The Most Famous
ECONOMISTS from United States
This page contains a list of the greatest American Economists. The pantheon dataset contains 414 Economists, 122 of which were born in United States. This makes United States the birth place of the most number of Economists.
Top 10
The following people are considered by Pantheon to be the top 10 most legendary American Economists of all time. This list of famous American Economists is sorted by HPI (Historical Popularity Index), a metric that aggregates information on a biography’s online popularity. Visit the rankings page to view the entire list of American Economists.
1. Milton Friedman (1912 - 2006)
With an HPI of 74.33, Milton Friedman is the most famous American Economist. His biography has been translated into 95 different languages on wikipedia.
Milton Friedman ( ; July 31, 1912 – November 16, 2006) was an American economist and statistician 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, Friedman was among the intellectual leaders of the Chicago school of economics, a neoclassical school of economic thought associated with the work of the faculty at the University of Chicago that rejected Keynesianism in favor of monetarism until the mid-1970s, when it turned to new classical macroeconomics heavily based on the concept of rational expectations. Several students, young professors and academics who were recruited or mentored by Friedman at Chicago went on to become leading economists, including Gary Becker, Robert Fogel, and Robert Lucas Jr. Friedman's challenges to what he called "naive Keynesian theory" began with his interpretation of consumption, which tracks how consumers spend. He introduced a theory which would later become part of mainstream economics and among the first to propagate the theory of consumption smoothing. During 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 a macroeconomic viewpoint known as monetarism and argued that a steady, small expansion of the money supply was the preferred policy, as compared to rapid, and unexpected changes. His ideas concerning monetary policy, taxation, privatization, and deregulation influenced government policies, especially during the 1980s. His monetary theory influenced the Federal Reserve's monetary policy in response to the global financial crisis of 2007–2008. After retiring from the University of Chicago in 1977, and becoming Emeritus professor in economics in 1983, Friedman served as an advisor to Republican U.S. president Ronald Reagan and Conservative British prime minister Margaret Thatcher. His political philosophy extolled the virtues of a free market economic system with minimal government intervention in social matters. 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, school vouchers, and opposition to the war on drugs and support for drug liberalization policies. His support for school choice led him to found the Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice, later renamed EdChoice. Friedman's works 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 2011 survey of economists commissioned by the EJW ranked Friedman as the second-most popular economist of the 20th century, following only John Maynard Keynes. Upon his death, The Economist described him as "the most influential economist of the second half of the 20th century ... possibly of all of it".
2. Paul Samuelson (1915 - 2009)
With an HPI of 69.36, Paul Samuelson is the 2nd most famous American Economist. His biography has been translated into 78 different languages.
Paul Anthony Samuelson (May 15, 1915 – December 13, 2009) was an American economist who was the first American to win the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. When awarding the prize in 1970, the Swedish Royal Academies stated that he "has done more than any other contemporary economist to raise the level of scientific analysis in economic theory". Samuelson was one of the most influential economists of the latter half of the 20th century. In 1996, when he was awarded the National Medal of Science. Samuelson considered mathematics to be the "natural language" for economists and contributed significantly to the mathematical foundations of economics with his book Foundations of Economic Analysis. He was author of the best-selling economics textbook of all time: Economics: An Introductory Analysis, first published in 1948. It was the second American textbook that attempted to explain the principles of Keynesian economics. Samuelson served as an advisor to President John F. Kennedy and President Lyndon B. Johnson, and was a consultant to the United States Treasury, the Bureau of the Budget and the President's Council of Economic Advisers. Samuelson wrote a weekly column for Newsweek magazine along with Chicago School economist Milton Friedman, where they represented opposing sides: Samuelson, as a self described "Cafeteria Keynesian", claimed taking the Keynesian perspective but only accepting what he felt was good in it. By contrast, Friedman represented the monetarist perspective. Together with Henry Wallich, their 1967 columns earned the magazine a Gerald Loeb Special Award in 1968. Samuelson was born in Gary, Indiana, on May 15, 1915, to Frank Samuelson, a pharmacist, and Ella née Lipton. His family, he later said, was "made up of upwardly mobile Jewish immigrants from Poland who had prospered considerably in World War I, because Gary was a brand new steel-town when my family went there". In 1923, Samuelson moved to Chicago where he graduated from Hyde Park High School (now Hyde Park Career Academy). Samuelson attended the University of Chicago as an undergraduate, earning a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1935. He said he was born as an economist at 8:00 am on January 2, 1932, in the University of Chicago classroom. The lecture mentioned as the cause was on the British economist Thomas Malthus, who most famously studied population growth and its effects. Samuelson felt there was a dissonance between neoclassical economics and the way the system seemed to behave; he said Henry Simons and Frank Knight were a big influence on him. He next completed his Master of Arts degree in 1936, and his Doctor of Philosophy in 1941 at Harvard University. He won the David A. Wells prize in 1941 for writing the best doctoral dissertation at Harvard University in economics, for a thesis titled "Foundations of Analytical Economics", which later turned into Foundations of Economic Analysis. As a graduate student at Harvard, Samuelson studied economics under Joseph Schumpeter, Wassily Leontief, Gottfried Haberler, and the "American Keynes" Alvin Hansen. Samuelson moved to MIT as an assistant professor in 1940 and remained there until his death. Samuelson's biographer argues that a central reason for Samuelson's move from Harvard to MIT was the anti-Semitism that was famously widespread at Harvard at the time. In a 1989 letter to his friend Henry Rosovsky, Samuelson blamed anti-Semitism in Harvard economics above all on chair Harold Burbank, as well as on Edward Chamberlin, John H. Williams, John D. Black, and Leonard Crum. Samuelson's family included many well-known economists, including brother Robert Summers, sister-in-law Anita Summers, brother-in-law Kenneth Arrow and nephew Larry Summers. During his seven decades as an economist, Samuelson's professional positions included: Assistant professor of economics at MIT, 1940; associate professor, 1944. Member of the Radiation Laboratory 1944–45. Professor of international economic relations (part-time) at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy in 1945. Guggenheim Fellowship from 1948 to 1949 Professor of economics at MIT beginning in 1947 and Institute Professor beginning in 1962. Vernon F. Taylor Visiting Distinguished Professor at Trinity University (Texas) in spring 1989. Samuelson died after a brief illness on December 13, 2009, at the age of 94. His death was announced by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. James M. Poterba, an economics professor at MIT and the president of the National Bureau of Economic Research, commented that Samuelson "leaves an immense legacy, as a researcher and a teacher, as one of the giants on whose shoulders every contemporary economist stands". Susan Hockfield, the president of MIT, said that Samuelson "transformed everything he touched: the theoretical foundations of his field, the way economics was taught around the world, the ethos and stature of his department, the investment practices of MIT, and the lives of his colleagues and students". His second wife died in 2019. As professor of economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Samuelson worked in many fields, including: Consumer theory, where he pioneered the revealed preference approach, which is a method by which one can discern a consumer's utility function, by observing their behavior. Rather than postulate a utility function or a preference ordering, Samuelson imposed conditions directly on the choices made by individuals – their preferences as revealed by their choices. Welfare economics, in which he popularised the Lindahl–Bowen–Samuelson conditions (criteria for deciding whether an action will improve welfare) and demonstrated in 1950 the insufficiency of a national-income index to reveal which of two social options was uniformly outside the other's (feasible) possibility function (Collected Scientific Papers, v. 2, ch. 77; Fischer, 1987, p. 236). Capital theory, where he is known for 1958 consumption loans model and a variety of turnpike theorems and involved in Cambridge capital controversy. Finance theory, in which he is known for the efficient-market hypothesis. Public finance theory, in which he is particularly known for his work on determining the optimal allocation of resources in the presence of both public goods and private goods. International economics, where he influenced the development of two important international trade models: the Balassa–Samuelson effect, and the Heckscher–Ohlin model (with the Stolper–Samuelson theorem). Macroeconomics, where he popularized the overlapping generations model as a way to analyze economic agents' behavior across multiple periods of time (Collected Scientific Papers, v. 1, ch. 21) and contributed to formation of the neoclassical synthesis. Market economics: Samuelson believed unregulated markets have drawbacks, he stated, "free markets do not stabilise themselves. Zero regulating is vastly suboptimal to rational regulating. Libertarianism is its own worst enemy!" Samuelson strongly criticised Friedman and Friedrich Hayek, arguing their opposition to state intervention "tells us something about them rather than something about Genghis Khan or Franklin Roosevelt. It is paranoid to warn against inevitable slippery slopes ... once individual commercial freedoms are in any way infringed upon." Samuelson is considered one of the founders of neo-Keynesian economics and a seminal figure in the development of neoclassical economics. In awarding him the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, the committee stated: More than any other contemporary economist, Samuelson has helped to raise the general analytical and methodological level in economic science. He has simply rewritten considerable parts of economic theory. He has also shown the fundamental unity of both the problems and analytical techniques in economics, partly by a systematic application of the methodology of maximization for a broad set of problems. This means that Samuelson's contributions range over a large number of different fields. He was also essential in creating the neoclassical synthesis, which ostensibly incorporated Keynesian and neoclassical principles and still dominates current mainstream economics. In 2003, Samuelson was one of the ten Nobel Prize–winning economists signing the Economists' statement opposing the Bush tax cuts. Stanislaw Ulam once challenged Samuelson to name one theory in all of the social sciences that is both true and nontrivial. Several years later, Samuelson responded with David Ricardo's theory of comparative advantage: "That it is logically true need not be argued before a mathematician; that is not trivial is attested by the thousands of important and intelligent men who have never been able to grasp the doctrine for themselves or to believe it after it was explained to them." For many years, Samuelson wrote a column for Newsweek. One article included Samuelson's most quoted remark and a favorite economics joke: To prove that Wall Street is an early omen of movements still to come in GNP, commentators quote economic studies alleging that market downturns predicted four out of the last five recessions. That is an understatement. Wall Street indexes predicted nine out of the last five recessions! And its mistakes were beauties. In the early editions of his famous, bestselling economics textbook Paul Samuelson joked that GDP falls when a man "marries his maid". Paul Samuelson's book Foundations of Economic Analysis (1946) is considered his magnum opus. It is derived from his doctoral dissertation, and was inspired by the classical thermodynamic methods. The book proposes to: Examine underlying analogies between central features in theoretical and applied economics and Study how operationally meaningful theorems can be derived with a small number of analogous methods (p. 3), in order to derive "a general theory of economic theories" (Samuelson, 1983, p. xxvi). The book showed how these goals could be parsimoniously and fruitfully achieved, using the language of the mathematics applied to diverse subfields of economics. The book proposes two general hypotheses as sufficient for its purposes: