Chapter 16
Ten (or so) Famous
Economists
So many brilliant
minds have gone into economics and made huge contributions that when I was
writing
Economics for Dummies,
I couldn't come up with a clear list of exactly who were the ten best
economists who ever lived. That, of course, was bad since every For
Dummies book is supposed to end with a few chapters of Ten Best lists.
The best I could do was a list of the top dozen
economists--hence the odd name for this chapter.
This website, though, is handy since I can provide
lots of links to the many amazing economists who didn't make my (rather
arbitrary) top 12.
I honestly
feel that biographies are among the best, most compelling, and most fun ways
to really build up some depth in a subject. So do click around through
some of these links. You'll find that very rarely did any of these
guys lead boring lives. In fact, one of the biggest economists of the
twentieth century as a young man dedicated himself to three things: Becoming
the best horseman, the best lover, and the best economist in Vienna (at a
time when Vienna was a top world intellectual capital and the sort of place
where you could seduce lots of noble ladies from the Austro-Hungarian
empire). He succeeded at all three.
Here is the
official biographies pages kept by the Bank
of Sweden, which chooses each year's Nobel Prize winner in economics.
These bios are great, and you can also read the full text of every
acceptance lecture. This is very convenient since these mandatory
lectures are usually written with the layman in mind--something all too
uncommon among economists. (Just so you know, the Nobel Prize in
Economics has only been handed out since 1969.)
The Wikipedia.com on-line encyclopedia has a very nice
collection of short bios of leading economists
here.
The Concise Encyclopedia of Economists, kept by
the good folks over at The Library of Economics and Liberty also has an
excellent collection of biographies of leading economists
here.
And definitely check out this list of great,
short autobiographies of famous economists that is run by Ralph Byrns.
