social critic of blacks in the United States. Considered by many as the first African American to achieve prominence in the field of economics, Harris was also known for his heavy influence on black radical and neo-conservative thought in the United States. As an economist, Harris is most famous for his 1931 collaboration with political scientist Sterling Spero to produce a study on African-American labor history titled The Black Worker and his 1936 work The Negro as Capitalist, in which he criticized black businessmen for not promoting interracial trade. He headed the economics department at Howard University from 1936 to 1945 and taught at the University of Chicago from then until his death. As a social critic, Harris took an active radical stance on racial relations by examining historical black involvement in the workplace, and suggested that African Americans needed to take more action in race relations.
- Birthplace: Richmond, Virginia
- Paul Howard Douglas (March 26, 1892 – September 24, 1976) was an American politician and Georgist economist. A member of the Democratic Party, he served as a U.S. Senator from Illinois for eighteen years, from 1949 to 1967. During his Senate career, he was a prominent member of the liberal coalition.Born in Massachusetts and raised in Maine, Douglas graduated from Bowdoin College and Columbia University. He served as a professor of economics at several schools, most notably the University of Chicago, and earned a reputation as a reformer while a member of the Chicago City Council (1939–1942). During World War II, he served in the U.S. Marine Corps, rising to the rank of lieutenant colonel and becoming known as a war hero. He was married to Emily Taft Douglas, a U.S. Representative from Illinois's At-large district (1945–1947).
- Birthplace: USA, Massachusetts, Salem
- Robert John Aumann (Hebrew name: ישראל אומן, Yisrael Aumann; born June 8, 1930) is an Israeli-American mathematician, and a member of the United States National Academy of Sciences. He is a professor at the Center for the Study of Rationality in the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel. He also holds a visiting position at Stony Brook University, and is one of the founding members of the Stony Brook Center for Game Theory. Aumann received the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 2005 for his work on conflict and cooperation through game-theory analysis. He shared the prize with Thomas Schelling.
- Birthplace: Frankfurt, Germany
- Dan Ariely (Hebrew: דן אריאלי; born April 29, 1967) is an Israeli-American James B. Duke Professor of Psychology and Behavioral Economics at Duke University. Ariely is the founder of the research institution The Center for Advanced Hindsight, co-founder of the companies Kayma, BEworks, Timeful, Genie and Shapa., the Chief Behavioral Economist of Qapital and the Chief Behavioral Officer of Lemonade. Ariely's TED talks have been viewed over 15 million times. . Ariely is the author of the three New York Times best sellers Predictably Irrational, The Upside of Irrationality, and The Honest Truth about Dishonesty, as well as the books Dollars and Sense, Irrationally Yours – a collection of his popular The Wall Street Journal advice column “Ask Ariely”; and Payoff, a short TED book. Ariely appeared in several documentary films, including The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley and produced and participated in (Dis)Honesty: The Truth About Lies. In 2018 Ariely was named one of the 50 most influential living psychologists in the world.
- Birthplace: New York City, New York
- Hal Ronald Varian (born March 18, 1947 in Wooster, Ohio) is an economist specializing in microeconomics and information economics. He is the chief economist at Google and he holds the title of emeritus professor at the University of California, Berkeley where he was founding dean of the School of Information.
- Birthplace: Wooster, Ohio
- Bryan Douglas Caplan (born April 8, 1971) is an American economist and author. Caplan is a professor of economics at George Mason University, research fellow at the Mercatus Center, adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute, and frequent contributor to Freakonomics as well as publishing his own blog, EconLog. He is a self-described economic libertarian. The bulk of Caplan's academic work is in behavioral economics and public economics, especially public choice theory.
- Birthplace: Northridge, Los Angeles, California
- Burton Gordon Malkiel (born August 28, 1932) is an American economist and writer, most famous for his classic finance book A Random Walk Down Wall Street (now in its 12th edition as of 2019). He is a leading proponent of the efficient-market hypothesis, which contends that prices of publicly traded assets reflect all publicly available information, although he has also pointed out that some markets are evidently inefficient, exhibiting signs of non-random walk.Malkiel in general supports buying and holding index funds as the most effective portfolio-management strategy, but does think it is viable to actively manage "around the edges" of such a portfolio, as financial markets are not totally efficient.