Maximizing behavior of agents (including consumers as to utility and business firms as to profit) and Economic systems (including a market and an economy) in stable equilibrium. The first tenet suggests that all actors, whether firms or consumers, are striving to maximize something. They could be attempting to maximize profits, utility, or wealth, but it did not matter because their efforts to improve their well-being would provide a basic model for all actors in an economic system. His second tenet focuses on providing insight on the workings of equilibrium in an economy. Generally in a market, supply would equal demand. However, he noted that this isn't always the case and that the important thing to look at was a system's natural resting point. Foundations presents the question of how an equilibrium would react when it is moved from its optimal point. Samuelson was also influential in providing explanations on how the changes in certain factors can affect an economic system. For example, he could explain the economic effect of changes in taxes or new technologies. In the course of analysis, comparative statics, (the analysis of changes in equilibrium of the system that result from a parameter change of the system) is formalized and clearly stated. The chapter on welfare economics "attempt(s) to give a brief but fairly complete survey of the whole field of welfare economics" (Samuelson, 1947, p. 252). It also exposits on and develops what became commonly called the Bergson–Samuelson social welfare function. It shows how to represent (in the maximization calculus) all real-valued economic measures of any belief system that is required to rank consistently different feasible social configurations in an ethical sense as "better than", "worse than", or "indifferent to" each other (p. 221). Samuelson is also author (and from 1985 co-author) of an influential principles textbook, Economics, first published in 1948 (19th ed. as of 2010; multiple reprints). The book sold more than 300,000 copies of each edition from 1961 through 1976 and was translated into forty-one languages. As of 2018, it had sold over four million copies. William Nordhaus joined as co-author on the 12th edition (1985). Sometime before 1988, it had become the best-selling economics textbook of all time. Samuelson was once quoted as saying, "Let those who will write the nation's laws if I can write its textbooks." Written in the shadow of the Great Depression and the Second World War, it helped to popularize the insights of John Maynard Keynes. A main focus was how to avoid, or at least mitigate, the recurring slumps in economic activity. Samuelson wrote: "It is not too much to say that the widespread creation of dictatorships and the resulting World War II stemmed in no small measure from the world's failure to meet this basic economic problem [the Great Depression] adequately." This reflected the concern of Keynes himself with the economic causes of war and the importance of economic policy in promoting peace. Samuelson's book was the second to introduce Keynesian economics to a wide audience, and was by far the most successful. Canadian economist Lorie Tarshis, who had been a student attending Keynes's lectures at Harvard in the 1930s, published in 1947 an introductory textbook that incorporated his lecture notes, titled Elements of Economics. There are 388 papers in Samuelson's Collected Scientific Papers. Stanley Fischer (1987, p. 234) writes that taken together they are "unique in their verve, breadth of economic and general knowledge, mastery of setting, and generosity of allusions to predecessors". Samuelson was co-editor, along with William A. Barnett, of Inside the Economist's Mind: Conversations with Eminent Economists (Blackwell Publishing, 2007), a collection of interviews with notable economists of the 20th century. Samuelson's textbook was a watershed in introducing the serious study of business cycles to the economics curriculum. It was particularly timely because it followed the Great Depression. The study of business cycles along with the introduction of the Keynesian approach of aggregate demand set the stage for the macroeconomic revolution in America, which then diffused throughout the world through translations into every major language. Generations of students, who then became teachers, learned their first and most influential lessons from Samuelson's Economics. It attracted many imitators, who became successful in different niches of the college market. The text was not without criticism. While it praised the "mixed economy" of market and government, some found that too radical and attacked it as socialist. As a precursor to criticisms of Samuelson's Economics textbook, Lorie Tarshis's textbook was attacked by trustees of, and donors to, American colleges and universities as preaching a "socialist heresy". Piling on, William F. Buckley, Jr., in his 1951 book, God and Man at Yale, devoted an entire chapter, attacking both Samuelson's and Tarshis' textbooks. For Samuelson's book, Buckley drew from the Educational Examiner and credited it as an "excellent review of Samuelson's text." ("Note to Chapter Two." p. 234) For Tarshis' book, Buckley drew from Merwin K. Hart's organization to wit: "I am also grateful to the National Economic Council for its telling analysis of the Tarshis." ("Note to Chapter Two." p. 234) Buckley essentially characterized both as – in the words of Paul Davidson – "communist inspired". Buckley, for the rest of his life, defended the criticisms set forth in his book. One criticism – of a concept that Samuelson added to his Economics textbook – was the comparison of USA growth rates with those of the USSR, which, according to the criticism, was inconsistent with historical GNP differences. The textbook's 1967 edition (7th ed.) extrapolates (projects) the possibility of USSR/US real GNP parity between 1977 and 1995. Each subsequent edition extrapolates a date range further in the future until those graphs were dropped from the 1985 edition (12th ed.). Samuelson, together with Robert Solow, helped develop and popularize the mathematics of the Phillips Curve. The curve suggested that unemployment and inflation were inversely related; with the advent of stagflation in the 1970s some economists including Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek attacked the economics based on the Phillips Curve as questionable or mistaken. Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, the United States National Academy of Sciences, Fellow of the British Academy President (1965–68) of the International Economic Association Member and past president (1961) of the American Economic Association Member of the editorial board and past president (1951) of the Econometric Society Fellow, council member and past vice-president of the Royal Economic Society. Member of Phi Beta Kappa. Samuelson, Paul A. (1947), Enlarged ed. 1983. Foundations of Economic Analysis, Harvard University Press. Samuelson, Paul A. (1948), Economics: An Introductory Analysis, ISBN 0-07-074741-5; with William D. Nordhaus (since 1985), 2009, 19th ed., McGraw–Hill. ISBN 978-0-07-126383-2 Samuelson, Paul A. (1952), "Economic Theory and Mathematics – An Appraisal", American Economic Review, 42(2), pp. 56–66. Samuelson, Paul A (1954). "The Pure Theory of Public Expenditure". Review of Economics and Statistics. 36 (4): 387–89. doi:10.2307/1925895. JSTOR 1925895. S2CID 153571905. Samuelson, Paul A. (1958), Linear Programming and Economic Analysis with Robert Dorfman and Robert M. Solow, McGraw–Hill. Chapter-preview links. Samuelson, Paul A. (1960). "Efficient paths of capital accumulation in terms of the calculus of variations". In Arrow, Kenneth J.; Karlin, Samuel; Suppes, Patrick (eds.). Mathematical models in the social sciences, 1959: Proceedings of the first Stanford symposium. Stanford mathematical studies in the social sciences, IV. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press. pp. 77–88. ISBN 9780804700214. Samuelson, Paul A. (1982). "Quesnay's 'Tableau Economique' as a theorist would formulate it today". In Meek, Ronald (author); Bradley, Ian C.; Howard, Michael C. (eds.). Classical and Marxian political economy: essays in honour of Ronald L. Meek. London: Macmillan. pp. 45–78. ISBN 9780333321997. {{cite book}}: |editor-first1= has generic name (help) The Collected Scientific Papers of Paul A. Samuelson, MIT Press. Preview links for vol. 1–3 below. Contents links for vol. 4–7. OCLC 1079936608 (all editions). Samuelson, Paul A. (1966), Vol. 1 → via Google Books, 1937–mid-1964. Samuelson, Paul A. (1966), Vol. 2 → via Google Books, 1937–mid-1964. Samuelson, Paul A. (1972), Vol. 3 → via Google Books, mid-1964–1970. Samuelson, Paul A. (1977), Vol. 4 → via Internet Archive (registration required), 1971–76. Samuelson, Paul A. (1986), Vol. 5 → via Google Books, 1977–1985 Description → via Samuelson, Paul A. (2011), Vol. 6, 1986–2009. Description → via Wayback Machine Samuelson, Paul A. (2011), Vol. 7, 1986–2009. Paul A. Samuelson Papers, 1933–2010, Rubenstein Library, Duke University. OCLC 664246147. Samuelson, Paul A. (1983). "My Life Philosophy", The American Economist, 27(2), pp. 5–12. Samuelson, Paul A. (2007), Inside the Economist's Mind: Conversations with Eminent Economists with William A. Barnett, Blackwell Publishing, ISBN 1-4051-5917-0 Samuelson, Paul A. (2002), Paul Samuelson and the Foundations of Modern Economics, Transaction Publishers, ISBN 978-0-76-580114-2 Samuelson, Paul A. (2004), Macroeconomics Samuelson, Paul A. (2004), Microeconomics Backhouse, Roger E. (2017). Founder of Modern Economics: Paul A. Samuelson: Volume 1: Becoming Samuelson, 1915–1948. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-066411-4. Description & arrow-scrollable preview. Fischer, Stanley (1987). Samuelson, Paul Anthony. Vol. 4. London: Macmillan. pp. 234–41. ISBN 978-0-935859-10-2. {{cite book}}: |work= ignored (help). Silk, Leonard (1976). The Economists. New York: Basic Books. ISBN 978-0-465-01810-9.. Sobel, Robert (1980). The Worldly Economists. New York: Free Press. ISBN 978-0-02-929780-3.. Fusfeld, Daniel R. (2002). "The Neoclassical Synthesis". The Age of the Economist (9th ed.). Boston: Addison-Wesley. pp. 198–201. ISBN 978-0-321-08812-3.. "I inkomstpolitiken tvår vi våra händer". Forum (in Swedish). No. 1973–17. October 31, 1973. p. 07-09. ISSN 0533-070X.{{cite news}}: CS1 maint: date and year (link) Paul Samuelson at the Mathematics Genealogy Project Paul A. Samuelson on Nobelprize.org Presentation Speech by Professor Assar Lindbeck, Stockholm School of Economics, Award Ceremony, The Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, 1970 A History of Economic Thought biography, 2004 "Paul Anthony Samuelson (1915–2009)". The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics. Library of Economics and Liberty (2nd ed.). Liberty Fund. 2009. Paul Samuelson, Yale Honorands biography, May 2005 "Nobel-winning economist Paul A. Samuelson dies at age 94", MIT News, December 13, 2009 Works by or about Paul Samuelson at Internet Archive Appearances on C-SPAN Paul Samuelson publications indexed by Google Scholar
3. Joseph Stiglitz (b. 1943)
With an HPI of 68.55, Joseph Stiglitz is the 3rd most famous American Economist. His biography has been translated into 67 different languages.
Joseph Eugene Stiglitz (; born February 9, 1943) is an American New Keynesian economist, a public policy analyst, political activist, and a full 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. He is also a former member and chairman of the US Council of Economic Advisers. He is known for his support for the 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 the 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 was 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 the chair of the international Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress, appointed by the French President Sarkozy, 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 the 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. In 2011, Stiglitz was named as one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time magazine. 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 People, Power, and Profits (2019), 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). He is also one of the 25 leading figures on the Information and Democracy Commission launched by Reporters Without Borders. According to the Open Syllabus Project, Stiglitz is the fifth most frequently cited author on college syllabi for economics courses.
4. Michael Porter (b. 1947)
With an HPI of 67.59, Michael Porter is the 4th most famous American Economist. His biography has been translated into 35 different languages.
Michael Eugene Porter (born May 23, 1947) is an American academic known for his theories on economics, business strategy, and social causes. He is the Bishop William Lawrence University Professor at Harvard Business School, and was one of the founders of the consulting firm The Monitor Group (now part of Deloitte) and FSG, a social impact consultancy. He is credited with creating Porter's five forces analysis, which is instrumental in business strategy development at present. He is generally regarded as the father of the modern strategy field. He is also regarded as one of the world's most influential thinkers on management and competitiveness as well as one of the most influential business strategists. His work has been recognized by governments, non-governmental organizations and universities.
5. Herbert A. Simon (1916 - 2001)
With an HPI of 67.55, Herbert A. Simon is the 5th most famous American Economist. His biography has been translated into 60 different languages.
