A.

Classical Anders Chydenius Notable ideas: Free trade Freedom of information Natural equality

Adam Smith "An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776)" was latter, usually abbreviated as The Wealth of Nations, is considered his magnum opus and the first modern work of economics. Smith is cited as the "father of modern economics" and is still among the most influential thinkers in the field of economics today.

Thomas Malthus was a British cleric and scholar, influential in the fields of political economy and demography. "MalthusRicardo debate on political economy"

James Mill He was a founder of classical economics, together with David Ricardo,[1] and the father of influential philosopher of liberalism, John Stuart Mill.

David Ricardo was a British political economist. He was one of the most influential of the classical economists, along with Thomas Malthus, Adam Smith, and John Stuart Mill. Perhaps his most important legacy is his theory of comparative advantage, which suggests that a nation should concentrate solely on those industries in which it is most internationally competitive, trading with other countries to obtain products which are not produced nationally. Ricardo's theory of Comparative Advantage attempted to prove, using simple mathematics, that industry specialization and international trade always produce positive results. This theory expanded on the concept of absolute advantage which does not advocate specialization and international trade in all cases.

Ideas: Comparative advantage Protectionism Criticism of the Ricardian theory of trade Value theory Rent Malthus's criticism and Extrapolation of the problem of Ricardian Rent

Contributions: Ricardian equivalence, labour theory of value, comparative advantage, law of diminishing returns, and Economic rent

Henry Thornton A successful merchant banker, as a monetary theorist Thornton has been described as the father of the modern central bank. An opponent of the real bills doctrine, he was a defender of the bullionist position and a significant figure in monetary theory, his process of monetary expansion anticipating the theories of Knut Wicksell regarding the "cumulative process which restates the Quantity Theory in a theoretically coherent form".

John Ramsay McCulloch He wrote extensively on economic policy, and was a pioneer in the collection, statistical analysis and publication of economic data.

Jeremy Bentham He focused on monetary expansion as a means of helping to create full employment. He was also aware of the relevance of forced saving, propensity to consume, the saving-investment relationship, and other matters that form the content of modern income and employment analysis. His monetary view was close to the fundamental concepts employed in his model of utilitarian decision making. His work is considered to be an early precursor of modern welfare economics. Bentham stated that pleasures and pains can be ranked according to their value or "dimension" such as intensity, duration, certainty of a pleasure or a pain. He was concerned with maxima and minima of pleasures and pains; and they set a precedent for the future employment of the maximisation principle in the economics of the consumer, the firm and the search for an optimum in welfare economics.

Jean Charles Lonard de Sismondi

in his principal subsequent economic work, Nouveaux principesd'conomiepolitique (1819), he insisted on the fact that economic science studied the means of increasing wealth too much, and the use of wealth for producing happiness, too little. For the science of economics, his most important contribution was probably his discovery of economic cycles. Contribution: Theory of periodic crises

Johann Heinrich von Thnen Natural Wage

John Stuart Mill He was an influential contributor to social theory, political theory and political economy. Economic philosophy: Economic democracy Political democracy The environment Economic development Control of population growth Wage fund Rate of capital accumulation Rate of profit

Karl Marx Marx's work in economics laid the basis for the current understanding of labour and its relation to capital, and has influenced much of subsequent economic thought. He published numerous books during his lifetime, the most notable being The Communist Manifesto (1848) and Das Kapital (18671894). Marx's thoughts on labour were related to the primacy he gave to the economic relation in determining the society's past, present and future (see also economic determinism).[193][196][219] Accumulation of capital shapes the social system.[196] Social change, for Marx, was about conflict between opposing interests, driven, in the background, by economic forces.[193] This became the inspiration for the body of works known as the conflict theory.[219] In his evolutionary model of history, he argued that human history began with free, productive and creative work that was over time coerced and dehumanised, a trend most apparent under capitalism.[193] Marx noted that this was not an intentional process; rather, no individual or even state can go against the forces of economy.

