Evsey Domar

A Russian-born, Manchurian-raised, MIT economist, Evsey Domar has made contributions in three main areas of economics: economic growth, comparative economics and economic history. His work on economic growth began with his 1944 model on government debt, which considered how economic growth can lighten the burden of the government debt. His major claim to fame,

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Francis Ysidro Edgeworth

Francis Edgeworth was a restless philosophy student at Cambridge on his way to Germany when he decided to elope with a teenage Catalonian refugee he met on the steps of the British Museum. One of the outcomes of their marriage was Ysidro Francis Edgeworth (the name order was reversed later), who was destined to

Francois Perroux (1903-1987)

François Perroux belongs to that small, strange group of unique Frenchmen who, in spite of the Anglophone dominance of economics, still manage to ocassionally infect the imagination of the economics world with their novel ideas. At Collège de France, Francois Perroux studied under Etienne Antonelli, the last lingering shadow of the Lausanne School. In

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Francois Quesnay

The humbly-born Francois Quesnay trained himself in medicine, rising to become a physician in Louis XV’s court and the leader of a sect of Enlightenment thinkers known as the Physiocrats or the economistes. The working-class boy who could not read until he was 11 was eventually elected to the Academy of Sciences and hailed

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Franco Modigliani

A student of Jacob Marschak’s at the New School for Social Research, Franco Modigliani, in the model presented in his Ph.D. thesis (1944), was to provide the nucleus of the Neo-Keynesian Synthesis of post-war macroeconomics. His further work went on to consolidate much of that research effort – whether in his life-cycle hypothesis for the consumption

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Frank Plumpton Ramsey

The Cambridge philosopher Frank Ramsey, A wunderkind of first order, wrote three important contributions to economics. The first, “Truth and Probability” (written in 1926, published 1931), was the first paper to lay out the theory of subjective probability and begin to axiomatize choice under (subjective) uncertainty, a task completed decades later by Bruno de

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Friedrich August von Hayek

Among the most masterful and insightful of 20th Century economists, Friedrich Hayek alone could have stood shoulder-to-shoulder with his great rival, John Maynard Keynes. Trained by Wieser and Böhm-Bawerk in the Austrian tradition at Vienna, Friedrich A. Hayek nonetheless carved a distinct spot in the economic pantheon – in some ways more different from the

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Gary Becker

Gary Stanley Becker is an American economist. Known for his work at the University of Chicago, he won The Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel in 1992 for “having extended the domain of microeconomic analysis to a wide range of human behavior and interaction, including non-market behavior”. He

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George Arthur Akerlof

George A. Akerlof, an economics professor at the University of California, Berkeley, was named the 2001 co-winner of the Nobel Prize in economic sciences in 2001. It is the second consecutive year in which the Nobel has gone to a UC Berkeley economist. George Akerlof, described by a colleague as ‘a citizen of the

Georges Eugene Sorel

Sometimes incomprehensible spirit behind the French syndicalist movement that sparked in 1895 in an attempt to recapture the initiative away from reformist state socialists and bring the workers’ movement back to its roots in the revolutionary anarcho-socialism of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and Michael Bakunin that had so shaken the world back in the 1840s and 1850s. Although he claimed himself to

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Gerard Debreu

It is difficult to underestimate the luminous shadow cast by Gerard Debreu over Neo-Walrasian general equilibrium theory. For many years, Gerard Debreu has set the standard as well as posed most of the questions (and, in many cases, provided many of the solutions) that were to be addressed by mathematical economics – an achievement paralleled only

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Karl Gustav Cassel

Gustav Cassel has the unfortunate distinction of belonging to that distinct group of influential economists who are intensely disliked by everyone. The Stockholm School, where he taught for many years, did its utmost to dissociate itself from him due to Cassel’s bitter rivalry with their beloved master, Knut Wicksell. Although Walrasians applauded his general equilibrium

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Hans Walter Singer (1910- )

The German-born Hans Singer was trained by Joseph Schumpeter and Arthur Spiethoff at Bonn, before gravitating to Cambridge, where he trained under John Maynard Keynes. It was under Keynes, that he produced his early surveys on unemployment (1937, 1940). In 1947, Singer moved onto the United Nations, with which he would be associated for much of his

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Harold Hotelling

Harold Hotelling’s articles on econoimcs were few, but his contributions were profound enough to make him one of the ‘leaders’ of the Paretian School, the ‘resurrectors’ the Marginalist Revolution in the 1930s. Hotelling’s 1929 paper on the stability of competition introduced the notion of spatial competition in a duopoly situation. The solution to this

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Herbert A. Simon

There are many that claim that Herbert A. Simon has precipitated something like a revolution in microeconomics. This revolution is in the concept of ‘decision-making’ in organization and under uncertainty, which he claims is far away from the ‘rational man’ often assumed in mainstream microeconomics. He is certainly not the first one to come

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Hilaire Belloc

Hilaire Belloc, the son of Louis Belloc, a French barrister, was born in St. Cloud near Paris in 1870. His mother was Elizabeth Rayner Parkes, the daughter of the Birmingham radical, Joseph Parkes, and granddaughter of Joseph Priestley. Although she was converted to Catholicism from Unitarianism, she remained a political radical and was a

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Hollis B. Chenery

Student of Wassily Leontief. Received his Ph.D. from Harvard in 1950. Major Works of Hollis B. Chenery – Overcapacity and the Acceleration Principle, 1952, Econometrica – Interindustry Economics, with P. Clark, 1959. – Patterns of Industrial Growth, 1960, AER – Comparative Advantage and Development Policy, 1961, AER – Capital-Labor Substitution and Economic Efficiency, with K.J.

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Hugo Grotius

Hugo Grotius (Huigh De Groot) was a Dutch legal scholar, playwright and poet. As a natural law philosopher, he is generally credited as the originator of ‘natural morality’ and the social contract theory of the state. His 1609 book promoted idea that seas should be free for the innocent use and mutual benefit of all – an

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Immanuel Wallerstein

Born in 1930, Immanuel Wallerstein has since 1976 been Distinguished Professor of Sociology at the State University of New York (SUNY) in Binghamton. He is the founder and director of the Fernand Braudel Center for the Study of Economies, Historical Systems, and Civilizations in Binghamton. Has published countless books and articles. Wallerstein’s so called

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Irving Fisher

Irving Fisher was one of the earliest American neo-classicals of unusual mathematical sophistication. He made numerous important contributions to the Neo-classical Marginalist Revolution, of which the following are but a sample: (1) his contributions to the Walrasian theory of equilibrium price (he also invented the indifference curve device) in 1892; (2) his volumes on

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