- Birthplace: Boston, Massachusetts
- Caroline Minter Hoxby (born 1966) is an American economist whose research focuses on issues in education and public economics. She is currently the Scott and Donya Bommer Professor in Economics at Stanford University and program director of the Economics of Education Program for the National Bureau of Economic Research. Hoxby is a John and Lydia Pearce Mitchell University Fellow in Undergraduate Education. She is also a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research.
- James Darrell Duffie (born May 23, 1954) is a Canadian financial economist, is Dean Witter Distinguished Professor of Finance at Stanford Graduate School of Business. He is the author of numerous research articles, and several books including Futures Markets, Dynamic Asset Pricing Theory, and—with Kenneth Singleton—Credit Risk.Duffie has been on the finance faculty at Stanford since 1984. He is a Fellow and member of the Council of the Econometric Society, a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, a member of the Financial Advisory Roundtable of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, and a Fellow of The American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He was the President of The American Finance Association for 2009. He has served on the editorial board of many journals, including Econometrica. In 2003, Duffie was awarded the SunGard/IAFE Financial Engineer of the Year Award from the International Association of Financial Engineers. He holds a Ph.D. (1984) in Engineering Economic Systems from Stanford University, a Master of Economics (1980) from the University of New England (Australia), and a Bachelor of Science in Engineering (Civil Engineering) (1975) from the University of New Brunswick.
- Edward Paul Lazear (, lə-ZEER) (born August 17, 1948) is an American economist, the Morris Arnold and Nona Jean Cox Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and the Davies Family Professor of Economics at Stanford Graduate School of Business.Lazear served as Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors from 2006 to 2009, replacing Ben Bernanke. As Chairman, he was the chief economic advisor to President George W. Bush holding a cabinet-level post as part of the White House team that led the response to the 2007-2008 financial crisis. Lazear has been called the founder of personnel economics a subfield of economics that applies economic models to the study of the management of human resources in the firm. His research advances new models of employee incentives, promotions, compensation and productivity in firms. He is also credited with developing a theory of entrepreneurship and leadership that emphasizes skill acquisition. In addition to personnel economics, Lazear is a labor economist known for his work on the educational production function, teaching to the test, and the importance of culture and language in explaining the rise of multiculturalism.
- Birthplace: New York City, New York, USA
- Eric Stark Maskin (born December 12, 1950) is an American economist and 2007 Nobel laureate recognized with Leonid Hurwicz and Roger Myerson "for having laid the foundations of mechanism design theory". He is the Adams University Professor at Harvard University. Until 2011, he was the Albert O. Hirschman Professor of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study, and a visiting lecturer with the rank of professor at Princeton University.
- Birthplace: New York City, New York
- Leonid "Leo" Hurwicz (Polish pronunciation: [lɛˈɔɲit ˈxurvitʂ]; August 21, 1917 – June 24, 2008) was a Polish-American economist and mathematician, known for his work in game theory and mechanism design. He originated the concept of incentive compatibility, and showed how desired outcomes can be achieved by using incentive compatible mechanism design. Hurwicz shared the 2007 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences (with Eric Maskin and Roger Myerson) for his seminal work on mechanism design. Hurwicz was one of the oldest Nobel Laureate, having received the prize at the age of 90. Hurwicz was educated and grew up in Poland, and became a refugee in the United States after Hitler invaded Poland in 1939. In 1941, Hurwicz worked as a research assistant for Paul Samuelson at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Oskar Lange at the University of Chicago. He was a research associate for the Cowles Commission between 1942 and 1946. In 1946 he became an associate professor of economics at Iowa State College. Hurwicz joined the University of Minnesota in 1951, becoming Curtis L. Carlson Regents Professor of Economics in 1989. He was Regents' Professor of Economics (Emeritus) at the University of Minnesota when he died in 2008. Hurwicz was among the first economists to recognize the value of game theory and was a pioneer in its application. Interactions of individuals and institutions, markets and trade are analyzed and understood today using the models Hurwicz developed.
