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Adam Smith
1723 — 1790
Adam Smith (1723–1790) — Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Glasgow, Fellow of the Royal Society, Commissioner of Customs for Scotland, author of The Theory of Moral Sentiments and An …
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Thomas Robert Malthus
1766 — 1834
The gentle Surrey clergyman who became the most hated economist in England for doing the arithmetic on hunger: population grows geometrically, food only arithmetically. Ricardo's closest opponent, Marx's favourite target, Keynes's rediscovered ancestor. He knows his forecast was wrong.
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Karl Marx
1818 — 1883
Karl Marx was a German philosopher, economist, and revolutionary theorist whose analysis of capitalism and class struggle became the intellectual foundation for socialist and communist movements world…
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John Maynard Keynes
1883 — 1946
John Maynard Keynes was the Cambridge-trained British economist who rewrote the rules of capitalism in the wreckage of the Great Depression, arguing that markets left to themselves do not self-correct…
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Friedrich Hayek
1899 — 1992
Friedrich August von Hayek was an Austrian-British economist and political philosopher who won the Nobel Prize in 1974 and spent his career arguing that the most dangerous thing a society can do is gi…
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John Stuart Mill
1806 — 1873
The Victorian philosopher who argued for liberty more precisely than anyone before him. On Liberty's harm principle is still the most widely cited justification for individual freedom. He introduced women's suffrage in Parliament in 1867. He was right about everything, usually a century early.
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David Ricardo
1772 — 1823
The stockbroker who became the most systematic economist between Smith and Mill. His comparative advantage principle still underlies all free trade theory. His labor theory of value became Marx's foundation. He intended neither outcome.
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Frédéric Bastiat
1801 — 1850
The most entertaining economist in the classical tradition. He invented the broken window fallacy, the seen and the unseen, and the Candlemakers' Petition. He wrote The Law while dying of tuberculosis. He finished it the year he died.
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Henry George
1839 — 1897
He asked why poverty persisted alongside progress and answered: land rent. Progress and Poverty (1879) became one of the best-selling economics books of the century. His single tax nearly got him elected mayor of New York.
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Thorstein Veblen
1857 — 1929
He invented conspicuous consumption and pecuniary emulation, was fired from three universities, and treated the Gilded Age with the anthropological detachment of a man studying a primitive ritual. His prose is impenetrable. His analysis is devastating.
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Alfred Marshall
1842 — 1924
The Second Wrangler who turned from physics to the faces in the slums, and in 1890 gave economics the cross of supply and demand, elasticity, and the long period, with the mathematics hidden in an appendix he told his students to burn. He trained Keynes and founded the Cambridge school. He voted against degrees for the women his wife had taught.
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Andrew Carnegie
1835 — 1919
The Dunfermline weaver's son who came to Pittsburgh at twelve, built the largest steel company on earth on cost sheets and hard partners, and sold it to Morgan in 1901 for the largest fortune in history, then gave it away in libraries and a palace for peace. He wrote that the man who dies rich dies disgraced. In July 1892 his workers at Homestead were locked out, shot at, and broken while he stayed in Scotland.
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