Adam Smith 1723-1790 Adam Smith was a Scottish political economist and philosopher Educated in Glasgow and at Balliol, Oxford, Smith later became Professor of Moral Philosophy at Glasgow University and frequently lectured at Edinburgh. The text of some of these lectures provided the base for his hook The Wealth of Nations, published in 1776. This […]

Nassau William Senior 1790-1864 Nassau William Senior was a British economist, educated at Oxford where he twice held the post of Drummond Professor of Political Economy. Senior’s most important book was Outline of the Science of Political Economy (1836). He is best remembered for his abstinence theory of interest in which interest is a payment, […]

Piero Staffa 1898-1983 Piero Staffa was an Italian economist, educated at the University of Turin. He later became a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, Emeritus Reader in Economics. His article The Low of Returns under Competitive Conditions printed in the Economic Journal in 1926, provided the groundwork for later theories of imperfect competition. Staffa’s other […]

Richard Abel Musgrave 1910-2007 Richard Abel Musgrave is a German-born economist, who emigrated to the US before the Second World War. Educated at Heidelberg and Harvard, Professor Musgrave has served as a consultant for several major organizations including the Federal Reserve, and has taught at Michigan, Princeton and Harvard universities. He has been an influential […]

Karl Gunnar Myrdal 1898-1987 Karl Gunnar Myrdal was a Swedish economist and social scientist. Myrdal was awarded his doctorate in 1927 from Stockholm University, won a Rockefeller scholarship to the US, and was Professor at Stockholm from 1935 to 1950 and again from 1960. He has worked for the Swedish government, the United Nations and […]

Bertil Ohlin 1889-1979 Bertil Ohlin was Swedish economist and politician. A brilliant student, Ohlin received his doctorate from Stockholm University in 1919 and was appointed Professor at Copenhagen when only twenty-five. From 1944 until 1967 he led the Swedish Liberal Party. Ohlin shared the 1977 Nobel Prize with James Meade for ‘pathbreaking contributions to the […]

Arthur Melvin Okun 1928-1980 Arthur Okun was an American economist. Okun taught at Yale University before moving to Washington in 1961. He acted in various capacities to successive administrations, becoming chairman of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers in 1968. His name is associated with the ‘law’ propounded in his 1962 paper, Potential GNP, its […]

Vilfredo F. D. Pareto 1848-1923 Vilfredo F. D. Pareto was an Italian who came to economics after twenty years as an engineer. Pareto’s application of mathematical and statistical techniques to his new subject attracted the attention of Walras, whom he succeeded as Professor of Economics at Lausanne in 1892. In the Cours d’economie Politique (1896). […]

Arthur Cecil Pigou 1877-1959 Arthur Cecil Pigou was an British academic, economist. Pigou was a student under Marshall at Cambridge and succeeded him as Professor of Political Economy in 1890, a post he held until retirement in 1944. The leading classical economist of the two decades before the Second World War, he wrote widely and […]

Alban W. H. Phillips 1914-1975 Alban W. H. Phillips was an New Zealand-born economist. Phillips trained initially as an electrical engineer. The legacy of which is apparent in his economic work. He taught at the London School of Economics from 1950 to 1967, being appointed Professor in 1958. In 1967 he joined the Australian National […]