Jean Baptiste Say 1767-1832 Jean Baptiste Say was a French economist who originally intended to pursue a business career. However, reading Smith’s Wealth of Nations inspired him to take up political economy. He taught at the Conservatoire des Arts et Meitiers, and the College de France. His most important works are Traite’ d’economique politique (1803) […]

Joseph Mois Schumpeter 1883-1950 Joseph Mois Schumpeter was an Austrian economist, educated in Vienna. He taught at Czernowitz, Graz and Bonn. In 1932, he moved to Harvard where he taught until his death. Among Schumpeter’s writings are Theory of Economic Development (1912), Business Cycles (1939), Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (1942), and History of Economic Analysis […]

Tibor Scitovsky 1910-2002 Tibor Scitovsky was born in Hungary, he was educated at the Universities of Budapest, Cambridge, Paris, and at the LSE. He taught at Stanford, California, Berkeley and Yale. Scitovsky contributed to the theory of prices and welfare economics. His most famous book Welfare and Competition synthesizes these two aspects of economic analysis. […]

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 […]