Herbert Alexander Simon (June 15, 1916 – February 9, 2001) was an American political scientist whose work also influenced the fields of computer science, economics, and cognitive psychology. His primary research interest was decision-making within organizations and he is best known for the theories of "bounded rationality" and "satisficing". He received the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1978 and the Turing Award in computer science in 1975. His research was noted for its interdisciplinary nature, spanning the fields of cognitive science, computer science, public administration, management, and political science. He was at Carnegie Mellon University for most of his career, from 1949 to 2001, where he helped found the Carnegie Mellon School of Computer Science, one of the first such departments in the world. Notably, Simon was among the pioneers of several modern-day scientific domains such as artificial intelligence, information processing, decision-making, problem-solving, organization theory, and complex systems. He was among the earliest to analyze the architecture of complexity and to propose a preferential attachment mechanism to explain power law distributions. Herbert Alexander Simon was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin on June 15, 1916. Simon's father, Arthur Simon (1881–1948), was a Jewish electrical engineer who came to the United States from Germany in 1903 after earning his engineering degree at Technische Hochschule Darmstadt. An inventor, Arthur also was an independent patent attorney. Simon's mother, Edna Marguerite Merkel (1888–1969), was an accomplished pianist whose Jewish, Lutheran, and Catholic ancestors came from Braunschweig, Prague and Cologne. Simon's European ancestors were piano makers, goldsmiths, and vintners. Simon attended Milwaukee Public Schools, where he developed an interest in science and established himself as an atheist. While attending middle school, Simon wrote a letter to "the editor of the Milwaukee Journal defending the civil liberties of atheists". Unlike most children, Simon's family introduced him to the idea that human behavior could be studied scientifically; his mother's younger brother, Harold Merkel (1892–1922), who studied economics at the University of Wisconsin–Madison under John R. Commons, became one of his earliest influences. Through Harold's books on economics and psychology, Simon discovered social science. Among his earliest influences, Simon cited Norman Angell for his book The Great Illusion and Henry George for his book Progress and Poverty. While attending high school, Simon joined the debate team, where he argued "from conviction, rather than cussedness" in favor of George's single tax. In 1933, Simon entered the University of Chicago, and, following his early influences, decided to study social science and mathematics. Simon was interested in studying biology but chose not to pursue the field because of his "color-blindness and awkwardness in the laboratory". At an early age, Simon learned he was color blind and discovered the external world is not the same as the perceived world. While in college, Simon focused on political science and economics. Simon's most important mentor was Henry Schultz, an econometrician and mathematical economist. Simon received both his B.A. (1936) and his Ph.D. (1943) in political science from the University of Chicago, where he studied under Harold Lasswell, Nicolas Rashevsky, Rudolf Carnap, Henry Schultz, and Charles Edward Merriam. After enrolling in a course on "Measuring Municipal Governments," Simon became a research assistant for Clarence Ridley, and the two co-authored Measuring Municipal Activities: A Survey of Suggested Criteria for Appraising Administration in 1938. Simon's studies led him to the field of organizational decision-making, which became the subject of his doctoral dissertation. After receiving his undergraduate degree, Simon obtained a research assistantship in municipal administration that turned into the directorship of an operations research group at the University of California, Berkeley, where he worked from 1939 to 1942. By arrangement with the University of Chicago, during his years at Berkeley, he took his doctoral exams by mail and worked on his dissertation after hours. From 1942 to 1949, Simon was a professor of political science and also served as department chairman at Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago. There, he began participating in the seminars held by the staff of the Cowles Commission who at that time included Trygve Haavelmo, Jacob Marschak, and Tjalling Koopmans. He thus began an in-depth study of economics in the area of institutionalism. Marschak brought Simon in to assist in the study he was currently undertaking with Sam Schurr of the "prospective economic effects of atomic energy". From 1949 to 2001, Simon was a faculty member at Carnegie-Mellon University, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. In 1949, Simon became a professor of administration and chairman of the Department of Industrial Management at Carnegie Institute of Technology ("Carnegie Tech"), which, in 1967, became Carnegie-Mellon University. Simon later also taught psychology and computer science in the same university, (occasionally visiting other universities). Seeking to replace the highly simplified classical approach to economic modeling, Simon became best known for his theory of corporate decision in his book Administrative Behavior. In this book he based his concepts with an approach that recognized multiple factors that contribute to decision making. His organization and administration interest allowed him to not only serve three times as a university department chairman, but he also played a big part in the creation of the Economic Cooperation Administration in 1948; administrative team that administered aid to the Marshall Plan for the U.S. government, serving on President Lyndon Johnson's Science Advisory Committee, and also the National Academy of Sciences. Simon has made a great number of contributions to both economic analysis and applications. Because of this, his work can be found in a number of economic literary works, making contributions to areas such as mathematical economics including theorem-proving, human rationality, behavioral study of firms, theory of casual ordering, and the analysis of the parameter identification problem in econometrics. Administrative Behavior, first published in 1947 and updated across the years, was based on Simon's doctoral dissertation. It served as the foundation for his life's work. The centerpiece of this book is the behavioral and cognitive processes of humans making rational decisions. By his definition, an operational administrative decision should be correct, efficient, and practical to implement with a set of coordinated means. Simon recognized that a theory of administration is largely a theory of human decision making, and as such must be based on both economics and on psychology. He states: [If] there were no limits to human rationality administrative theory would be barren. It would consist of the single precept: Always select that alternative, among those available, which will lead to the most complete achievement of your goals. (p xxviii) Contrary to the "homo economicus" model, Simon argued that alternatives and consequences may be partly known, and means and ends imperfectly differentiated, incompletely related, or poorly detailed. Simon defined the task of rational decision making as selecting the alternative that results in the more preferred set of all the possible consequences. Correctness of administrative decisions was thus measured by: Adequacy of achieving the desired objective Efficiency with which the result was obtained The task of choice was divided into three required steps: Identifying and listing all the alternatives Determining all consequences resulting from each of the alternatives; Comparing the accuracy and efficiency of each of these sets of consequences Any given individual or organization attempting to implement this model in a real situation would be unable to comply with the three requirements. Simon argued that knowledge of all alternatives, or all consequences that follow from each alternative is impossible in many realistic cases. Simon attempted to determine the techniques and/or behavioral processes that a person or organization could bring to bear to achieve approximately the best result given limits on rational decision making. Simon writes: The human being striving for rationality and restricted within the limits of his knowledge has developed some working procedures that partially overcome these difficulties. These procedures consist in assuming that he can isolate from the rest of the world a closed system containing a limited number of variables and a limited range of consequences. Therefore, Simon describes work in terms of an economic framework, conditioned on human cognitive limitations: Economic man and Administrative man. Administrative Behavior addresses a wide range of human behaviors, cognitive abilities, management techniques, personnel policies, training goals and procedures, specialized roles, criteria for evaluation of accuracy and efficiency, and all of the ramifications of communication processes. Simon is particularly interested in how these factors influence the making of decisions, both directly and indirectly. Simon argued that the two outcomes of a choice require monitoring and that many members of the organization would be expected to focus on adequacy, but that administrative management must pay particular attention to the efficiency with which the desired result was obtained. 36-49 Simon followed Chester Barnard, who stated "the decisions that an individual makes as a member of an organization are quite distinct from his personal decisions". Personal choices may be determined whether an individual joins a particular organization and continue to be made in his or her extra–organizational private life. As a member of an organization, however, that individual makes decisions not in relationship to personal needs and results, but in an impersonal sense as part of the organizational intent, purpose, and effect. Organizational inducements, rewards, and sanctions are all designed to form, strengthen, and maintain this identification.212 Simon saw two universal elements of human social behavior as key to creating the possibility of organizational behavior in human individuals: Authority (addressed in Chapter VII—The Role of Authority) and in Loyalties and Identification (Addressed in Chapter X: Loyalties, and Organizational Identification). Authority is a well-studied, primary mark of organizational behavior, straightforwardly defined in the organizational context as the ability and right of an individual of higher rank to guide the decisions of an individual of lower rank. The actions, attitudes, and relationships of the dominant and subordinate individuals constitute components of role behavior that may vary widely in form, style, and content, but do not vary in the expectation of obedience by the one of superior status, and willingness to obey from the subordinate. Loyalty was defined by Simon as the "process whereby the individual substitutes organizational objectives (service objectives or conservation objectives) for his own aims as the value-indices which determine his organizational decisions". This entailed evaluating alternative choices in terms of their consequences for the group rather than only for oneself or one's family. Decisions can be complex admixtures of facts and values. Information about facts, especially empirically proven facts or facts derived from specialized experience, are more easily transmitted in the exercise of authority than are the expressions of values. Simon is primarily interested in seeking identification of the individual employee with the organizational goals and values. Following Lasswell, he states that "a person identifies himself with a group when, in making a decision, he evaluates the several alternatives of choice in terms of their consequences for the specified group". Simon has been critical of traditional economics' elementary understanding of decision-making, and argues it "is too quick to build an idealistic, unrealistic picture of the decision-making process and then prescribe on the basis of such unrealistic picture". Herbert Simon rediscovered path diagrams, which were originally invented by Sewall Wright around 1920. Simon was a pioneer in the field of artificial intelligence, creating with Allen Newell the Logic Theory Machine (1956) and the General Problem Solver (GPS) (1957) programs. GPS may possibly be the first method developed for separating problem solving strategy from information about particular problems. Both programs were developed using the Information Processing Language (IPL) (1956) developed by Newell, Cliff Shaw, and Simon. Donald Knuth mentions the development of list processing in IPL, with the linked list originally called "NSS memory" for its inventors. In 1957, Simon predicted that computer chess would surpass human chess abilities within "ten years" when, in reality, that transition took about forty years. He also predicted in 1965 that "machines will be capable, within twenty years, of doing any work a man can do." In the early 1960s psychologist Ulric Neisser asserted that while machines are capable of replicating "cold cognition" behaviors such as reasoning, planning, perceiving, and deciding, they would never be able to replicate "hot cognition" behaviors such as pain, pleasure, desire, and other emotions. Simon responded to Neisser's views in 1963 by writing a paper on emotional cognition, which he updated in 1967 and published in Psychological Review. Simon's work on emotional cognition was largely ignored by the artificial intelligence research community for several years, but subsequent work on emotions by Sloman and Picard helped refocus attention on Simon's paper and eventually, made it highly influential on the topic. Simon also collaborated with James G. March on several works in organization theory. With Allen Newell, Simon developed a theory for the simulation of human problem solving behavior using production rules. The study of human problem solving required new kinds of human measurements and, with Anders Ericsson, Simon developed the experimental technique of verbal protocol analysis. Simon was interested in the role of knowledge in expertise. He said that to become an expert on a topic required about ten years of experience and he and colleagues estimated that expertise was the result of learning roughly 50,000 chunks of information. A chess expert was said to have learned about 50,000 chunks or chess position patterns. He was awarded the ACM Turing Award, along with Allen Newell, in 1975. "In joint scientific efforts extending over twenty years, initially in collaboration with J. C. (Cliff) Shaw at the RAND Corporation, and subsequentially [sic] with numerous faculty and student colleagues at Carnegie Mellon University, they have made basic contributions to artificial intelligence, the psychology of human cognition, and list processing." Simon was interested in how humans learn and, with Edward Feigenbaum, he developed the EPAM (Elementary Perceiver and Memorizer) theory, one of the first theories of learning to be implemented as a computer program. EPAM was able to explain a large number of phenomena in the field of verbal learning. Later versions of the model were applied to concept formation and the acquisition of expertise. With Fernand Gobet, he has expanded the EPAM theory into the CHREST computational model. The theory explains how simple chunks of information form the building blocks of schemata, which are more complex structures. CHREST has been used predominantly, to simulate aspects of chess expertise. Simon has been credited for revolutionary changes in microeconomics. He is responsible for the concept of organizational decision-making as it is known today. He was the first to rigorously examine how administrators made decisions when they did not have perfect and complete information. It was in this area that he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1978. At the Cowles Commission, Simon's main goal was to link economic theory to mathematics and statistics. His main contributions were to the fields of general equilibrium and econometrics. He was greatly influenced by the marginalist debate that began in the 1930s. The popular work of the time argued that it was not apparent empirically that entrepreneurs needed to follow the marginalist principles of