- Birthplace: Moscow, Russia
- Nouriel Roubini (born March 29, 1958) is an American economist. He teaches at New York University's Stern School of Business and is chairman of Roubini Macro Associates LLC, an economic consultancy firm. The child of Iranian Jews, he was born in Turkey and grew up in Italy. After receiving a BA in political economics at Bocconi University, Milan and a doctorate in international economics at Harvard University, he became an academic at Yale and a visiting researcher/advisor at the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the Federal Reserve, World Bank, and Bank of Israel. Much of his early research focused on emerging markets. During the administration of President Bill Clinton, he was a senior economist for the Council of Economic Advisers, later moving to the United States Treasury Department as a senior adviser to Timothy Geithner, who in 2009 became Treasury Secretary.
- Birthplace: Istanbul, Turkey
- Allan H. Meltzer (; February 6, 1928 – May 8, 2017) was an American economist and Allan H. Meltzer Professor of Political Economy at Carnegie Mellon University's Tepper School of Business and Institute for Politics and Strategy in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Meltzer specialized on studying monetary policy and the US Federal Reserve System, and authored several academic papers and books on the development and applications of monetary policy, and about the history of central banking in the US. Together with Karl Brunner, he created the Shadow Open Market Committee: a monetarist council that deeply criticized the Federal Open Market Committee.Meltzer originated the aphorism "Capitalism without failure is like religion without sin. It doesn't work." That is, guarding companies from failure "removes the dynamic process that makes stockholders responsible for losses and disciplines managers who make mistakes."
- Birthplace: Boston, Massachusetts
- Nassim Nicholas Taleb (; Arabic: نسيم نقولا طالب, alternatively Nessim or Nissim; born 1960) is a Lebanese-American (of Antiochian Greek descent) essayist, scholar, statistician, and former trader and risk analyst, whose work concerns problems of randomness, probability, and uncertainty. His 2007 book The Black Swan has been described by The Sunday Times as one of the twelve most influential books since World War II.Taleb is the author of the Incerto, a five volume philosophical essay on uncertainty published between 2001 and 2018 (of which the most known books are The Black Swan and Antifragile). He has been a professor at several universities, serving as a Distinguished Professor of Risk Engineering at the New York University Tandon School of Engineering since September 2008. He has been co-editor-in-chief of the academic journal Risk and Decision Analysis since September 2014. He has also been a practitioner of mathematical finance, a hedge fund manager, and a derivatives trader, and is currently listed as a scientific adviser at Universa Investments.He criticized the risk management methods used by the finance industry and warned about financial crises, subsequently profiting from the late-2000s financial crisis. He advocates what he calls a "black swan robust" society, meaning a society that can withstand difficult-to-predict events. He proposes antifragility in systems, that is, an ability to benefit and grow from a certain class of random events, errors, and volatility as well as "convex tinkering" as a method of scientific discovery, by which he means that decentralized experimentation outperforms directed research.
- Birthplace: Amioun, Lebanon
- David Graham Blanchflower, (born 2 March 1952), sometimes called Danny Blanchflower, is a British-American labour economist and academic. He is currently a tenured economics professor at Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire. He is also a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, part-time professor at the University of Stirling, Research Fellow at the Centre for Economic Studies at the University of Munich and (since 1999) the Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA) at the University of Bonn, and a Bloomberg TV contributing editor. He was an external member of the Bank of England's interest rate-setting Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) from June 2006 to June 2009. British-born, Blanchflower is now both a British and an American citizen, having moved to the United States in 1989. He was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 2009 Birthday Honours.
- Birthplace: Brighton, England
- Albert Otto Hirschman (born Otto-Albert Hirschmann; April 7, 1915 – December 10, 2012) was an economist and the author of several books on political economy and political ideology. His first major contribution was in the area of development economics. Here he emphasized the need for unbalanced growth. Because developing countries are short of decision making skills, he argued that disequilibria should be encouraged to stimulate growth and help mobilize resources. Key to this was encouraging industries with a large number of linkages to other firms. His later work was in political economy and there he advanced two schemata. The first describes the three basic possible responses to decline in firms or polities (quitting, speaking up, staying quiet) in Exit, Voice, and Loyalty (1970). The second describes the basic arguments made by [conservatism|conservatives]] (perversity, futility and jeopardy) in The Rhetoric of Reaction (1991). In World War II, he played a key role in rescuing refugees in occupied France.
- Birthplace: Berlin, Germany
- Robert William Fogel (; July 1, 1926 – June 11, 2013) was an American economic historian and scientist, and winner (with Douglass North) of the 1993 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. As of his death, he was the Charles R. Walgreen Distinguished Service Professor of American Institutions and director of the Center for Population Economics (CPE) at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. He is best known as an advocate of new economic history (cliometrics) – the use of quantitative methods in history.
