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Category
Era
11 figures
Adam Smith
1723 – 1790The Wealth of Nations founded economics as a discipline.
David Ricardo
1772 – 1823Comparative advantage and rent theory — still the core argument for trade.
John Maynard Keynes
1883 – 1946Argued governments should spend in a slump — and every modern state now does.
Joseph Schumpeter
1883 – 1950Creative destruction — the standard account of how innovation reshapes industries.
Gunnar Myrdal
1898 – 1987Cumulative causation and the economics of racial inequality in America.
Friedrich Hayek
1899 – 1992Prices as information; the intellectual engine of late-century market liberalism.
John von Neumann
1903 – 1957Computer architecture, game theory, quantum foundations.
Joan Robinson
1903 – 1983Imperfect competition and a lifelong challenge to orthodox capital theory.
Mariana Mazzucato
b. 1968The Entrepreneurial State reframed public investment as the source of major innovation.
Thomas Piketty
b. 1971Capital in the Twenty-First Century put wealth inequality data at the centre of policy.
Esther Duflo
b. 1972Randomised trials made development aid an experimental science.