profit-maximization/cost-minimization in running organizations. The argument went on to note that profit maximization was not accomplished, in part, because of the lack of complete information. In decision-making, Simon believed that agents face uncertainty about the future and costs in acquiring information in the present. These factors limit the extent to which agents may make a fully rational decision, thus they possess only "bounded rationality" and must make decisions by "satisficing", or choosing that which might not be optimal, but which will make them happy enough. Bounded rationality is a central theme in behavioral economics. It is concerned with the ways in which the actual decision-making process influences decision. Theories of bounded rationality relax one or more assumptions of standard expected utility theory. Further, Simon emphasized that psychologists invoke a "procedural" definition of rationality, whereas economists employ a "substantive" definition. Gustavos Barros argued that the procedural rationality concept does not have a significant presence in the economics field and has never had nearly as much weight as the concept of bounded rationality. However, in an earlier article, Bhargava (1997) noted the importance of Simon's arguments and emphasized that there are several applications of the "procedural" definition of rationality in econometric analyses of data on health. In particular, economists should employ "auxiliary assumptions" that reflect the knowledge in the relevant biomedical fields, and guide the specification of econometric models for health outcomes. Simon was also known for his research on industrial organization. He determined that the internal organization of firms and the external business decisions thereof, did not conform to the neoclassical theories of "rational" decision-making. Simon wrote many articles on the topic over the course of his life, mainly focusing on the issue of decision-making within the behavior of what he termed "bounded rationality". "Rational behavior, in economics, means that individuals maximize their utility function under the constraints they face (e.g., their budget constraint, limited choices, ...) in pursuit of their self-interest. This is reflected in the theory of subjective expected utility. The term, bounded rationality, is used to designate rational choice that takes into account the cognitive limitations of both knowledge and cognitive capacity. Bounded rationality is a central theme in behavioral economics. It is concerned with the ways in which the actual decision-making process influences decisions. Theories of bounded rationality relax one or more assumptions of standard expected utility theory". Simon determined that the best way to study these areas was through computer simulations. As such, he developed an interest in computer science. Simon's main interests in computer science were in artificial intelligence, human–computer interaction, principles of the organization of humans and machines as information processing systems, the use of computers to study (by modeling) philosophical problems of the nature of intelligence and of epistemology, and the social implications of computer technology. In his youth, Simon took an interest in land economics and Georgism, an idea known at the time as "single tax". The system is meant to redistribute unearned economic rent to the public and improve land use. In 1979, Simon still maintained these ideas and argued that land value tax should replace taxes on wages. Some of Simon's economic research was directed toward understanding technological change in general and the information processing revolution in particular. Simon's work has strongly influenced John Mighton, developer of a program that has achieved significant success in improving mathematics performance among elementary and high school students. Mighton cites a 2000 paper by Simon and two coauthors that counters arguments by French mathematics educator, Guy Brousseau, and others suggesting that excessive practice hampers children's understanding: [The] criticism of practice (called "drill and kill," as if this phrase constituted empirical evaluation) is prominent in constructivist writings. Nothing flies more in the face of the last 20 years of research than the assertion that practice is bad. All evidence, from the laboratory and from extensive case studies of professionals, indicates that real competence only comes with extensive practice... In denying the critical role of practice one is denying children the very thing they need to achieve real competence. The instructional task is not to "kill" motivation by demanding drill, but to find tasks that provide practice while at the same time sustaining interest. Simon received many top-level honors in life, including becoming a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a member of the American Philosophical Society in 1959; election as a Member of the National Academy of Sciences in 1967; APA Award for Distinguished Scientific Contributions to Psychology (1969); the ACM's Turing Award for making "basic contributions to artificial intelligence, the psychology of human cognition, and list processing" (1975); the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics "for his pioneering research into the decision-making process within economic organizations" (1978); the National Medal of Science (1986); Founding Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (1990); the APA's Award for Outstanding Lifetime Contributions to Psychology (1993); ACM fellow (1994); and IJCAI Award for Research Excellence (1995). Honorary doctorate, Lund School of Economics and Management, 1968. Honorary degree, University of Pavia, 1988. Honorary Doctor of Laws (LL.D.) degree from Harvard University in 1990. Honorary degree, University of Buenos Aires, 1999. Simon was a prolific writer and authored 27 books and almost a thousand papers. As of 2016, Simon was the most cited person in artificial intelligence and cognitive psychology on Google Scholar. With almost a thousand highly cited publications, he was one of the most influential social scientists of the twentieth century. 1947. Administrative Behavior: A Study of Decision-Making Processes in Administrative Organization. – 4th ed. in 1997, The Free Press 1957. Models of Man. John Wiley. Presents mathematical models of human behaviour. 1958 (with James G. March and the collaboration of Harold Guetzkow). Organizations. New York: Wiley. the foundation of modern organization theory 1969. The Sciences of the Artificial. MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass, 1st edition. Made the idea easy to grasp: "objects (real or symbolic) in the environment of the decision-maker influence choice as much as the intrinsic information-processing capabilities of the decision-maker"; Explained "the principles of modeling complex systems, particularly the human information-processing system that we call the mind." - 2nd ed. in 1981, MIT Press. As stated in the Preface, the second edition provided the author an opportunity "to amend and expand [his] thesis and to apply it to several additional fields" beyond organization theory, economics, management science, and psychology that were covered in the previous edition. - 3rd ed. in 1996, MIT Press. 1972 (with Allen Newell). Human Problem Solving. Prentice Hall, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, (1972). "the most important book on the scientific study of human thinking in the 20th century" 1977. Models of Discovery : and other topics in the methods of science. Dordrecht, Holland: Reidel. 1979. Models of Thought, Vols. 1 and 2. Yale University Press. His papers on human information-processing and problem-solving. 1982. Models of Bounded Rationality, Vols. 1 and 2. MIT Press. His papers on economics. - Vol. 3. in 1997, MIT Press. His papers on economics since the publication of Vols. 1 and 2 in 1982. The papers grouped under the category "The Structure of Complex Systems"– dealing with issues such as causal ordering, decomposability, aggregation of variables, model abstraction– are of general interest in systems modelling, not just in economics. 1983. Reason in Human Affairs, Stanford University Press. A readable 115pp. book on human decision-making and information processing, based on lectures he gave at Stanford in 1982. A popular presentation of his technical work. 1987 (with P. Langley, G. Bradshaw, and J. Zytkow). Scientific Discovery: computational explorations of the creative processes. MIT Press. 1991. Models of My Life. Basic Books, Sloan Foundation Series. His autobiography. 1997. An Empirically Based Microeconomics. Cambridge University Press. A compact and readable summary of his criticisms of conventional "axiomatic" microeconomics, based on a lecture series. 2008 (posthumously). Economics, Bounded Rationality and the Cognitive Revolution. Edward Elgar Publishing, ISBN 1847208967. reprint some of his papers not widely read by economists. 1938 (with Clarence E. Ridley). Measuring Municipal Activities: a Survey of Suggested Criteria and Reporting Forms For Appraising Administration. 1943. Fiscal Aspects of Metropolitan Consolidation. 1945. The Technique of Municipal Administration, 2d ed. 1955. "A Behavioral Model of Rational Choice", Quarterly Journal of Economics, vol. 69, 99–118. 1956. "Reply: Surrogates for Uncertain Decision Problems", Office of Naval Research, January 1956. – Reprinted in 1982, In: H.A. Simon, Models of Bounded Rationality, Volume 1, Economic Analysis and Public Policy, Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press, 235–44. 1958 (with Allen Newell and J. C. Shaw). Elements of a theory of human problem solving 1967. "Motivational and emotional controls of cognition", Psychological Review, vol. 74, 29–39, reprinted in Models of Thought Vol 1. 1972. "Theories of Bounded Rationality", Chapter 8 in C. B. McGuire and R. Radner, eds., Decision and Organization, Amsterdam: North-Holland Publishing Company. 1980 (with K. Anders Ericsson). "Verbal reports as data", Psychological Review, vol. 87, 215–251. 1985 "Human Nature in Politics: The Dialogue of Psychology with Political Science", The American Political Science Review, vol. 79, no. 2 (Jun. 1985), pp. 293–304 1989 (with M.J. Prietula). "The Experts in Your Midst", Harvard Business Review, January–February, 120–124. 1992 'What is an "Explanation" of Behavior?' Psychological Science, 3(3), 150-161 1995 (with Peter C.-H. Cheng). "Scientific discovery and creative reasoning with diagrams", in S. M. Smith, T. B. Ward & R. A. Finke (Eds.), The Creative Cognition Approach (pp. 205–228). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 1998 (with John R. Anderson, Lynne M. Reder, K. Anders Ericsson, and Robert Glaser). "Radical Constructivism and Cognitive Psychology", Brookings Papers on Education Policy, no. 1, 227–278. 2000 (with John R. Anderson and Lynne M. Reder). "Applications and misapplications of cognitive psychology to mathematics education", Texas Education Review, vol. 1, no. 2, 29–49. Simon married Dorothea Pye in 1938. Their marriage lasted 63 years until his death. In January 2001, Simon underwent surgery at UPMC Presbyterian to remove a cancerous tumor in his abdomen. Although the surgery was successful, Simon later died from the complications that followed. They had three children, Katherine, Peter, and Barbara. His wife died a year later in 2002. From 1950 to 1955, Simon studied mathematical economics and during this time, together with David Hawkins, discovered and proved the Hawkins–Simon theorem on the "conditions for the existence of positive solution vectors for input-output matrices". He also developed theorems on near-decomposability and aggregation. Having begun to apply these theorems to organizations, by 1954 Simon determined that the best way to study problem-solving was to simulate it with computer programs, which led to his interest in computer simulation of human cognition. Founded during the 1950s, he was among the first members of the Society for General Systems Research. Simon was a pianist and had a keen interest in the arts. He was a friend of Robert Lepper and Richard Rappaport. Rappaport also painted Simon's commissioned portrait at Carnegie Mellon University. He was also a keen mountain climber. As a testament to his wide interests, he at one point taught an undergraduate course on the French Revolution. List of Jewish Nobel laureates Bhargava, Alok (1997). "Editor's introduction: Analysis of data on health". Journal of Econometrics. 77: 1–4. doi:10.1016/s0304-4076(96)01803-9. Courtois, P.J., 1977. Decomposability: queueing and computer system applications. New York: Academic Press. Courtois was influenced by the work of Simon and Albert Ando on hierarchical nearly-decomposable systems in economic modelling as a criterion for computer systems design, and in this book he presents the mathematical theory of these nearly-decomposable systems in more detail than Simon and Ando do in their original papers. Frantz, R., and Marsh, L. (Eds.) (2016). Minds, Models and Milieux: Commemorating the Centennial of the Birth of Herbert Simon. Palgrave Macmillan. Herbert Alexander Simon at the Mathematics Genealogy Project Herbert Alexander Simon at the AI Genealogy Project. A Tribute to Herbert A. Simon Full-text digital archive of Herbert Simon papers Mind Models online Artificial Intelligence exhibit pioneering research into the decision-making process within economic organizations History of Twentieth-Century Philosophy of Science BOOK VIII: Herbert Simon, Paul Thagard and Others on Discovery Systems – with free downloads for public use. — (December 12, 1962). "The Architecture of Complexity" (PDF). Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society. 106 (6): 467–482. JSTOR 985254. Archived from the original (PDF) on March 10, 2009. Retrieved February 23, 2010. IDEAS/RePEc "Herbert Alexander Simon (1901–1985)". The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics. Library of Economics and Liberty (2nd ed.). Liberty Fund. 2008. Biography of Herbert A. Simon from the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences Documentary interviews with Herbert Simon, with critiques of his work, as part of the Nobel Perspectives project Herbert Simon on Nobelprize.org including the Prize Lecture December 8, 1978 Rational Decision-Making in Business Organizations
6. Elinor Ostrom (1933 - 2012)
With an HPI of 67.38, Elinor Ostrom is the 6th most famous American Economist. Her biography has been translated into 78 different languages.
Elinor Claire "Lin" Ostrom (née Awan; August 7, 1933 – June 12, 2012) was an American political scientist and political economist whose work was associated with 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; she was the first woman to win the prize. After graduating with a B.A. and Ph.D. in political science 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 a 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. Since the 60s, Ostrom was involved in resource management policy and created a research center, which attracted scientists from different disciplines from around the world. Working and teaching at her center was created on the principle of a workshop, rather than a university with lectures and a strict hierarchy. Ostrom studied the interaction of people and ecosystems for many years and showed that the use of exhaustible resources by groups of people (communities, cooperatives, trusts, trade unions) can be rational and prevent depletion of the resource without either state intervention or markets with private property.
7. Robert Solow (1924 - 2023)
With an HPI of 65.81, Robert Solow is the 7th most famous American Economist. His biography has been translated into 54 different languages.
Robert Merton Solow, GCIH (; August 23, 1924 – December 21, 2023) was an American economist and Nobel laureate whose work on the theory of economic growth culminated in the exogenous growth model named after him. He was Institute Professor Emeritus of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he was a professor from 1949 on. He was awarded the John Bates Clark Medal in 1961, the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1987, and the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2014. Four of his PhD students, George Akerlof, Joseph Stiglitz, Peter Diamond, and William Nordhaus, later received Nobel Memorial Prizes in Economic Sciences in their own right. while an undergraduate student of Solow, H. Robert Horvitz, won in medicine.
8. Paul Krugman (b. 1953)
With an HPI of 65.36, Paul Krugman is the 8th most famous American Economist. His biography has been translated into 75 different languages.