- Birthplace: New York City, New York
- Myron Samuel Scholes ( SHOHLZ; born July 1, 1941) is a Canadian-American financial economist. Scholes is the Frank E. Buck Professor of Finance, Emeritus, at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, Nobel Laureate in Economic Sciences, and co-originator of the Black–Scholes options pricing model. Scholes is currently the chairman of the Board of Economic Advisers of Stamos Capital Partners. Previously he served as the chairman of Platinum Grove Asset Management and on the Dimensional Fund Advisors board of directors, American Century Mutual Fund board of directors and the Cutwater Advisory Board. He was a principal and limited partner at Long-Term Capital Management, L.P. and a managing director at Salomon Brothers. Other positions Scholes held include the Edward Eagle Brown Professor of Finance at the University of Chicago, senior research fellow at the Hoover Institution, director of the Center for Research in Security Prices, and professor of finance at MIT’s Sloan School of Management. Scholes earned his PhD at the University of Chicago. In 1997 he was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for a method to determine the value of derivatives. The model provides a conceptual framework for valuing options, such as calls or puts, and is referred to as the Black–Scholes model.
- Birthplace: Timmins, Canada
- Bruce Owen is Morris M. Doyle Centennial Professor in Public Policy, Director of the Public Policy Program, Senior Fellow at SIEPR & Prof, by courtesy, of Economics at Stanford University
- Birthplace: Worcester, Massachusetts
- Oliver Eaton Williamson (born September 27, 1932) is an American economist, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and recipient of the 2009 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, which he shared with Elinor Ostrom.
- Birthplace: Superior, Wisconsin
- Murray Newton Rothbard (; March 2, 1926 – January 7, 1995) was an American heterodox economist of the Austrian School, historian, and a political theorist whose writings and personal influence played a seminal role in the development of modern right-libertarianism. Rothbard was the founder and leading theoretician of anarcho-capitalism, a staunch advocate of historical revisionism and a central figure in the 20th-century American libertarian movement. He wrote over twenty books on political theory, revisionist history, economics and other subjects.Rothbard asserted that all services provided by the "monopoly system of the corporate state" could be provided more efficiently by the private sector and wrote that the state is "the organization of robbery systematized and writ large". He called fractional-reserve banking a form of fraud and opposed central banking. He categorically opposed all military, political and economic interventionism in the affairs of other nations. According to his protégé Hans-Hermann Hoppe, "[t]here would be no anarcho-capitalist movement to speak of without Rothbard".Economist Jeffrey Herbener, who calls Rothbard his friend and "intellectual mentor", wrote that Rothbard received "only ostracism" from mainstream academia. Rothbard rejected mainstream economic methodologies and instead embraced the praxeology of his most important intellectual precursor, Ludwig von Mises. To promote his economic and political ideas, Rothbard joined Lew Rockwell and Burton Blumert in 1982 to establish the Mises Institute in Alabama.
- Birthplace: New York City, New York
- Michael Hammer may refer to: Michael Martin Hammer (1948–2008), engineer and author Michael A. Hammer (born 1963), official in the U.S. State Department Michael Armand Hammer (born 1955), American philanthropist and businessman Mike Hammer, a fictional hard boiled detective
- Birthplace: Annapolis, Maryland
- Irving Fisher (February 27, 1867 – April 29, 1947) was an American economist, statistician, inventor, 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.Fisher made important contributions to utility theory and general equilibrium. He was also a pioneer in the rigorous study of intertemporal choice in markets, which led him to develop a theory of capital and interest rates. His research on the quantity theory of money inaugurated the school of macroeconomic thought known as "monetarism." Fisher was also a pioneer of econometrics, including the development of index numbers. Some concepts named after him include the Fisher equation, the Fisher hypothesis, the international Fisher effect, the Fisher separation theorem and Fisher market. Fisher was perhaps the first celebrity economist, but his reputation during his lifetime was irreparably harmed by his public statements, just prior to the Wall Street Crash of 1929, claiming that the stock market had reached "a permanently high plateau". His subsequent theory of debt deflation as an explanation of the Great Depression, as well as his advocacy of full-reserve banking and alternative currencies, were largely ignored in favor of the work of John Maynard Keynes. Fisher's reputation has since recovered in neoclassical economics, particularly after his work was rediscovered in the late 1950s, and more widely due to an increased interest in debt deflation after the late-2000s recession.Having made numerous contributions to economic theory, he later became the foremost proponent of the full-reserve banking reform until his death. He was one of the authors of A Program for Monetary Reform where the general concepts of 100% reserve system is outlined.
