Living Economists
Too much of the A-level syllabus in Economics is dedicated to ideas from dead economists. Whilst of course it is important to learn the history of the discipline, ironically Economic History itself has been removed from the syllabus over time such that there is now a mere nod to it at best. This page is about trying to get new young economists to understand about today’s economists, about their ideas today, and thus the future of the discipline.
There is a specific section on this site discussing the role of Women in Economics more widely.
You can also see an excellent article at Fortune.com on celebrating Black Economists specifically, an article written specifically with the Juneteenth celebrations in mind entitled ‘19 Black economists to celebrate and know, this Juneteenth and beyond’.
.You can see prominent Dead Economists at the bottom of this page too - still having made important and notable contributions to the field, and it is important to know upon which giants’ shoulders today’s economists are standing.
Diane Coyle
Author of GDP: A Brief but Affectionate History; blog is here. Enlightenment Economics. Guardian articles here.
Sendhil Mullainathan
Author of Scarcity: why having too little means so much, Sendhil’s areas of interest includes the use of behavioural science to help solve social problems. You can watch his TED talk for an insight into his approach here.
Minouche Shafik
Ex-Deputy Governor of the Bank of England and current Director of the London School of Economics.
Here she is giving a lecture at the Oxford Union. Her work on social mobility, education, the social contract is of acute importance in the current world landscape.
Carmen Reinhart
Daniel Kahneman
Paul Krugman
Jeffrey Sachs
Arthur Lewis
Anna Schwartz
Christina Romer
Joan Robinson
F. A. Hayek
J.M. Keynes
Alfred Marshall
Kate Raworth
known for her work (and book) on the 'Doughnut Economics', which builds an economic model that balances between essential human needs and planetary boundaries…If you are interested in the environment, sustainability, a new mode of thinking in Economics, she’s your economist. Visit her website here.
@KateRaworth on twitter
Esther Duflo
2019 Nobel prize winner, co-author of Poor Economics (a must-read for anyone interested in Development Economics, anti-poverty policies etc).
Silvana Tenreyro
External member of the Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Committee, Professor of Economics at the LSE, her main area of interest and expertise in macroeconomic monetary policy. Here is a speech she gave on the topic of monetary policy in a pandemic.
Joseph Stiglitz
John van Reenen
Paul Samuelson
George Akerlof
Akerlof won a Nobel Prize with Spence and Stiglitz. One of his key contributions to the field was , "The Market for Lemons: Quality Uncertainty and the Market Mechanism", in which he identified certain severe problems that afflict markets characterised by asymmetric information. I would recommend all budding economists to understand his model and the implications it has for health markets, insurance markets, financial markets in LEDCs. In Efficiency Wage Models of the Labor Market, Akerlof and coauthor/former Fed Chair Janet Yellen propose reasons for why firms should pay above the current market wage rate (the efficiency wage hypothesis).
Ernst Fehr
James Buchanan
Hernando de Soto
Barbara Bergmann
Mariana Mazzucato
Amartya Sen
Milton Friedman
Linda Yueh
Author of The Great Economists: How Their Ideas Can Help Us Today, which I would highly recommend any budding macroeconomist.
@LindaYueh on twitter.
Elinor Ostrom
I highly recommend Elinor Ostrom for those of you who want to think beyond the constraints of the A-level framework. First female Nobel prize winner in 2009, for her "analysis of economic governance, especially the commons". The Marginal Revolution University give a nice introduction to her main ideas here. Here 2012 Hayek lecture builds on these ideas of market failure and regulation here.
Al Roth
Richard Layard
Tim Beesley
Ronald Coase
Thomas Sowell
Gita Gopinath
Kenneth Rogoff
Jean Tirole
Wendy Carlin
Gary Becker
James Tobin
John Nash
Adam Smith
Ludwig von Mises