Henry George who was the most influential proponent of the land value tax, also known as the "single tax" on land. He inspired the economic philosophy known as Georgism, whose main tenet is that people should own what they create, but that everything found in nature, most importantly the value of land, belongs equally to all humanity. His most famous work, Progress and Poverty (1879), is a treatise on inequality, the cyclic nature of industrialized economies, and the use of the land value tax as a remedy. Contributions: Georgism; studied land as a factor in economic inequality and business cycles; proposed land value tax

Thomas Tooke was an English economist known for writing on money and his work on economic statistics. Tooke is best known for his History of Prices and of the State of the Circulation during the Years 1703-1856 (6 vols., 1838-1857). In the first four volumes he treats (a) of the prices of corn, and the circumstances affecting prices; (b) the prices of produce other than corn; and (c) the state of the circulation. The two final volumes, written with William Newmarch, deal with railways, free trade, banking in Europe and the effects of new discoveries of gold.

Robert Torrens He was an independent discoverer of the principle of comparative advantage in international trade, which principle is usually attributed to David Ricardo although Torrens wrote about it in 1815, two years before Ricardo's book On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation was first published.

B. Neoclassical Lionel Robbins He is known for his proposed definition of economics, and for his instrumental efforts in shifting Anglo-Saxon economics from its Marshallian direction. His definition of economics "Economics is the science which studies human behaviour as a relationship between ends and scarce means which have alternative uses." Contributions: Robbin's Report

William Stanley Jevons

Irving Fisher described his book A General Mathematical Theory of Political Economy (1862) as the start of the mathematical method in economics. It made the case that economics as a science concerned with quantities is necessarily mathematical. In so doing, it expounded upon the "final" (marginal) utility theory of value. For Jevons, the utility or value to a consumer of an additional unit of a product is inversely related to the number of units of that product he already owns, at least beyond some critical quantity.

Francis YsidroEdgeworth was an Anglo-Irish philosopher and political economist who made significant contributions to the methods of statistics during the 1880s. From 1891 onward he was appointed the founding editor of The Economic Journal. In Mathematical Psychics (1881), his most famous and original book, he criticised Jevons's theory of barter exchange, showing that under a system of "recontracting" there will be, in fact, many solutions, an "indeterminacy of contract". Edgeworth's "range of final settlements" was later resurrected by Martin Shubik (1959) as the game-theoretic concept of "the core". Contributions: Edgeworth's conjecture As the number of agents in an economy increases, the degree of indeterminacy is reduced. In the limit case of an infinite number of agents (perfect competition), contract becomes fully determinate and identical to the 'equilibrium' of economists. The only way of resolving this indeterminacy of contract would be to appeal to the utilitarian principle of maximising the sum of the utilities of traders over the range of final settlements. Incidentally, it was in this 1881 book that Edgeworth introduced into economics the generalised utility function, U (x, y, z, ...), and drew the first 'indifference curve'. International trade He was the first one to use offer curves and community indifference curves to illustrate its main propositions, including the "optimal tariff". Taxation paradox Taxation of a good may actually result in a decrease in price. He set the utilitarian foundations for highly progressive taxation, arguing that the optimal distribution of taxes should be such that 'the marginal disutility incurred by each taxpayer should be the same' (Edgeworth, 1897). Monopoly pricing In 1897, in an article on monopoly pricing, EdgeworthcriticisedCournot's exact solution to the duopoly problem with quantity adjustments as well as Bertrand's "instantly competitive" result in

a duopoly model with price adjustment. At the same time, Edgeworth showed how price competition between two firms with capacity constraints and/or rising marginal cost curves resulted in indeterminacy. This gave rise to the Bertrand-Edgeworth model of oligopoly. Marginal productivity theory Edgeworthcriticised the marginal productivity theory in several articles (1904, 1911), and tried to refine the neo-classical theory of distribution on a more solid basis. Although his work in questions of war finance during World War I was original, they were a bit too theoretical and did not achieve the practical influence he had hoped. Edgeworth's limit theorem Edgeworth's limit theorem relates to equilibrium of supply and demand in a free market. . Though Edgeworth's economic ideas were original and in depth, his contemporaries frequently complained of his manner of expression for lack of clarity. He was prone to verbosity and coining obscure words without providing definition for the reader.