- Birthplace: Saugerties, New York
- Jacob Marschak (23 July 1898 – 27 July 1977) was an American economist, known as "the Father of Econometrics".
- Birthplace: Kiev, Ukraine
- Tjalling Charles Koopmans (August 28, 1910 – February 26, 1985) was a Dutch American mathematician and economist. He was the joint winner with Leonid Kantorovich of the 1975 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his work on the theory of the optimum allocation of resources. Koopmans showed that on the basis of certain efficiency criteria, it is possible to make important deductions concerning optimum price systems.
- Birthplace: 's-Graveland, Netherlands
- Ian Ayres (born 1959) is an American lawyer and economist. He is a professor at the Yale Law School and at the Yale School of Management.
- James Joseph Heckman, born in 1944, is a Nobel Prize winning American economist who is currently at the University of Chicago, where he is The Henry Schultz Distinguished Service Professor in Economics and the College; Professor at the Harris Graduate School of Public Policy Studies; Director of the Center for the Economics of Human Development (CEHD); and Co-Director of Human Capital and Economic Opportunity (HCEO) Global Working Group. He is also Professor of Law at the Law School, a senior research fellow at the American Bar Foundation, and a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. In 2000, Heckman shared the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences with Daniel McFadden, for his pioneering work in econometrics and microeconomics. As of February 2019 (according to RePEc), he is the next most influential economist in the world.
- Birthplace: Chicago, Illinois
- David LeFevre Dodd (August 23, 1895 – September 18, 1988) was an American educator, financial analyst, author, economist, professional investor, and in his student years, a protégé of, and as a postgraduate, close colleague of Benjamin Graham at Columbia Business School. The Wall Street Crash of 1929 (Black Tuesday) almost wiped out Graham, who had started teaching the year before at his alma mater, Columbia. The crash inspired Graham to search for a more conservative, safer way to invest. Graham agreed to teach with the stipulation that someone take notes. Dodd, then a young instructor at Columbia, volunteered. Those transcriptions served as the basis for a 1934 book Security Analysis, which galvanized the concept of value investing. It is the longest running investment text ever published.
- Birthplace: West Virginia
- Gary Stanley Becker (1930 - 2014) was an American economist. He was a professor of economics and sociology at the University of Chicago. According to Milton Friedman he was “the greatest social scientist who has lived and worked" in the second part of the twentieth century. Economist Justin Wolfers called him, "the most important social scientist in the past 50 years." Becker was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1992 and received the United States Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2007. A 2011 survey of economics professors named Becker their favorite living economist over the age of 60, followed by Ken Arrow and Robert Solow. Becker was one of the first economists to analyze topics that had been researched in sociology, including racial discrimination, crime, family organization, and rational addiction. He argued that many different types of human behavior can be seen as rational and utility maximizing. His approach included altruistic behavior of human behavior by defining individuals' utility appropriately. He was also among the foremost exponents of the study of human capital.
- Birthplace: Pottsville, Pennsylvania
- George Joseph Stigler (; January 17, 1911 – December 1, 1991) was an American economist, the 1982 laureate in Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences and a key leader of the Chicago School of Economics.
