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Category
Disciplines in Economics, Business & Politics
Economists, political economists, entrepreneurs and statesmen whose theories, firms and constitutions organise money and power.
Era
15 figures
Alexander Hamilton
1755 – 1804Designed American public credit, the national bank and industrial policy.
Simón Bolívar
1783 – 1830Led six nations to independence and drafted their founding constitutions.
Andrew Carnegie
1835 – 1919Built modern steel and then invented large-scale philanthropy.
Frederick Winslow Taylor
1856 – 1915Scientific management — the origin of every productivity metric and its discontents.
Wallace Wattles
1860 – 1911The Science of Getting Rich turned New Thought toward prosperity and later inspired The Secret.
Henry Ford
1863 – 1947The moving assembly line and the five-dollar day created mass consumer industry.
Madam C. J. Walker
1867 – 1919Built a national cosmetics company and became America's first self-made Black woman millionaire.
Napoleon Hill
1883 – 1970Think and Grow Rich carried New Thought into business self-help; his sourcing remains disputed.
W. Edwards Deming
1900 – 1993Statistical quality control rebuilt Japanese manufacturing and then global industry.
Raúl Prebisch
1901 – 1986Centre-periphery theory drove Latin American development strategy for decades.
Milton Friedman
1912 – 2006Monetarism, floating exchange rates and a generation of deregulation.
Anna J. Schwartz
1915 – 2012Co-authored the monetary history that reshaped central banking doctrine.
Paul Samuelson
1915 – 2009Mathematised economics and wrote the textbook that taught the postwar world.
Catherine Ponder
b. 1927Unity minister whose prosperity books shaped late-century abundance teaching.
Elinor Ostrom
1933 – 2012Showed communities can govern shared resources without markets or states.