James Tobin

John Maynard Keynes, 1st Baron Keynes, CB FBA was a British economist whose ideas have profoundly affected the theory and practice of modern macroeconomics, as well as the economic policies of governments. He greatly refined earlier work on the causes of business cycles, and advocated the use of... fiscal and monetary measures to mitigate the adverse effects of economic recessions and depressions. His ideas are the basis for the school of thought known as Keynesian economics, as well as its various offshoots. In the 1930s, Keynes spearheaded a revolution in economic thinking, overturning the older ideas of neoclassical economics that held that free markets would, in the short to medium term, automatically provide full employment, as long as workers were flexible in their wage demands. Keynes instead argued that aggregate demand determined the overall level of economic activity, and that inadequate aggregate demand could lead to prolonged periods of high unemployment. Following the outbreak of World War II, Keynes's ideas concerning economic policy were adopted by leading Western economies.
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Sumner Huber Slichter was an American economist and the first Lamont University Professor at Harvard University. Slichter was considered by many to be the pre-eminent labor economist of the 1940s and 1950s. Slichter was born in Madison, Wisconsin, the son of Charles Sumner Slichter, a... mathematician and dean of the graduate school at the University of Wisconsin. He graduated from the University of Wisconsin in 1913 before earning a Ph.D. at the University of Chicago. Following stints at Cornell and Princeton, Slichter moved to Harvard in 1930. After Harvard president James Conant created university professorships - those not tied to any particular department - in 1936, Slichter was named the inaugural Lamont University Professor. He remained at Harvard through the end of his career. Slichter received an honorary degree from Harvard in 1942. A regular lecturer and contributor to magazines such as Harper's, Slichter was arguably the best-known economist in America at the peak of his career. Slichter's textbook, Modern Economic Society, was a standard introductory economics textbook in America before 1950.
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Wassily Wassilyovich Leontief , was a Russian-American economist notable for his research on how changes in one economic sector may have an effect on other sectors. Leontief won the Nobel Committee's Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1973, and three of his doctoral students have also... been awarded the prize . Wassily Leontief was born on August 5, 1905, in Munich, Germany, the son of Wassily W. Leontief and Slata Leontief . W. Leontief, Sr., belonged to a dynasty of old-believer merchants living in St. Petersburg since 1741. Genya Becker belonged to a wealthy Jewish family from Odessa. At 15 in 1921, Wassily, Jr., entered University of Leningrad in present day St. Petersburg. He earned his Learned Economist degree in 1924 at the age of 19. Leontief sided with campaigners for academic autonomy, freedom of speech and in support of Pitirim Sorokin. As a consequence, he was detained several times by the Cheka.
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