Paul Robin Krugman ( KRUUG-mən; born February 28, 1953) is an American economist who is the 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 the sole winner of 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 Centennial 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. According to the Open Syllabus Project, Krugman is the second most frequently cited author on college syllabi for economics courses. 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 praise and criticism. Krugman was born to a Ukrainian Jewish family, the son of Anita and David Krugman. In 1914, his maternal grandparents immigrated to the United States from Ukraine, while in 1920, his paternal grandparents arrived from Belarus. He was born in Albany, New York, spent several years of his childhood in the upstate city of Utica, before growing up from age eight in Merrick, a hamlet in Nassau County, Long Island. He graduated from John F. Kennedy High School in Bellmore. According to Krugman, his interest in economics began with Isaac Asimov's Foundation novels, in which the social scientists of the future use a new science of "psychohistory" to try to save civilization. Since present-day science fell far short of "psychohistory", Krugman turned to economics as the next best thing. In 1974, Krugman earned his BA summa cum laude in economics from Yale University, where he was a National Merit Scholar. He then went on to pursue a PhD in economics from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). In 1977, he successfully completed his PhD in three years, with a thesis titled Essays on flexible exchange rates. While at MIT, he was part of a small group of MIT students sent to work for the Central Bank of Portugal for three months in the summer of 1976, during the chaotic aftermath of the Carnation Revolution. Krugman later praised his PhD thesis advisor, Rudi Dornbusch, as "one of the great economics teachers of all time" and said that he "had the knack of inspiring students to pick up his enthusiasm and technique, but find their own paths". In 1978, Krugman presented a number of ideas to Dornbusch, who flagged as interesting the idea of a monopolistically competitive trade model. Encouraged, Krugman worked on it and later wrote, "[I] knew within a few hours that I had the key to my whole career in hand". In that same year, Krugman wrote "The Theory of Interstellar Trade", a tongue-in-cheek essay on computing interest rates on goods in transit near the speed of light. He says he wrote it to cheer himself up when he was "an oppressed assistant professor". Krugman became an assistant professor at Yale University in September 1977. He joined the faculty at MIT in 1979. From 1982 to 1983, Krugman spent a year working at the Reagan White House as a staff member of the Council of Economic Advisers. He rejoined MIT as a full professor in 1984. Krugman has also taught at Stanford, Yale, and the London School of Economics. In 2000, Krugman joined Princeton University as Professor of Economics and International Affairs. He is also currently Centenary Professor at the London School of Economics, and a member of the Group of Thirty international economic body. He has been a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research since 1979. Krugman was President of the Eastern Economic Association in 2010. In February 2014, he announced that he would be retiring from Princeton in June 2015 and that he would be joining the faculty at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Paul Krugman has written extensively on international economics, including international trade, economic geography, and international finance. The Research Papers in Economics project ranks him among the world's most influential economists. Krugman's International Economics: Theory and Policy, co-authored with Maurice Obstfeld, is a standard undergraduate textbook on international economics. He is also co-author, with Robin Wells, of an undergraduate economics text which he says was strongly inspired by the first edition of Paul Samuelson's classic textbook. Krugman also writes on economic topics for the general public, sometimes on international economic topics but also on income distribution and public policy. The Nobel Prize Committee stated that Krugman's main contribution is his analysis of the effects of economies of scale, combined with the assumption that consumers appreciate diversity, on international trade and on the location of economic activity. The importance of spatial issues in economics has been enhanced by Krugman's ability to popularize this complicated theory with the help of easy-to-read books and state-of-the-art syntheses. "Krugman was beyond doubt the key player in 'placing geographical analysis squarely in the economic mainstream' ... and in conferring it the central role it now assumes." Prior to Krugman's work, trade theory (see David Ricardo and Heckscher–Ohlin model) emphasized trade based on the comparative advantage of countries with very different characteristics, such as a country with a high agricultural productivity trading agricultural products for industrial products from a country with a high industrial productivity. However, in the 20th century, an ever-larger share of trade occurred between countries with similar characteristics, which is difficult to explain by comparative advantage. Krugman's explanation of trade between similar countries was proposed in a 1979 paper in the Journal of International Economics, and involves two key assumptions: that consumers prefer a diverse choice of brands, and that production favors economies of scale. Consumers' preference for diversity explains the survival of different versions of cars like Volvo and BMW. However, because of economies of scale, it is not profitable to spread the production of Volvos all over the world; instead, it is concentrated in a few factories and therefore in a few countries (or maybe just one). Krugman modeled a 'preference for diversity' by assuming a CES utility function like that in a 1977 paper by Avinash Dixit and Joseph Stiglitz. Many models of international trade now follow Krugman's lead, incorporating economies of scale in production and a preference for diversity in consumption. This way of modeling trade has come to be called New Trade Theory. Krugman's theory also took into account transportation costs, a key feature in producing the "home market effect", which would later feature in his work on the new economic geography. The home market effect "states that, ceteris paribus, the country with the larger demand for a good shall, at equilibrium, produce a more than proportionate share of that good and be a net exporter of it". The home market effect was an unexpected result, and Krugman initially questioned it, but ultimately concluded that the mathematics of the model were correct. When there are economies of scale in production, it is possible that countries may become 'locked into' disadvantageous patterns of trade. Krugman points out that although globalization has been positive on a whole, since the 1980s the process known as hyper-globalization has at least played a part in rising inequality. Nonetheless, trade remains beneficial in general, even between similar countries, because it permits firms to save on costs by producing at a larger, more efficient scale, and because it increases the range of brands available and sharpens the competition between firms. Krugman has usually been supportive of free trade and globalization. He has also been critical of industrial policy, which New Trade Theory suggests might offer nations rent-seeking advantages if "strategic industries" can be identified, saying it's not clear that such identification can be done accurately enough to matter. It took an interval of eleven years, but ultimately Krugman's work on New Trade Theory (NTT) converged to what is usually called the "new economic geography" (NEG), which Krugman began to develop in a seminal 1991 paper, "Increasing Returns and Economic Geography", published in the Journal of Political Economy. In Krugman's own words, the passage from NTT to NEG was "obvious in retrospect; but it certainly took me a while to see it. ... The only good news was that nobody else picked up that $100 bill lying on the sidewalk in the interim." This would become Krugman's most-cited academic paper: by early 2009, it had 857 citations, more than double his second-ranked paper. Krugman called the paper "the love of my life in academic work". The "home market effect" that Krugman discovered in NTT also features in NEG, which interprets agglomeration "as the outcome of the interaction of increasing returns, trade costs and factor price differences". If trade is largely shaped by economies of scale, as Krugman's trade theory argues, then those economic regions with most production will be more profitable and will therefore attract even more production. That is, NTT implies that instead of spreading out evenly around the world, production will tend to concentrate in a few countries, regions, or cities, which will become densely populated but will also have higher levels of income. Manufacturing is characterized by increasing returns to scale and less restrictive and expansive land qualifications as compared to agricultural uses. So, geographically where can manufacturing be predicted to develop? Krugman states that manufacturing's geographical range is inherently limited by economies of scale, but also that manufacturing will establish and accrue itself in an area of high demand. Production that occurs adjacent to demand will result in lower transportation costs, but demand, as a result, will be greater due to concentrated nearby production. These forces act upon one another simultaneously, producing manufacturing and population agglomeration. Population will increase in these areas due to the more highly developed infrastructure and nearby production, therefore lowering the expense of goods, while economies of scale provide varied choices of goods and services. These forces will feed into each other until the greater portion of the urban population and manufacturing hubs are concentrated into a relatively insular geographic area. Krugman has also been influential in the field of international finance. As a graduate student, Krugman visited the Federal Reserve Board where Stephen Salant and Dale Henderson were completing their discussion paper on speculative attacks in the gold market. Krugman adapted their model for the foreign exchange market, resulting in a 1979 paper on currency crises in the Journal of Money, Credit, and Banking, which showed that misaligned fixed exchange rate regimes are unlikely to end smoothly but instead end in a sudden speculative attack. Krugman's paper is considered one of the main contributions to the 'first generation' of currency crisis models, and it is his second-most-cited paper (457 citations as of early 2009). In response to the global financial crisis of 2008, Krugman proposed, in an informal "mimeo" style of publication, an "international finance multiplier", to help explain the unexpected speed with which the global crisis had occurred. He argued that when, "highly leveraged financial institutions [HLIs], which do a lot of cross-border investment [. ... ] lose heavily in one market ... they find themselves undercapitalized, and have to sell off assets across the board. This drives down prices, putting pressure on the balance sheets of other HLIs, and so on." Such a rapid contagion had hitherto been considered unlikely because of "decoupling" in a globalized economy. He first announced that he was working on such a model on his blog, on October 5, 2008. Within days of its appearance, it was being discussed on some popular economics-oriented blogs. The note was soon being cited in papers (draft and published) by other economists, even though it had not itself been through ordinary peer review processes. Krugman has done much to revive discussion of the liquidity trap as a topic in economics. He recommended pursuing aggressive fiscal policy and unconventional monetary policy to counter Japan's lost decade in the 1990s, arguing that the country was mired in a Keynesian liquidity trap. The debate he started at that time over liquidity traps and what policies best address them continues in the economics literature. Krugman had argued in The Return of Depression Economics that Japan was in a liquidity trap in the late 1990s, since the central bank could not drop interest rates any lower to escape economic stagnation. The core of Krugman's policy proposal for addressing Japan's liquidity trap was inflation targeting, which, he argued "most nearly approaches the usual goal of modern stabilization policy, which is to provide adequate demand in a clean, unobtrusive way that does not distort the allocation of resources". The proposal appeared first in a web posting on his academic site. This mimeo-draft was soon cited, but was also misread by some as repeating his earlier advice that Japan's best hope was in "turning on the printing presses", as recommended by Milton Friedman, John Makin, and others. Krugman has since drawn parallels between Japan's 'lost decade' and the late 2000s recession, arguing that expansionary fiscal policy is necessary as the major industrialized economies are mired in a liquidity trap. In response to economists who point out that the Japanese economy recovered despite not pursuing his policy prescriptions, Krugman maintains that it was an export-led boom that pulled Japan out of its economic slump in the late-90s, rather than reforms of the financial system. Krugman was one of the most prominent advocates of the 2008–2009 Keynesian resurgence, so much so that economics commentator Noah Smith referred to it as the "Krugman insurgency". His view that most peer-reviewed macroeconomic research since the mid-1960s is wrong, preferring simpler models developed in the 1930s, has been criticized by some modern economists, like John H. Cochrane. In June 2012, Krugman and Richard Layard launched A manifesto for economic sense, where they call for greater use of fiscal stimulus policy to reduce unemployment and foster growth. The manifesto received over four thousand signatures within two days of its launch, and has attracted both positive and critical responses. Krugman was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences (informally the Nobel Prize in Economics), the sole recipient for 2008. This prize includes an award of about $1.4 million and was given to Krugman for his work associated with New Trade Theory and the New Economic Geography. In the words of the prize committee, "By having integrated economies of scale into explicit general equilibrium models, Paul Krugman has deepened our understanding of the determinants of trade and the location of economic activity." 1991, American Economic Association, John Bates Clark Medal. Since it was awarded to only one person, once every two years (prior to 2009), The Economist has described the Clark Medal as 'slightly harder to get than a Nobel prize'. 1992, Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (AAAS). 