Milton Friedman

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 Karl Raimund Popper, CH FRS FBA was an Austro-British philosopher and professor at the London School of Economics. He is generally regarded as one of the greatest philosophers of science of the 20th century; he also wrote extensively on social and political philosophy. Popper is known for his... attempt to repudiate the classical observationalist/inductivist form of scientific method in favour of empirical falsification. He is also known for his opposition to the classical justificationist account of knowledge which he replaced with critical rationalism, "the first non justificational philosophy of criticism in the history of philosophy". In political discourse, he is known for his vigorous defence of liberal democracy and the principles of social criticism that he came to believe made a flourishing "open society" possible. Karl Popper was born in Vienna in 1902, to upper middle-class parents. All of Karl Popper's grandparents were Jewish, but the Popper family converted to Lutheranism before Karl was born.
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Ludwig Heinrich Edler von Mises was a philosopher, Austrian School economist, and classical liberal. He became a prominent figure in the Austrian School of economic thought and is best known for his work on praxeology. Fearing a Nazi takeover of Europe, Mises emigrated to the United States in... 1940. Mises had a significant influence on the libertarian movement in the United States in the mid-20th century. Ludwig von Mises was born to wealthy Jewish parents in the city of Lemberg, in Galicia, Austria-Hungary . The family of his father Arthur Edler von Mises had been elevated to the Austrian nobility in the 19th century, and was involved in building and financing railroads. Ludwig's mother, Adele , was a niece of Dr. Joachim Landau, a Liberal Party deputy to the Austrian Parliament. Arthur was stationed there as a construction engineer with Czernowitz railway company. At the age of twelve Ludwig spoke fluent Yiddish, German, Polish, and French, read Latin, and could understand Ukrainian.
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Joseph Alois Schumpeter was an Austrian-Hungarian-American economist and political scientist. He popularized the term "creative destruction" in economics. Born in Třešť, Habsburg Moravia in 1883 to Catholic ethnic German parents. His father owned a factory, but he died when Joseph... was only four years old. In 1893, Joseph and his mother moved to Vienna. Schumpeter began his career studying law at the University of Vienna under the Austrian capital theorist Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk, taking his PhD in 1906. In 1909, after some study trips, he became a professor of economics and government at the University of Czernowitz. In 1911 he joined the University of Graz, where he remained until World War I. In 1919, he served briefly as the Austrian Minister of Finance, with some success, and in 1920–1924, as president of the private Biedermann Bank. That bank, along with a great part of that regional economy, collapsed in 1924 leaving Schumpeter bankrupt. From 1925 to 1932, he held a chair at the University of Bonn, Germany. He lectured at Harvard in 1927–1928 and 1930.
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