- Birthplace: Renton, Washington
- Jeremy Rifkin (born January 26, 1945) is an American economic and social theorist, writer, public speaker, political advisor, and activist. Rifkin is the author of 20 books about the impact of scientific and technological changes on the economy, the workforce, society, and the environment. His most recent books include The Zero Marginal Cost Society (2014), The Third Industrial Revolution (2011), The Empathic Civilization (2010), and The European Dream (2004). Rifkin is the principal architect of the Third Industrial Revolution long-term economic sustainability plan to address the triple challenge of the global economic crisis, energy security, and climate change. The Third Industrial Revolution was formally endorsed by the European Parliament in 2007 and is now being implemented by various agencies within the European Commission.The Huffington Post reported from Beijing in October 2015 that "Chinese Premier Li Keqiang has not only read Jeremy Rifkin's book, The Third Industrial Revolution, but taken it to heart", he and his colleagues having incorporated ideas from this book into the core of the country's thirteenth Five-Year Plan. According to EurActiv, "Jeremy Rifkin is an American economist and author whose best-selling Third Industrial Revolution arguably provided the blueprint for Germany's transition to a low-carbon economy, and China's strategic acceptance of climate policy."Rifkin has taught at the Wharton School's Executive Education Program at the University of Pennsylvania since 1995, where he instructs CEOs and senior management on transitioning their business operations into sustainable economies. Rifkin is ranked #123 in the WorldPost / HuffingtonPost 2015 global survey of "The World's Most Influential Voices." He is also listed among the top 10 most influential economic thinkers in the survey. Rifkin has lectured before many Fortune 500 companies, and hundreds of governments, civil society organizations, and universities over the past thirty five years.Rifkin is also the President of the TIR Consulting Group, LLC, in connection with a wide range of industries including renewable energy, power transmission, architecture, construction, IT, electronics, transport, and logistics. TIR's global economic development team is working with cities, regions, and national governments to develop the Internet of Things (IoT) infrastructure for a Collaborative Commons and a Third Industrial Revolution. TIR is currently working with the regions of Hauts-de-France in France, the Metropolitan Region of Rotterdam and The Hague, and the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg in the conceptualization, build-out, and scale-up of a smart Third Industrial Revolution infrastructure to transform their economies.
- Birthplace: Denver, Colorado
- Leslie Aspin Jr. (July 21, 1938 – May 21, 1995) was a United States Representative from 1971 to 1993, and the United States Secretary of Defense under President Bill Clinton from January 21, 1993 to February 3, 1994. In Congress, Aspin had a reputation as an intellectual who took a middle-of-the-road position on controversial issues. He supported the Reagan administration regarding the MX missile and aid to the Nicaraguan Contras, but he opposed the B-2 bomber and the Strategic Defense Initiative. He played a major role in convincing the House to support the January 1991 resolution supporting the use of force by President G.H.W. Bush against Iraq, after it invaded Kuwait. As Secretary of Defense, he faced complex social issues, such as the roles of homosexuals in uniform, and of women in combat. He faced major decisions regarding the use of military force in Somalia, Bosnia, and Haiti. He proposed budget cuts and restructuring of forces as part of the downsizing of the military after the end of the Cold War. The deaths of U.S. soldiers in Somalia because of inadequate military support led to his resignation.
- Birthplace: Milwaukee, Wisconsin, USA
- Robert L. Kuttner (; born April 17, 1943) is an American journalist and writer whose works present a liberal/progressive point of view. Kuttner is the co-founder and current co-editor of The American Prospect, which was created in 1990 as an "authoritative magazine of liberal ideas," according to its mission statement. He was a 20-year columnist for Business Week and The Boston Globe, and continues to write columns in and for the Huffington Post.Kuttner is also one of five 1986 co-founders of the Economic Policy Institute, and currently serves on its executive committee. Between 2007 and 2014, Kuttner joined the liberal Demos research and policy center as a Distinguished Senior Fellow.
- Birthplace: New York City, New York
- Walt Whitman Rostow (also known as Walt Rostow or W.W. Rostow) (October 7, 1916 – February 13, 2003) was an American economist, professor and political theorist who served as Special Assistant for National Security Affairs to US President Lyndon B. Johnson from 1966 to 1969.Rostow worked in the Office of Strategic Services during World War II and later was a foreign policy adviser and speechwriter for presidential candidate and then President John F. Kennedy; he is often credited with writing Kennedy's famous "New Frontier" speech. Prominent for his role in the shaping of US foreign policy in Southeast Asia during the 1960s, he was a staunch anti-communist, noted for a belief in the efficacy of capitalism and free enterprise, strongly supporting US involvement in the Vietnam War. Rostow is known for his book The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto (1960), which was used in several fields of social science. Rostow's theories were embraced by many officials in both the Kennedy and Johnson administrations as a possible counter to the increasing popularity of communism in Asia, Africa and Latin America. Unlike other protagonists of the Vietnam War (like Robert McNamara), Rostow never apologized for his actions, and this stance effectively ostracized him from work in top American universities after his retirement from government service. His older brother Eugene Rostow also held a number of high government foreign policy posts.