1995, Adam Smith Award of the National Association for Business Economics 1998, Doctor honoris causa in Economics awarded by Free University of Berlin Freie Universität Berlin in Germany 2000, H.C. Recktenwald Prize in Economics, awarded by University of Erlangen-Nuremberg in Germany. 2002, Editor and Publisher, Columnist of the Year. 2004, Fundación Príncipe de Asturias (Spain), Prince of Asturias Awards in Social Sciences. 2004, Doctor of Humane Letters honoris causa, Haverford College 2008, Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics for Krugman's contributions to New Trade Theory. He became the twelfth John Bates Clark Medal winner to be awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize. 2010, Howland Memorial Prize, awarded by Yale University 2011, EPI Distinguished Economist Award. 2011 Gerald Loeb Award for Commentary 2012, Doctor honoris causa from the Universidade de Lisboa, Universidade Técnica de Lisboa and Universidade Nova de Lisboa 2013, Doctor of Laws, honoris causa conferred by the University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada 2014, recipient of the Literary and Historical Society (University College Dublin)'s James Joyce Award in recognition of his outstanding contribution to the economic sciences. 2014, recipient of the Green Templeton College, Oxford's Sanjaya Lall Visiting Professorship of Business and Development, Trinity Term 2014, in recognition of his outstanding international reputation in scholarship and research in the field of Development Economics and Business. 2016, Doctor of Letters, honoris causa conferred by the University of Oxford, Oxford, UK A May 2011 Hamilton College analysis of 26 politicians, journalists, and media commentators who made predictions in major newspaper columns or television news shows from September 2007 to December 2008 found that Krugman was the most accurate. Only nine of the prognosticators predicted more accurately than chance, two were significantly less accurate, and the remaining 14 were no better or worse than a coin flip. Krugman was correct in 15 out of 17 predictions, compared to 9 out of 11 for the next most accurate media figure, Maureen Dowd. Krugman was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2011. Foreign Policy named Krugman one of its 2012 FP Top 100 Global Thinkers "for wielding his acid pen against austerity". In the 1990s, besides academic books and textbooks, Krugman increasingly began writing books for a general audience on issues he considered important for public policy. In The Age of Diminished Expectations (1990), he wrote in particular about the increasing US income inequality in the "New Economy" of the 1990s. He attributes the rise in income inequality in part to changes in technology, but principally to a change in political atmosphere which he attributes to Movement Conservatives. In September 2003, Krugman published a collection of his columns under the title, The Great Unraveling, about the Bush administration's economic and foreign policies and the US economy in the early 2000s. His columns argued that the large deficits during that time were generated by the Bush administration as a result of decreasing taxes on the rich, increasing public spending, and fighting the Iraq War. Krugman wrote that these policies were unsustainable in the long run and would eventually generate a major economic crisis. The book was a best-seller. In 2007, Krugman published The Conscience of a Liberal, whose title refers to Barry Goldwater's Conscience of a Conservative. It details the history of wealth and income gaps in the United States in the 20th century. The book describes how the gap between rich and poor declined greatly during the middle of the century, and then widened in the last two decades to levels higher even than in the 1920s. In Conscience, Krugman argues that government policies played a much greater role than commonly thought both in reducing inequality in the 1930s through 1970s and in increasing it in the 1980s through the present, and criticizes the Bush administration for implementing policies that Krugman believes widened the gap between the rich and poor. Krugman also argued that Republicans owed their electoral successes to their ability to exploit the race issue to win political dominance of the South. Krugman argues that Ronald Reagan had used the "Southern Strategy" to signal sympathy for racism without saying anything overtly racist, citing as an example Reagan's coining of the term "welfare queen". In his book, Krugman proposed a "new New Deal", which included placing more emphasis on social and medical programs and less on national defense. In his review of Conscience of a Liberal, the liberal journalist and author Michael Tomasky credited Krugman with a commitment "to accurate history even when some fudging might be in order for the sake of political expediency". In a review for The New York Times, Pulitzer prize-winning historian David M. Kennedy stated: "Krugman's chapter on the imperative need for health care reform is the best in this book, a rueful reminder of the kind of skilled and accessible economic analysis of which he is capable". In late 2008, Krugman published a substantial updating of an earlier work, entitled The Return of Depression Economics and the Crisis of 2008. In the book, he discusses the failure of the United States regulatory system to keep pace with a financial system increasingly out-of-control, and the causes of and possible ways to contain the greatest financial crisis since the 1930s. In 2012, Krugman published End This Depression Now!, a book which argues that looking at the available historical economic data, fiscal cuts and austerity measures only deprive the economy of valuable funds that can circulate and further add to a poor economy – people cannot spend, and markets cannot thrive if there is not enough consumption and there cannot be sufficient consumption if there is large unemployment. He argues that while it is necessary to cut debt, it is the worst time to do so in an economy that has just suffered the most severe of financial shocks, and must be done instead when an economy is near full-employment when the private sector can withstand the burden of decreased government spending and austerity. Failure to stimulate the economy either by public or private sectors will only unnecessarily lengthen the current economic depression and make it worse. Martin Wolf has written that Krugman is both the "most hated and most admired columnist in the US". Economist J. Peter Neary has noted that Krugman "has written on a wide range of topics, always combining one of the best prose styles in the profession with an ability to construct elegant, insightful and useful models". Neary added that "no discussion of his work could fail to mention his transition from Academic Superstar to Public Intellectual. Through his extensive writings, including a regular column for The New York Times, monographs and textbooks at every level, and books on economics and current affairs for the general public ... he has probably done more than any other writer to explain economic principles to a wide audience." Krugman has been described as the most controversial economist in his generation and according to Michael Tomasky since 1992 he has moved "from being a center-left scholar to being a liberal polemicist". From the mid-1990s onwards, Krugman wrote for Fortune (1997–99) and Slate (1996–99), and then for The Harvard Business Review, Foreign Policy, The Economist, Harper's, and Washington Monthly. In this period Krugman critiqued various positions commonly taken on economic issues from across the political spectrum, from protectionism and opposition to the World Trade Organization on the left to supply-side economics on the right. During the 1992 presidential campaign, Krugman praised Bill Clinton's economic plan in The New York Times, and Clinton's campaign used some of Krugman's work on income inequality. At the time, it was considered likely that Clinton would offer him a position in the new administration, but allegedly Krugman's volatility and outspokenness caused Clinton to look elsewhere. Krugman later said that he was "temperamentally unsuited for that kind of role. You have to be very good at people skills, biting your tongue when people say silly things." In a Fresh Dialogues interview, Krugman added, "you have to be reasonably organized ... I can move into a pristine office and within three days it will look like a grenade went off." In 1999, near the height of the dot com boom, The New York Times approached Krugman to write a bi-weekly column on "the vagaries of business and economics in an age of prosperity". His first columns in 2000 addressed business and economic issues, but as the 2000 US presidential campaign progressed, Krugman increasingly focused on George W. Bush's policy proposals. According to Krugman, this was partly due to "the silence of the media – those 'liberal media' conservatives complain about ..." Krugman accused Bush of repeatedly misrepresenting his proposals, and criticized the proposals themselves. After Bush's election, and his perseverance with his proposed tax cut in the midst of the slump (which Krugman argued would do little to help the economy but substantially raise the fiscal deficit), Krugman's columns grew angrier and more focused on the administration. As Alan Blinder put it in 2002, "There's been a kind of missionary quality to his writing since then ... He's trying to stop something now, using the power of the pen." Partly as a result, Krugman's twice-weekly column on the Op-Ed page of The New York Times has made him, according to Nicholas Confessore, "the most important political columnist in America ... he is almost alone in analyzing the most important story in politics in recent years – the seamless melding of corporate, class, and political party interests at which the Bush administration excels." In an interview in late 2009, Krugman said his missionary zeal had changed in the post-Bush era and he described the Obama administration as "good guys but not as forceful as I'd like ... When I argue with them in my column this is a serious discussion. We really are in effect speaking across the transom here." Krugman says he's more effective at driving change outside the administration than inside it, "now, I'm trying to make this progressive moment in American history a success. So that's where I'm pushing." Krugman's columns have drawn criticism as well as praise. A 2003 article in The Economist questioned Krugman's "growing tendency to attribute all the world's ills to George Bush", citing critics who felt that "his relentless partisanship is getting in the way of his argument" and claiming errors of economic and political reasoning in his columns. Daniel Okrent, a former The New York Times ombudsman, in his farewell column, criticized Krugman for what he said was "the disturbing habit of shaping, slicing and selectively citing numbers in a fashion that pleases his acolytes but leaves him open to substantive assaults". Krugman's New York Times blog is "The Conscience of a Liberal", devoted largely to economics and politics. Five days after 9/11 terrorist attacks, Krugman argued in his column that the calamity was "partly self-inflicted", citing poor pay and training for airport security driven by the transfer of responsibility for airport security from government to airlines. His column provoked an angry response and The New York Times was flooded with complaints. According to Larissa MacFarquhar of The New Yorker, while some people thought that he was too partisan to be a columnist for The New York Times, he was revered on the left. Similarly, on the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 on the United States Krugman again provoked a controversy by accusing on his New York Times blog former U.S. President George W. Bush and former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani of rushing "to cash in on the horror" after the attacks and describing the anniversary as "an occasion for shame". Krugman was noteworthy for his fierce opposition to the 2016 presidential campaign of Bernie Sanders. On January 19, 2016, he wrote an article which criticized Bernie Sanders for his perceived lack of political realism, compared Sanders' plans for healthcare and financial reform unfavorably to those of Hillary Clinton, and cited criticisms of Sanders from other liberal policy wonks like Mike Konczal and Ezra Klein. Later, Krugman wrote an article which accused Sanders of "[going] for easy slogans over hard thinking" and attacking Hillary Clinton in a way that was "just plain dishonest". On the 12 July 2016, Krugman tweeted "leprechaun economics", in response to Central Statistics Office (Ireland) data that 2015 GDP grew 26.3% and 2015 GNP grew 18.7%. The leprechaun economics affair (proved in 2018 to be Apple restructuring its double Irish subsidiaries), led to the Central Bank of Ireland introducing a new economic statistic, Modified gross national income (or GNI*) to better measure the Irish economy (2016 Irish GDP is 143% of 2016 Irish GNI*). The term leprechaun economics has since been used by Krugman, and others, to describe distorted/unsound economic data. Krugman's use of the term leprechaun to refer to Ireland and its people has raised rebuke. In June 2021, Krugman wrote an article titled, "Yellen's New Alliance Against Leprechauns". Following the article, the Irish Ambassador to the US, Daniel Mulhall, wrote a letter to his publisher saying, "This is not the first time your columnist has used the word 'leprechaun' when referring to Ireland, and I see it as my duty to point out that this represents an unacceptable slur." Krugman harshly criticized the Trump administration. He has also remarked several times on how Trump tempts him to assume the worst, such that he has to be careful to check his personal beliefs against the weight of evidence. In a 1994 Foreign Affairs article, Paul Krugman argued that it was a myth that the economic successes of the East Asian 'tigers' constituted an economic miracle. He argued that their rise was fueled by mobilizing resources and that their growth rates would inevitably slow. His article helped popularize the argument made by Lawrence Lau and Alwyn Young, among others, that the growth of economies in East Asia was not the result of new and original economic models, but rather from high capital investment and increasing labor force participation, and that total factor productivity had not increased. Krugman argued that in the long term, only increasing total factor productivity can lead to sustained economic growth. Krugman's article was highly criticized in many Asian countries when it first appeared, and subsequent studies disputed some of Krugman's conclusions. However, it also stimulated a great deal of research, and may have caused the Singapore government to provide incentives for technological progress. During the 1997 Asian financial crisis, Krugman advocated currency controls as a way to mitigate the crisis. Writing in a Fortune magazine article, he suggested exchange controls as "a solution so unfashionable, so stigmatized, that hardly anyone has dared suggest it". Malaysia was the only country that adopted such controls, and although the Malaysian government credited its rapid economic recovery on currency controls, the