Alfred Marshall was one of the most influential economists of his time. His book, Principles of Economics brings the ideas of supply and demand, marginal utility, and costs of production into a coherent whole. He is known as one of the founders of economics. "The Theory of Foreign Trade: The Pure Theory of Domestic Values" and "Principles of Economics"

John Bates Clark He was one of the pioneers of the marginalist revolution and opponent to the Institutionalist school of economics. Major works: The Philosophy of Wealth: Economic Principles Newly Formulated Capital and Its Earnings The Distribution of Wealth: A Theory of Wages, Interest and Profits Essentials of Economic Theory Social Justice without Socialism

Irving Fisher He was one of the earliest American neoclassical economists, though his later work on debt deflation has been embraced by the Post-Keynesian school.Fisher made important

contributions to utility theory and general equilibrium. He was also a pioneer in the rigorous study of intertemporal choice in markets, which led him to develop a theory of capital and interest rates. His research on the quantity theory of money inaugurated the school of macroeconomic thought known as "monetarism." Economic theories: Utility theory Interest and capital Monetary economics Debt-deflation

Contributions: Fisher equation, Equation of exchange, Price index, Debt deflation, Phillips curve, Money illusion, Fisher separation theorem, and Independent Party of Connecticut

Knut Wicksell His economic contributions would influence both the Keynesian and Austrian schools of economic thought.

C. Keynesian John Maynard Keynes was a British economist whose ideas have fundamentally affected the theory and practice of modern macroeconomics, and informed the economic policies of governments. He built on and greatly refined earlier work on the causes of business cycles, and is widely considered to be one of the founders of modern macroeconomics and the most influential economist of the 20th century. His ideas are the basis for the school of thought known as Keynesian economics, and its various offshoots. Keynes instead argued that aggregate demand determined the overall level of economic activity, and that inadequate aggregate demand could lead to prolonged periods of high unemployment. He advocated the use of fiscal and monetary measures to mitigate the adverse effects of economic recessions and depressions. Contributions: Macroeconomics, Keynesian economics, Liquidity preference, Spending multiplier, and Aggregate Demand-Aggregate Supply model

Joan Robinson as a post-Keynesian economist who was well known for her work on monetary economics and wide-ranging contributions to economic theory.

Contributions: Joan Robinson's growth model and Amoroso-Robinson relation

Paul Krugman Krugman is known in academia for his work on international economics (including trade theory, economic geography, and international finance), liquidity traps, and currency crises. Contributions: International Trade Theory, New Trade Theory, and New Economic Geography

Paul Samuelson He was author of the largest-selling economics textbook of all time: Economics: An Introductory Analysis, first published in 1948. It was the second American textbook to explain the principles of Keynesian economics and how to think about economics, and the first one to be successful. Samuelson is considered to be one of the founders of neo-Keynesian economics and a seminal figure in the development of neoclassical economics. Contributions: Neoclassical synthesis, Mathematical economics, Economic methodology, Revealed preference, International trade, Economic growth, and Public goods

Joseph Stiglitz He is known for his critical view of the management of globalization, free-market economists (whom he calls "free market fundamentalists"). Contibutions: Screening, taxation, and unemployment; Shapiro-Stiglitz model

D. Monetarism Karl Brunner His main interest in economics was on the nature of the money supply process and the philosophy of science and logic.

Phillip D. Cagan Cagan's work focused on monetary policy and the control of inflation. He is perhaps best known for Determinants and Effects of Changes in the Stock of Money, 1875-1960, a work that sought to identify the "causal relationships between changes in money, prices and output."