- Birthplace: New York City, USA, New York
- Alfred Edward Kahn was an American professor, an expert in regulation and deregulation, and an important influence in the deregulation of the airline and energy industries. Commonly known as the "Father of Airline Deregulation," he chaired the Civil Aeronautics Board during the period when it ended its regulation of the airline industry, paving the way for low-cost airlines, from People Express to Southwest Airlines. He was the Robert Julius Thorne Professor Emeritus of Political Economy at Cornell University.
- Birthplace: Paterson, New Jersey
- Anne Osborn Krueger (; born February 12, 1934) is an American economist. She was the World Bank Chief Economist from 1982 to 1986, and the first deputy managing director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) from 2001 to 2006. She is currently the senior research professor of international economics at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, D.C. She also is a senior fellow of Center for International Development (also was the founding Director) and the Herald L. and Caroline Ritch Emeritus Professor of Sciences and Humanities' Economics Department at Stanford University.
- Birthplace: Endicott, New York
- Harold Hotelling (; September 29, 1895 – December 26, 1973) was an American mathematical statistician and an influential economic theorist, known for Hotelling's law, Hotelling's lemma, and Hotelling's rule in economics, as well as Hotelling's T-squared distribution in statistics. He also developed and named the principal component analysis method widely used in finance, statistics and computer science. He was Associate Professor of Mathematics at Stanford University from 1927 until 1931, a member of the faculty of Columbia University from 1931 until 1946, and a Professor of Mathematical Statistics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill from 1946 until his death. A street in Chapel Hill bears his name. In 1972, he received the North Carolina Award for contributions to science.
- Birthplace: Fulda, Minnesota
- John Brian Taylor (born December 8, 1946) is the Mary and Robert Raymond Professor of Economics at Stanford University, and the George P. Shultz Senior Fellow in Economics at Stanford University's Hoover Institution.Born in Yonkers, New York, he graduated from Shady Side Academy and earned his A.B. from Princeton University in 1968 and Ph.D. from Stanford in 1973, both in economics. He taught at Columbia University from 1973–1980 and the Woodrow Wilson School and Economics Department of Princeton University from 1980–1984 before returning to Stanford. He has received several teaching prizes and teaches Stanford's introductory economics course as well as Ph.D. courses in monetary economics.In research published in 1979 and 1980 he developed a model of price and wage setting—called the staggered contract model—which served as an underpinning of a new class of empirical models with rational expectations and sticky prices—sometimes called new Keynesian models. In a 1993 paper he proposed the Taylor rule, intended as a recommendation about how nominal interest rates should be determined, which then became a rough summary of how central banks actually do set them. He has been active in public policy, serving as the Under Secretary of the Treasury for International Affairs during the first term of the George W. Bush Administration. His book Global Financial Warriors chronicles this period. He was a member of the President's Council of Economic Advisors during the George H. W. Bush Administration and Senior Economist at the Council of Economic Advisors during the Ford and Carter Administrations. In 2012 he was included in the 50 Most Influential list of Bloomberg Markets Magazine. Thomson Reuters lists Taylor among the 'citation laureates' who are likely future winners of the Nobel Prize in Economics.
- Birthplace: Yonkers, New York, USA
- Edmund Strother Phelps (born July 26, 1933) is an American economist and the recipient of the 2006 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. Early in his career, he became known for his research at Yale's Cowles Foundation in the first half of the 1960s on the sources of economic growth. His demonstration of the golden rule savings rate, a concept related to work by John von Neumann, started a wave of research on how much a nation should spend on present consumption rather than save and invest for future generations. Phelps was at the University of Pennsylvania from 1966 to 1971 and moved to Columbia University in 1971. His most seminal work inserted a microfoundation, one featuring imperfect information, incomplete knowledge and expectations about wages and prices, to support a macroeconomic theory of employment determination and price-wage dynamics. That led to his development of the natural rate of unemployment: its existence and the mechanism governing its size. In the early 2000s, he turned to the study of business innovation. He is the founding director, since 2001, of Columbia's Center on Capitalism and Society. He has been McVickar Professor of Political Economy at Columbia since 1982.