relationship is disputed. An empirical study found that the Malaysian policies produced faster economic recovery and smaller declines in employment and real wages. Krugman later stated that the controls might not have been necessary at the time they were applied, but that nevertheless "Malaysia has proved a point – namely, that controlling capital in a crisis is at least feasible." Krugman more recently pointed out that emergency capital controls have even been endorsed by the IMF, and are no longer considered radical policy. In the early 2000s, Krugman repeatedly criticized the Bush tax cuts, both before and after they were enacted. Krugman argued that the tax cuts enlarged the budget deficit without improving the economy, and that they enriched the wealthy – worsening income distribution in the US. Krugman advocated lower interest rates (to promote investment and spending on housing and other durable goods), and increased government spending on infrastructure, military, and unemployment benefits, arguing that these policies would have a larger stimulus effect, and unlike permanent tax cuts, would only temporarily increase the budget deficit. In addition, he was against Bush's proposal to privatize social security. In August 2005, after Alan Greenspan expressed concern over housing markets, Krugman criticized Greenspan's earlier reluctance to regulate the mortgage and related financial markets, arguing that "[he's] like a man who suggests leaving the barn door ajar, and then – after the horse is gone – delivers a lecture on the importance of keeping your animals properly locked up." Krugman has repeatedly expressed his view that Greenspan and Phil Gramm are the two individuals most responsible for causing the subprime crisis. Krugman points to Greenspan and Gramm for the key roles they played in keeping derivatives, financial markets, and investment banks unregulated, and to the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, which repealed Great Depression era safeguards that prevented commercial banks, investment banks and insurance companies from merging. Krugman has also been critical of some of the Obama administration's economic policies. He has criticized the Obama stimulus plan as being too small and inadequate given the size of the economy and the banking rescue plan as misdirected; Krugman wrote in The New York Times: "an overwhelming majority [of the American public] believes that the government is spending too much to help large financial institutions. This suggests that the administration's money-for-nothing financial policy will eventually deplete its political capital." In particular, he considered the Obama administration's actions to prop up the US financial system in 2009 to be impractical and unduly favorable to Wall Street bankers. In anticipation of President Obama's Job Summit in December 2009, Krugman said in a Fresh Dialogues interview, "This jobs summit can't be an empty exercise ... he can't come out with a proposal for $10 or $20 Billion of stuff because people will view that as a joke. There has to be a significant job proposal ... I have in mind something like $300 Billion." Krugman has criticized China's exchange rate policy, which he believes to be a significant drag on global economic recovery from the Late-2000s recession, and he has advocated a "surcharge" on Chinese imports to the US in response. Jeremy Warner of The Daily Telegraph accused Krugman of advocating a return to self-destructive protectionism. In April 2010, as the Senate began considering new financial regulations, Krugman argued that the regulations should not only regulate financial innovation, but also tax financial-industry profits and remuneration. He cited a paper by Andrei Shleifer and Robert Vishny released the previous week, which concludes that most innovation was in fact about "providing investors with false substitutes for [traditional] assets like bank deposits", and once investors realize the sheer number of securities that are unsafe a "flight to safety" occurs which necessarily leads to "financial fragility". In his June 28, 2010, column in The New York Times, in light of the recent G-20 Toronto Summit, Krugman criticized world leaders for agreeing to halve deficits by 2013. Krugman claimed that these efforts could lead the global economy into the early stages of a "third depression" and leave "millions of lives blighted by the absence of jobs". He advocated instead the continued stimulus of economies to foster greater growth. In a 2014 review of Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century he stated we are in a Second Gilded Age. Krugman identifies as a Keynesian and a saltwater economist, and he has criticized the freshwater school on macroeconomics. Although he has used New Keynesian theory in his work, he has also criticized it for lacking predictive power and for hewing to ideas like the efficient-market hypothesis and rational expectations. Since the 1990s, he has promoted the practical use of the IS-LM model of the neoclassical synthesis, pointing out its relative simplicity compared to New Keynesian models, and its continued currency in economic policy analysis. In the wake of the 2007–2009 financial crisis he has remarked that he is "gravitating towards a Keynes-Fisher-Minsky view of macroeconomics". Post-Keynesian observers cite commonalities between Krugman's views and those of the Post-Keynesian school, although Krugman has been critical of some Post-Keynesian economists such as John Kenneth Galbraith – whose works The New Industrial State (1967) and Economics in Perspective (1987) Krugman has referred to as not "real economic theory" and "remarkably ill-informed" respectively. In recent academic work, he has collaborated with Gauti Eggertsson on a New Keynesian model of debt-overhang and debt-driven slumps, inspired by the writings of Irving Fisher, Hyman Minsky, and Richard Koo. Their work argues that during a debt-driven slump, the "paradox of toil", together with the paradox of flexibility, can exacerbate a liquidity trap, reducing demand and employment. Krugman's support for free trade in the 1980s–1990s provoked some ire from the anti-globalization movement. In 1987 he quipped that, "If there were an Economist's Creed, it would surely contain the affirmations 'I understand the Principle of Comparative Advantage' and 'I advocate Free Trade'." However, Krugman argues in the same article that, given the findings of New Trade Theory, "[free trade] has shifted from optimum to reasonable rule of thumb ... it can never again be asserted as the policy that economic theory tells us is always right." In the article, Krugman comes out in favor of free trade given the enormous political costs of actively engaging in strategic trade policy and because there is no clear method for a government to discover which industries will ultimately yield positive returns. He also notes that increasing returns and strategic trade theory do not disprove the underlying truth of comparative advantage. In 1994, Krugman criticized the notion of national competitiveness, particularly comparisons of nations as competing corporations. Krugman noted that a country's economic success does not need to come at the expense of a rival nation, as if they were two competing companies selling similar products. Instead, foreign nations typically serve as export markets for a nation's goods, as well as suppliers of useful imports. In the midst of the 2009 Great Recession, Krugman made a significant departure from his general support for free trade, entertaining the idea of a 25% tariff on Chinese imports as a retaliation for China's policy of maintaining a low value for the renminbi, which many saw as hostile currency manipulation, artificially making their exports more competitive. In 2015, Krugman noted his ambivalence about the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership, as the agreement was not mainly about trade and, "whatever you may say about the benefits of free trade, most of those benefits have already been realized" [by existing agreements]. After the 2016 elections, and Trump's moves towards protectionism, he wrote that while protectionism can make economies less efficient and reduce long-term growth, it would not directly cause recessions. He noted that if there is a trade war, imports would decrease as much as exports, so employment should not be strongly impacted, at least in the medium to long run. He believes that the US should not repeat Reagan's 1981 policy on taxes and quotas on imported products, as even if it does not produce a recession, protectionism would shock "value chains" and disrupt jobs and communities in the same way as free trade in the past. In addition, other countries would take retaliatory measures against US exports. Krugman recommended against the abandonment of NAFTA, because it could cause economic losses and disruptions to businesses, jobs, and communities. In the late 2010s, Krugman admitted that the models that scholars used to measure the impact of globalization in the 1990s underestimated the effect on jobs and inequality in developed countries such as the US. He noted that although free trade has harmed some industries, communities, and some workers, it remains a win-win system overall, enriching both parties to the agreement at the national level; a trade war is equivalently negative for the nations involved, even while it may benefit some individuals or industries within each nation. Krugman wrote in March 2006: "Immigration reduces the wages of domestic workers who compete with immigrants. That's just supply and demand: we're talking about large increases in the number of low-skill workers relative to other inputs into production, so it's inevitable that this means a fall in wages ... the fiscal burden of low-wage immigrants is also pretty clear." Krugman has called for a transition to a green economy. He supported the Green New Deal, asserting "I believe progressives should enthusiastically embrace the G.N.D.". He said that a "Green New Deal stuff is investment. On that stuff, don't worry about paying for it. Debt as an issue is vastly overstated, and a lot of these things pay for themselves. Go ahead and just deficit finance it." In 2021, he wrote that "we will almost surely have to put a price" on greenhouse gas emissions. He criticized Democratic "moderates" and corporations "torpedoing efforts to avoid a civilization-threatening crisis because you want to hold down your tax bill". Krugman describes himself as liberal and has explained that he views the term "liberal" in the American context to mean "more or less what social democratic means in Europe". In a 2009 Newsweek article, Evan Thomas described Krugman as having "all the credentials of a ranking member of the East coast liberal establishment" but also as someone who is anti-establishment, a "scourge of the Bush administration", and a critic of the Obama administration. In 1996, Newsweek's Michael Hirsh remarked, "Say this for Krugman: though an unabashed liberal ... he's ideologically colorblind. He savages the supply-siders of the Reagan–Bush era with the same glee as he does the 'strategic traders' of the Clinton administration." Krugman has at times advocated free markets in contexts where they are often viewed as controversial. He has written against rent control and land-use restrictions in favor of market supply and demand, likened the opposition against free trade and globalization to the opposition against evolution via natural selection (1996), opposed farm subsidies, argued that sweatshops are preferable to unemployment, dismissed the case for living wages (1998), and argued against mandates, subsidies, and tax breaks for ethanol (2000). In 2003, he questioned the usefulness of NASA's manned space flights given the available technology and their high financial cost compared to their general benefits. Krugman has also criticized U.S. zoning laws and European labor market regulation. Krugman endorsed Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton in the run-up to the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Krugman has criticized the Republican Party leadership for what he sees as a strategic (but largely tacit) reliance on racial divisions. In his Conscience of a Liberal, he wrote: The changing politics of race made it possible for a revived conservative movement, whose ultimate goal was to reverse the achievements of the New Deal, to win national elections – even though it supported policies that favored the interests of a narrow elite over those of middle- and lower-income Americans. Krugman worked for Martin Feldstein when the latter was appointed chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers and chief economic advisor to President Ronald Reagan. He later wrote in an autobiographical essay, "It was, in a way, strange for me to be part of the Reagan Administration. I was then and still am an unabashed defender of the welfare state, which I regard as the most decent social arrangement yet devised." Krugman found the time "thrilling, then disillusioning". He did not fit into the Washington political environment and was not tempted to stay on. According to Krugman, Gordon Brown and his party were unfairly blamed for the late-2000s financial crisis. He has also praised the former British prime minister, whom he described as "more impressive than any US politician" after a three-hour conversation with him. Krugman asserted that Brown "defined the character of the worldwide financial rescue effort" and urged British voters not to support the opposition Conservative Party in the 2010 general election, arguing their Party Leader David Cameron "has had little to offer other than to raise the red flag of fiscal panic". Krugman has been a vocal critic of Donald Trump and his administration. His criticisms have included the president's climate change proposals, economic policy, the Republican tax plan and Trump's foreign policy initiatives. Krugman has often used his op-ed column in The New York Times to set out arguments against the president's policies. On election night in 2016, Krugman wrongly predicted in a New York Times op-ed that the markets would never recover under Trump and stated "first-pass answer is never" but retracted the call in the same publication three days later. Trump gave him a 'Fake News Award'. Krugman stated "I get a 'fake news award' for a bad market call, retracted 3 days later, from 2000-lie man, who still won't admit he lost the popular vote. Sad!" In his New York Times column, Krugman described Russia as a "Potemkin superpower" in reaction to the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine. He stated that "Russia is even weaker than most people, myself included, seem to have realized", that the military performance of Russia "has been less effective than advertised" in a stalemate at the beginning of the invasion, and that Russia encountered serious logistical problems. Krugman observed that the country's total gross domestic product is only a bit more than half as large as those of countries such as Britain and France, despite Russia's greater landmass, total population and natural resource endowment. He also noted that Russia's economy was further weakened by international