Economists — Influence Network

Founded economics as a discipline; The Wealth of Nations turned the market's 'invisible hand' into a first principle.

• → Influenced: David Ricardo
• → Influenced: Thomas Malthus
• → Influenced: Karl Marx
• → Influenced: John Stuart Mill
• → Influenced: Alfred Marshall

Turned classical economics into rigorous deduction with comparative advantage, rent, and the labour theory of value.

• ← Influenced: Adam Smith
• → Reacted against: Thomas Malthus
• → Influenced: John Stuart Mill
• → Influenced: Karl Marx

Argued that population outruns food supply, earning economics its nickname 'the dismal science'.

• ← Influenced: Adam Smith
• ← Reacted against: David Ricardo

Synthesised and humanised classical economics, blending Ricardo's rigour with a liberal concern for distribution.

• ← Influenced: David Ricardo
• ← Influenced: Adam Smith
• → Influenced: Alfred Marshall

Took Ricardo's labour theory to a revolutionary conclusion: profit is surplus value extracted from labour.

• ← Influenced: Adam Smith
• ← Influenced: David Ricardo
• → Influenced: Thorstein Veblen
• → Reacted against: John Maynard Keynes

Built the first mathematical model of general equilibrium, where all markets clear at once.

• ← Influenced: Carl Menger
• → Influenced: Kenneth Arrow
• → Influenced: John Nash

Fused marginal utility with cost of production into the supply-and-demand diagram at the heart of the textbook.

• ← Influenced: Adam Smith
• ← Influenced: Carl Menger
• → Influenced: John Maynard Keynes
• → Influenced: Paul Samuelson
• → Influenced: Milton Friedman
• ← Influenced: John Stuart Mill

Proved the general-equilibrium existence theorem and the impossibility theorem on collective choice.

• ← Influenced: Léon Walras
• → Influenced: John Nash
• → Influenced: Amartya Sen
• ← Influenced: Paul Samuelson

His equilibrium concept let economists model strategic interaction, remaking microeconomics from the 1980s on.

• ← Influenced: Léon Walras
• ← Influenced: Kenneth Arrow
• → Reacted against: Daniel Kahneman

Rewrote economics around aggregate demand and the state's role in stabilising it, founding modern macroeconomics.

• ← Influenced: Alfred Marshall
• ← Reacted against: Karl Marx
• → Influenced: Paul Samuelson
• → Reacted against: Milton Friedman
• → Reacted against: Friedrich Hayek

Mathematised economics and forged the neoclassical synthesis that fused Keynesian macro with neoclassical micro.

• ← Influenced: John Maynard Keynes
• ← Influenced: Alfred Marshall
• → Influenced: Kenneth Arrow

Co-founder of the marginal revolution and the Austrian school; value derives from subjective marginal utility.

• → Influenced: Alfred Marshall
• → Influenced: Léon Walras
• → Influenced: Joseph Schumpeter
• → Influenced: Friedrich Hayek

Placed the entrepreneur and 'creative destruction' at the centre of capitalist growth and change.

• ← Influenced: Carl Menger
• → Influenced: Friedrich Hayek

Argued that prices convey dispersed knowledge no planner can gather, making markets a form of discovery.

• ← Influenced: Carl Menger
• → Influenced: Milton Friedman
• ← Reacted against: John Maynard Keynes
• ← Influenced: Joseph Schumpeter

Leader of the Chicago school and monetarism: 'inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon.'

• ← Reacted against: John Maynard Keynes
• ← Influenced: Friedrich Hayek
• ← Influenced: Alfred Marshall
• → Reacted against: Daniel Kahneman

Founder of institutional economics; his 'conspicuous consumption' challenged the rational optimising agent.

• ← Influenced: Karl Marx
• → Influenced: Daniel Kahneman

Reconnected economics with ethics through welfare economics and the capabilities approach to development.

• ← Influenced: Kenneth Arrow

A psychologist who won the economics Nobel; his work on bias and heuristics founded behavioural economics.

• ← Influenced: Thorstein Veblen
• ← Reacted against: Milton Friedman
• ← Reacted against: John Nash