John Maynard Keynes

Arthur Cecil Pigou was an English economist. As a teacher and builder of the school of economics at the University of Cambridge he trained and influenced many Cambridge economists who went on to fill chairs of economics around the world. His work covered various fields of economics, particularly... welfare economics but also including industrial fluctuations, unemployment, public finance, index numbers, and measurement of national output. His reputation was affected adversely by influential economic writers who used his work as the basis on which to define their own opposing views. He reluctantly served on several public committees, including the Cunliffe Committee and the 1919 Royal Commission on Income tax. Arthur Cecil Pigou was born at Ryde on the Isle of Wight, the son of Clarence George Scott Pigou, an army officer, and his wife Nora Biddel Frances Sophia Lees, daughter of Sir John Lees, 3rd Baronet. He won a scholarship to Harrow School where he was in Newlands House and became the first modern head of school. The school's economics society is named The Pigou Society in his honour.
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Alfred Marshall was one of the most influential economists of his time. His book, Principles of Economics , was the dominant economic textbook in England for many years. It brings the ideas of supply and demand, marginal utility, and costs of production into a coherent whole. He is known as one of... the founders of economics. Marshall was born in Clapham, England, July 26, 1842. His father was a bank cashier and a devout Evangelical. Marshall grew up in the London suburb of Clapham and was educated at the Merchant Taylors' School, Northwood and St John's College, Cambridge, where he demonstrated an aptitude in mathematics, achieving the rank of Second Wrangler in the 1865 Cambridge Mathematical Tripos. Marshall experienced a mental crisis that led him to abandon physics and switch to philosophy. He began with metaphysics, specifically "the philosophical foundation of knowledge, especially in relation to theology.".
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Adam Smith was a Scottish social philosopher and a pioneer of political economy. One of the key figures of the Scottish Enlightenment, Smith is the author of The Principles Which Lead and Direct Philosophical Enquiries, Illustrated by the History of Astronomy, prior to 1758, The Theory of Moral... Sentiments, 1759, and An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, 1776. The latter, usually abbreviated as The Wealth of Nations, is considered his magnum opus and the first modern work of economics. It earned him an enormous reputation and would become one of the most influential works ever published. Smith is widely cited as the father of modern economics and capitalism and is still among the most influential thinkers in the field of economics today. In 2009, Smith was named among the 'Greatest Scots' of all time, in a vote run by Scottish television channel STV. Smith studied social philosophy at the University of Glasgow and at Balliol College in the University of Oxford, where he was one of the first students to benefit from scholarships set up by his fellow Glaswegian John Snell.
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David Ricardo was an English political economist, often credited with systematising economics, and was one of the most influential of the classical economists, along with Thomas Malthus, Adam Smith, and John Stuart Mill. He was also a member of Parliament, businessman, financier and speculator,... who amassed a considerable personal fortune. Perhaps his most important contribution was the law of comparative advantage, a fundamental argument in favour of free trade among countries and of specialisation among individuals. Ricardo argued that there is mutual benefit from trade even if one party is more productive in every possible area than its trading counterpart , as long as each concentrates on the activities where it has a relative productivity advantage. Born in London, England, Ricardo was the third of 17 children of a Sephardic Jewish family of Portuguese origin who had recently relocated from the Dutch Republic. His father was a successful stockbroker.
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Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein was an Austrian-British philosopher who worked primarily in logic, the philosophy of mathematics, the philosophy of... mind, and the philosophy of language. He was professor in philosophy at the University of Cambridge from 1939 until 1947. In his lifetime, he published just one book review, one article, a children's dictionary, and the 75-page Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus . In 1999, his posthumously published Philosophical Investigations was ranked as the most important book of 20th-century philosophy, standing out as "the one crossover masterpiece in twentieth-century philosophy, appealing across diverse specializations and philosophical orientations". Bertrand Russell described him as "the most perfect example I have ever known of genius as traditionally conceived, passionate, profound, intense, and dominating". Born in Vienna into one of Europe's wealthiest families, he gave away his entire inheritance. Three of his brothers committed suicide, with Ludwig contemplating it too.
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Friedrich August Hayek CH , born in Austria-Hungary as Friedrich August von Hayek, was an economist and philosopher best known for his defense of... classical liberalism. In 1974, Hayek shared the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his "pioneering work in the theory of money and economic fluctuations and penetrating analysis of the interdependence of economic, social and institutional phenomena." He considered the efficient allocation of capital to be the most important factor leading to sustainable and optimal GDP growth, and warned of harms from monetary authority manipulation of interest rates. Interest rates should be set naturally by equilibrium between consumption of goods or capital stock. Hayek is considered to be a major economist and political philosopher of the twentieth century. Along with his mentor Ludwig von Mises, he was an important contributor to the Austrian school of economic thought.
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Sir Ronald Aylmer Fisher FRS was an English statistician, evolutionary biologist, eugenicist and geneticist. Among other things, Fisher is well... known for his contributions to statistics by creating Fisher's exact test and Fisher's equation. Anders Hald called him "a genius who almost single-handedly created the foundations for modern statistical science" while Richard Dawkins named him "the greatest biologist since Darwin". Fisher was born in East Finchley in London, England, to George and Katie Fisher. His father was a successful fine arts dealer. He had a happy childhood, being doted on by three older sisters, an older brother, and his mother, who died when Fisher was 14. His father lost his business in several ill-considered transactions only 18 months later, according to the biography by Fisher's daughter, Joan. Joan Fisher's biography is the main source of information on her father's early life; it was published under her married name and with the statistical advice of her husband, George E. P. Box.
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