sanctions as a result of the war. He concluded that Russia had "far less real strength than meets the eye." Krugman opposed the 2003 invasion of Iraq. He wrote in his New York Times column: "What we should have learned from the Iraq debacle was that you should always be skeptical and that you should never rely on supposed authority. If you hear that 'everyone' supports a policy, whether it's a war of choice or fiscal austerity, you should ask whether 'everyone' has been defined to exclude anyone expressing a different opinion." In 1998 during the dot-com bubble, Krugman wrote a commentary for Red Herring that urged skepticism of optimistic predictions for technology-driven progress. He followed it with several pessimistic predictions of his own, including that "[b]y 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet's impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine's" and that the number of jobs for IT specialists would decelerate and turn down. In a 2013 interview, Krugman stated that the predictions were meant to be "fun and provocative, not to engage in careful forecasting". Krugman is a vocal critic of Bitcoin, arguing against its economic soundness since 2011. In 2017, he predicted that Bitcoin is a more obvious bubble than housing and stated that "[t]here's been no demonstration yet that it actually is helpful in conducting economic transactions". In December 2022 Krugman predicted that, because of generative AI such as ChatGPT, "quite a few knowledge jobs may be eminently replaceable". He suggested that such technology would likely prove beneficial "in the long run", but that "in the long run, we are all dead, and even before that, some of us may find ourselves either unemployed or earning far less than we expected". Krugman has been married twice. His first wife, Robin L. Bergman, is a designer. He is currently married to Robin Wells, an academic economist who received her BA from the University of Chicago and her PhD from the University of California, Berkeley. She, as did Krugman, taught at MIT. Together, Krugman and his wife have collaborated on several economics textbooks. Although rumors began to circulate in early 2007 that Krugman's "son" was working for Hillary Clinton's campaign, Krugman reiterated in his New York Times op-ed column that he and his wife are childless. Krugman currently lives in New York City. Upon retiring from Princeton after fifteen years of teaching in June 2015, he addressed the issue in his column, stating that while he retains the utmost praise and respect for Princeton, he wishes to reside in New York City and hopes to focus more on public policy issues. He subsequently became a professor at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and a distinguished scholar at the Graduate Center's Luxembourg Income Study Center. Krugman reports that he is a distant relative of conservative journalist David Frum. He has described himself as a "Loner. Ordinarily shy. Shy with individuals." The Spatial Economy – Cities, Regions and International Trade (July 1999), with Masahisa Fujita and Anthony Venables. MIT Press, ISBN 0-262-06204-6 The Self Organizing Economy (February 1996), ISBN 1-55786-698-8 EMU and the Regions (December 1995), with Guillermo de la Dehesa. ISBN 1-56708-038-3 Development, Geography, and Economic Theory (Ohlin Lectures) (September 1995), ISBN 0-262-11203-5 Foreign Direct Investment in the United States (3rd Edition) (February 1995), with Edward M. Graham. ISBN 0-88132-204-0 World Savings Shortage (September 1994), ISBN 0-88132-161-3 What Do We Need to Know About the International Monetary System? (Essays in International Finance, No 190 July 1993) ISBN 0-88165-097-8 Currencies and Crises (June 1992), ISBN 0-262-11165-9 Geography and Trade (Gaston Eyskens Lecture Series) (August 1991), ISBN 0-262-11159-4 The Risks Facing the World Economy (July 1991), with Guillermo de la Dehesa and Charles Taylor. ISBN 1-56708-073-1 Has the Adjustment Process Worked? (Policy Analyses in International Economics, 34) (June 1991), ISBN 0-88132-116-8 Rethinking International Trade (April 1990), ISBN 0-262-11148-9 Trade Policy and Market Structure (March 1989), with Elhanan Helpman. ISBN 0-262-08182-2 Exchange-Rate Instability (Lionel Robbins Lectures) (November 1988), ISBN 0-262-11140-3 Adjustment in the World Economy (August 1987) ISBN 1-56708-023-5 Market Structure and Foreign Trade: Increasing Returns, Imperfect Competition, and the International Economy (May 1985), with Elhanan Helpman. ISBN 978-0-262-08150-4 Currency Crises (National Bureau of Economic Research Conference Report) (September 2000), ISBN 0-226-45462-2 Trade with Japan: Has the Door Opened Wider? (National Bureau of Economic Research Project Report) (March 1995), ISBN 0-226-45459-2 Empirical Studies of Strategic Trade Policy (National Bureau of Economic Research Project Report) (April 1994), co-edited with Alasdair Smith. ISBN 0-226-45460-6 Exchange Rate Targets and Currency Bands (October 1991), co-edited with Marcus Miller. ISBN 0-521-41533-0 Strategic Trade Policy and the New International Economics (January 1986), ISBN 0-262-11112-8 Economics: European Edition (Spring 2007), with Robin Wells and Kathryn Graddy. ISBN 0-7167-9956-1 Macroeconomics (February 2006), with Robin Wells. ISBN 0-7167-6763-5 Economics, first edition (December 2005), with Robin Wells. ISBN 1-57259-150-1 Economics, second edition (2009), with Robin Wells. ISBN 0-7167-7158-6 Economics, third edition (2013), with Robin Wells. ISBN 1-4292-5163-8 Economics, fourth edition (2017), with Robin Wells. ISBN 1-4641-8665-0 Economics, fifth edition (2018), with Robin Wells. ISBN 1-319-06660-7 Economics, sixth edition (2021), with Robin Wells. ISBN 1-319-24494-7 Microeconomics (March 2004), with Robin Wells. ISBN 0-7167-5997-7 International Economics: Theory and Policy, with Maurice Obstfeld. 7th Edition (2006), ISBN 0-321-29383-5; 1st Edition (1998), ISBN 0-673-52186-9 Arguing with Zombies: Economics, Politics, and the Fight for a Better Future (January 2020) ISBN 978-1324005018 End This Depression Now! (April 2012) ISBN 0-393-08877-4 A call for stimulative expansionary policy and an end to austerity The Conscience of a Liberal (October 2007) ISBN 0-393-06069-1 The Great Unraveling: Losing Our Way in the New Century (September 2003) ISBN 0-393-05850-6 A book of his The New York Times columns, many deal with the economic policies of the Bush administration or the economy in general. Fuzzy Math: The Essential Guide to the Bush Tax Plan (May 4, 2001) ISBN 0-393-05062-9 The Return of Depression Economics and the Crisis of 2008 (December 2008) ISBN 0-393-07101-4 An updated version of his previous work. The Return of Depression Economics (May 1999) ISBN 0-393-04839-X Considers the long economic stagnation of Japan through the 1990s, the Asian financial crisis, and problems in Latin America. The Return of Depression Economics and the Crisis of 2008 (December 2008) ISBN 0-393-07101-4 The Accidental Theorist and Other Dispatches from the Dismal Science (May 1998) ISBN 0-393-04638-9 Essay collection, primarily from Krugman's writing for Slate. Pop Internationalism (March 1996) ISBN 0-262-11210-8 Essay collection, covering largely the same ground as Peddling Prosperity. Peddling Prosperity: Economic Sense and Nonsense in an Age of Diminished Expectations (April 1995) ISBN 0-393-31292-5 History of economic thought from the first rumblings of revolt against Keynesian economics to the present, for the layman. The Age of Diminished Expectations: U.S. Economic Policy in the 1990s (1990) ISBN 0-262-11156-X A "briefing book" on the major policy issues around the economy. Revised and Updated, January 1994, ISBN 0-262-61092-2 Third Edition, August 1997, ISBN 0-262-11224-8 (2012) "Debt, Deleveraging, and the Liquidity Trap: A Fisher-Minsky-Koo Approach". The Quarterly Journal of Economics 127 (3), pp. 1469–513. (2009) "The Increasing Returns Revolution in Trade and Geography". The American Economic Review 99(3), pp. 561–71. (1998) "It's Baaack: Japan's Slump and the Return of the Liquidity Trap". Brookings Papers on Economic Activity 1998, pp. 137–205. (1996) "Are currency crises self-fulfilling?". NBER Macroeconomics Annual 11, pp. 345–78. (1995) (with AJ Venables) (1995). "Globalization and the inequality of nations" (PDF). Quarterly Journal of Economics. 110 (4): 857–80. doi:10.2307/2946642. JSTOR 2946642. S2CID 154458353. (1991) "Increasing returns and economic geography". Journal of Political Economy 99, pp. 483–99. (1991) Krugman, P. R. (1991). "Target zones and exchange rate dynamics" (PDF). Quarterly Journal of Economics. 106 (3): 669–82. doi:10.2307/2937922. JSTOR 2937922. S2CID 154356042. (1991) "History versus expectations". Quarterly Journal of Economics 106 (2), pp. 651–67. (1981) "Intra-industry specialization and the gains from trade". Journal of Political Economy 89, pp. 959–73. (1980) "Scale economies, product differentiation, and the pattern of trade". American Economic Review 70, pp. 950–59. (1979) "A model of balance-of-payments crises". Journal of Money, Credit, and Banking 11, pp. 311–25. (1979) "Increasing returns, monopolistic competition, and international trade". Journal of International Economics 9, pp. 469–79. Capitol Hill Baby-Sitting Co-op, popularized in Krugman's book, Peddling Prosperity List of economists List of Jewish Nobel laureates List of newspaper columnists New Yorkers in journalism Paul Krugman on X Profile and column archive at The New York Times KrugmanOnline.com features books by Krugman, a custom search engine, and aggregated content from the web. The Unofficial Krugman Archive contains nearly all his pre-TimesSelect articles Paul Krugman (MIT): archives of his Slate and Fortune columns plus other writings 1996–2000 Krugman Publications at the National Bureau of Economic Research Contra Krugman – articles by economist Robert P. Murphy and historian Thomas Woods seeking to refute Krugman "Paul Krugman: Commencement Speaker, Bard College at Simon's Rock" (YouTube) Appearances on C-SPAN Paul Krugman at nobelprize.org Paul Krugman on the Muck Rack journalist listing site
9. Gary Becker (1930 - 2014)
With an HPI of 65.08, Gary Becker is the 9th most famous American Economist. His biography has been translated into 59 different languages.
Gary Stanley Becker (; December 2, 1930 – May 3, 2014) was an American economist who received the 1992 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. He was a professor of economics and sociology at the University of Chicago, and was a leader of the third generation of the Chicago school of economics. 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 Kenneth Arrow and Robert Solow. Economist Justin Wolfers called him "the most important social scientist in the past 50 years." 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, including those that are often regarded as self-destructive or irrational. His approach also extended to altruistic aspects of human behavior, which he showed to sometimes have self-serving ends (when individuals' utility is properly defined and measured, that is). He was also among the foremost exponents of the study of human capital. According to Milton Friedman, he was "the greatest social scientist who has lived and worked" in the second part of the twentieth century.
10. Murray Rothbard (1926 - 1995)
With an HPI of 64.70, Murray Rothbard is the 10th most famous American Economist. His biography has been translated into 42 different languages.
Murray Newton Rothbard (; March 2, 1926 – January 7, 1995) was an American economist of the Austrian School, economic historian, political theorist, and activist. Rothbard was a central figure in the 20th-century American libertarian movement, particularly its right-wing strands, and was a founder and leading theoretician of anarcho-capitalism. He wrote over twenty books on political theory, history, economics, and other subjects. Rothbard argued 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. Rothbard led a "fringe existence" in academia, as described by his protégé Hans-Hermann Hoppe. Rothbard rejected mainstream economic methodologies and instead embraced the praxeology of Ludwig von Mises. Rothbard taught economics at a Wall Street division of New York University, later at Brooklyn Polytechnic, and after 1986 in an endowed position at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Partnering with the oil billionaire Charles Koch, Rothbard was a founder of the Cato Institute and the Center for Libertarian Studies in the 1970s. He broke with Koch and joined Lew Rockwell and Burton Blumert in 1982 to establish the Mises Institute in Alabama. Rothbard opposed egalitarianism and the civil rights movement, and blamed women's voting and activism for the growth of the welfare state. He promoted historical revisionism and befriended the Holocaust denier Harry Elmer Barnes. Later in his career, Rothbard advocated a libertarian alliance with paleoconservatism (which he called paleolibertarianism), favoring right-wing populism and describing David Duke and Joseph McCarthy as models for political strategy. In the 2010s, he received renewed attention as an influence on the alt-right.
People
Pantheon has 132 people classified as American economists born between 1793 and 1970. Of these 132, 67 (50.76%) of them are still alive today. The most famous living American economists include Joseph Stiglitz, Michael Porter, and Paul Krugman. The most famous deceased American economists include Milton Friedman, Paul Samuelson, and Herbert A. Simon. As of April 2024, 9 new American economists have been added to Pantheon including Douglas Diamond, Philip H. Dybvig, and David Landes.
Living American Economists
Go to all Rankings
Joseph Stiglitz
1943 - Present
HPI: 68.55
Michael Porter
1947 - Present
HPI: 67.59
Paul Krugman
1953 - Present
HPI: 65.36
Ben Bernanke
1953 - Present
HPI: 63.11
Richard Thaler
1945 - Present
HPI: 61.98
Edmund Phelps
1933 - Present
HPI: 61.93
Robert Reich
1946 - Present
HPI: 61.28
Claudia Goldin
1946 - Present
HPI: 61.19
George Akerlof
1940 - Present
HPI: 61.08
Thomas J. Sargent
1943 - Present
HPI: 60.03
William Nordhaus
1941 - Present
HPI: 60.01
Jeremy Rifkin
1945 - Present
HPI: 59.70
Deceased American Economists
Go to all RankingsMilton Friedman
1912 - 2006
HPI: 74.33
Paul Samuelson
1915 - 2009
HPI: 69.36
Herbert A. Simon
1916 - 2001
HPI: 67.55
Elinor Ostrom
1933 - 2012
HPI: 67.38
Robert Solow
1924 - 2023
HPI: 65.81
Gary Becker
1930 - 2014
HPI: 65.08
Murray Rothbard
1926 - 1995
HPI: 64.70
Thorstein Veblen
1857 - 1929
HPI: 64.46
Douglass North
1920 - 2015
HPI: 64.06
Theodore Schultz
1902 - 1998
HPI: 63.60
Oliver E. Williamson
1932 - 2020
HPI: 63.57
Irving Fisher
1867 - 1947
HPI: 63.40
Newly Added American Economists (2024)
Go to all Rankings
Douglas Diamond
1953 - Present
HPI: 54.35
Philip H. Dybvig
1955 - Present
HPI: 52.04
David Landes
1924 - 2013
HPI: 48.17
Don Patinkin
1922 - 1995
HPI: 45.38
Paul Craig Roberts
1939 - Present
HPI: 43.87
Richard D. Wolff
1942 - Present
HPI: 42.52
Paul Douglas
1892 - 1976
HPI: 39.04
Laura Tyson
1947 - Present
HPI: 36.06
Rebecca Blank
1955 - 2023
HPI: 34.29
Overlapping Lives
Which Economists were alive at the same time? This visualization shows the lifespans of the 25 most globally memorable Economists since 1700.