Cagan's most important contribution to economics, however, is the article included in Milton Friedman's edited volume Studies in the Quantity Theory of Money (1956), entitled "The Monetary Dynamics of Hyperinflation," a work that became an "instant classic" in the field. Contributions: Analysis of money and Analysis of inflation

Milton Friedman Friedman was best known for reviving interest in the money supply as a determinant of the nominal value of output, that is, the quantity theory of money. Monetarism is the set of views associated with modern quantity theory. Friedman was the main proponent of the monetarist school of economics. He maintained that there is a close and stable association between price inflation and the money supply, mainly that price inflation should be regulated with monetary deflation and price deflation with monetary inflation. He famously quipped that price deflation can be fought by "dropping money out of a helicopter." Friedman rejected the use of fiscal policy as a tool of demand management; and he held that the government's role in the guidance of the economy should be restricted severely. Friedman also argued for the cessation of government intervention in currency markets, thereby spawning an enormous literature on the subject, as well as promoting the practice of freely floating exchange rates. Friedman was also known for his work on the consumption function, the permanent income hypothesis (1957), which Friedman himself referred to as his best scientific work. This work contended that rational consumers would spend a proportional amount of what they perceived to be their permanent income. Other important contributions include his critique of the Phillips curve and the concept of the natural rate of unemployment (1968). Contributions: Price theory, Monetarism, Applied macroeconomics, Floating exchange rates, Volunteer military, Permanent income hypothesis, and Friedman test

David Laidler has been one of the foremost scholars of monetarism. His book, The Demand for Money, was published in four editions from 1969 through 1993 (with slightly altered subtitles), initially setting forth the stability of the relationship between income and the demand for money and later taking into consideration the effects of legal, technological, and institutional changes on the demand for money.

Allan Meltzer

Meltzer's study A History of the Federal Reserve is considered the most comprehensive history of the central bank.

Anna Schwartz "one of the world's greatest monetary scholars". She was best known for her collaboration with Milton Friedman on A Monetary History of the United States, 18671960, published in 1963, which laid a large portion of the blame for the Great Depression at the door of the Federal Reserve System. Contributions: Analysis of money and Analysis of banking

Clark Warburton He was described as the "first monetarist of the post-World War II period," the most uncompromising upholder of a strictly monetary theory of business fluctuations, and reviver of classic monetary-disequilibrium theory and the quantity theory of money.

E. Rational Expectations John F. Muth was an American economist. He is known as "the father of the rational expectations revolution in economics", primarily due to his article "Rational Expectations and the Theory of Price Movements" from 1961. Muth asserted that expectations "are essentially the same as the predictions of the relevant economic theory." Although he formulated the rational expectations principle in the context of microeconomics it has subsequently become associated with macroeconomics and the work of Robert Lucas, Jr., Finn E. Kydland, Edward C. Prescott, Neil Wallace, Thomas J. Sargent, and others. The Theory of Rational Expectations; publication of Rational Expectations and the Theory of Price Movements.

Robert Lucas, Jr. he challenged the foundations of macroeconomic theory (previously dominated by the Keynesian economics approach), arguing that a macroeconomic model should be built as an aggregated version of microeconomic models (while noting that aggregation in the theoretical sense may not be possible within a given model).

He developed the "Lucas critique" of economic policymaking, which holds that relationships that appear to hold in the economy, such as an apparent relationship between inflation and unemployment, could change in response to changes in economic policy. This led to the development of New Keynesian economics and the drive towards microeconomic foundations for macroeconomic theory. He developed a theory of supply that suggests people can be tricked by unsystematic monetary policy; the Lucas-Uzawa model (with Hirofumi Uzawa) of human capital accumulation; and the "Lucas paradox", which considers why more capital does not flow from developed countries to developing countries. He also contributed foundational contributions to behavioral economics, and has provided the intellectual foundation that enables us to understand deviations from the law of one price based on the irrationality of investors.