field list
A course in Economics
The people who built economics as we practise it, in the order they arrived.
Ibn Khaldun
1332 – 1406Founded sociology and economic history with the Muqaddimah.
Adam Smith
1723 – 1790The Wealth of Nations founded economics as a discipline.
Alexander Hamilton
1755 – 1804Designed American public credit, the national bank and industrial policy.
David Ricardo
1772 – 1823Comparative advantage and rent theory — still the core argument for trade.
Wallace Wattles
1860 – 1911The Science of Getting Rich turned New Thought toward prosperity and later inspired The Secret.
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.
Napoleon Hill
1883 – 1970Think and Grow Rich carried New Thought into business self-help; his sourcing remains disputed.
B. R. Ambedkar
1891 – 1956Principal architect of India's constitution and Dalit emancipation.
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.
Raúl Prebisch
1901 – 1986Centre-periphery theory drove Latin American development strategy for decades.
John von Neumann
1903 – 1957Computer architecture, game theory, quantum foundations.
Joan Robinson
1903 – 1983Imperfect competition and a lifelong challenge to orthodox capital theory.
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.
Lee Kuan Yew
1923 – 2015Turned a port city into a high-income state — the developmental-state exemplar and its critics.
Catherine Ponder
b. 1927Unity minister whose prosperity books shaped late-century abundance teaching.
Amartya Sen
b. 1933Recast famine as a failure of entitlement, not food supply.
Elinor Ostrom
1933 – 2012Showed communities can govern shared resources without markets or states.
Daniel Kahneman
1934 – 2024Prospect theory founded behavioural economics and modern policy 'nudging'.
Ellen Johnson Sirleaf
b. 1938Africa's first elected woman head of state; rebuilt post-war Liberia.
Muhammad Yunus
b. 1940Lent $27 of his own money and started a global industry for the poor.
Ha-Joon Chang
b. 1963Kicking Away the Ladder documented how rich states industrialised behind protection.
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.