- Birthplace: Evanston, Illinois
- Rajeev "Raj" Patel (born 1972) is a British Indian American academic, journalist, activist and writer who has lived and worked in Zimbabwe, South Africa and the United States for extended periods. He has been referred to as "the rock star of social justice writing."
- Birthplace: London, United Kingdom
- Henry Kaufman (born October 20, 1927) is President of Henry Kaufman & Company, Inc., a firm established in April 1988, specializing in economic and financial consulting, and is known by the nickname "Dr. Doom."
- Grace Raymond Hebard (July 2, 1861 – October 1936) gained prominence as a Wyoming historian, suffragist, pioneering scholar, prolific writer, political economist and noted University of Wyoming educator. Hebard's standing as a historian in part rose from her years trekking Wyoming's high plains and mountains seeking first-hand accounts of Wyoming's early pioneers. Today her books on Wyoming history are sometimes challenged due to Hebard's tendency to romanticize the Old West, spurring questions regarding accuracy of her research findings. In particular, her conclusion after decades of field research that Sacajawea (participant in the Lewis and Clark Expedition) was buried in Wyoming's Wind River Indian Reservation is called into question.Yet Hebard didn't let critics limit her. She served as the first female on the University of Wyoming Board of Trustees, where she exercised authority over the university finances, its president, and faculty. Her University of Wyoming role extended to establishing the university's first library. Moreover, Hebard served as a professor for 28 years. Hebard also broke new ground when she became the first woman admitted to the Wyoming State Bar Association (1898); admitted to practice before the Wyoming Supreme Court (1914); and appointed by her peers as vice president of the National Society of Women Lawyers.Whether it be as a legal professional, educator, or feminist, the Iowa native spearheaded her own one-woman progressive movement. The range rider seemed to be constantly on the stump in Wyoming giving speeches, organizing historical associations, conducting citizenship classes for immigrants, participating in the local and national suffragist movement, lobbying for child-welfare laws, serving as a Red Cross volunteer, and traveling the state selling war bonds during World War I.
- Birthplace: Clinton, Iowa
- Susan George (born June 29, 1934) is an American and French political and social scientist, activist and writer on global social justice, Third World poverty, underdevelopment and debt. She is a fellow and president of the board of the Transnational Institute in Amsterdam. She is a fierce critic of the present policies of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), World Bank (IBRD) and what she calls their 'maldevelopment model'. She similarly criticizes the structural reform policies of the Washington Consensus on Third World development. She is of U.S. birth but now resides in France, and has dual citizenship since 1994.
- Birthplace: Akron, Ohio
- Thomas James DiLorenzo (; born August 8, 1954) is an American economics professor at Loyola University Maryland Sellinger School of Business. He identifies as an adherent of the Austrian School of economics. He is a research fellow at The Independent Institute, a senior fellow of the Ludwig von Mises Institute, Board of Advisors member at CFACT, and an associate of the Abbeville Institute. He holds a Ph.D. in Economics from Virginia Tech.
- Avinash Kamalakar Dixit (born 6 August 1944, in Bombay, India) is an Indian-American economist. He was the John J. F. Sherrerd '52 University Professor of Economics Emeritus at Princeton University, Distinguished Adjunct Professor of Economics at Lingnan University (Hong Kong), senior research fellow at Nuffield College, Oxford and Sanjaya Lall Senior Visiting Research Fellow at Green Templeton College, Oxford.
- Birthplace: Mumbai, India
- Edward Christian Prescott (born December 26, 1940) is an American economist. He received the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics in 2004, sharing the award with Finn E. Kydland, "for their contributions to dynamic macroeconomics: the time consistency of economic policy and the driving forces behind business cycles". This research was primarily conducted while both Kydland and Prescott were affiliated with the Graduate School of Industrial Administration (now Tepper School of Business) at Carnegie Mellon University. According to the IDEAS/RePEc rankings, he is the 19th most widely cited economist in the world today. In August 2014, Prescott was appointed as an Adjunct Distinguished Economic Professor at the Australian National University (ANU) in Canberra, Australia.
- Birthplace: Glens Falls, New York
James K. Galbraith
Age: 73James Kenneth Galbraith (born January 29, 1952) is an American economist who writes frequently for the popular press on economic topics. He is currently a professor at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs and at the Department of Government, University of Texas at Austin. He is also a Senior Scholar with the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College and part of the executive committee of the World Economics Association, created in 2011.
