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Ideas & Media

Journalists, publishers, scholars, teachers and preachers who shaped what Americans knew and believed.

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Milton Friedman 1912–2006Scholars & Public IntellectualsNobel Prize-winning economist whose free-market ideas profoundly influenced American economic policy.Alan Greenspan 1926–2026Scholars & Public IntellectualsChaired the Federal Reserve from 1987 to 2006 across several financial crises.Janet Yellen b. 1946Scholars & Public IntellectualsFirst woman to chair the Federal Reserve and to serve as Treasury Secretary.Daniel Kahneman 1934–2024Scholars & Public IntellectualsIsraeli-American psychologist who won the Nobel Prize for his work on behavioral economics and decision-making.Paul Volcker 1927–2019Scholars & Public IntellectualsBroke 1970s inflation as Federal Reserve chairman through sustained high interest rates.Ben Bernanke b. 1953Scholars & Public IntellectualsLed the Federal Reserve through the 2008 financial crisis and won the 2022 Nobel Prize in Economics.Paul Samuelson 1915–2009Scholars & Public IntellectualsFirst American to win the Nobel Prize in Economics, whose textbook defined the field for decades.Paul Krugman b. 1953Scholars & Public IntellectualsNobel Prize-winning economist and New York Times columnist known for his work on trade and geography.Thomas Sowell b. 1930Scholars & Public IntellectualsEconomist and social theorist at the Hoover Institution whose conservative writings span race, culture, and policy.Lawrence Summers b. 1954Scholars & Public IntellectualsEconomist, Treasury Secretary, and president of HarvardJohn Kenneth Galbraith 1908–2006Scholars & Public IntellectualsEconomist and public intellectual whose The Affluent Society critiqued American consumerism.Joseph Stiglitz b. 1943Scholars & Public IntellectualsNobel Prize-winning economist whose work on information asymmetries reshaped development economics.Robert Solow 1924–2023Scholars & Public IntellectualsMeasured economic growth and found that most of it comes from technological progress, not capital.Thorstein Veblen 1857–1929Scholars & Public IntellectualsFounded institutional economics and coined conspicuous consumption in The Theory of the Leisure Class.Amartya Sen b. 1933Scholars & Public IntellectualsIndian-American economist and Nobel laureate whose work on welfare economics and famine reshaped development.Clark Kerr 1911–2003EducationArchitect of California's 1960 Master Plan for Higher EducationHenry George 1839–1897Scholars & Public IntellectualsArgued for the single tax on land values in Progress and Poverty.Kenneth Arrow 1921–2017Scholars & Public IntellectualsEconomist whose impossibility theorem and work on general equilibrium, risk, and information reshaped modern economic theory.Herbert A. Simon 1916–2001Scholars & Public IntellectualsPolymath whose theories of bounded rationality and pioneering artificial-intelligence research transformed economics and decision science.Gary Becker 1930–2014Scholars & Public IntellectualsExtended economic analysis to family — crime and discrimination — winning the 1992 Nobel Prize.Elinor Ostrom 1933–2012Scholars & Public IntellectualsPolitical economist who showed how communities can govern shared resources without relying solely on markets or centralized states.Ronald Coase 1910–2013Scholars & Public IntellectualsDeveloped transaction-cost theory of the firm and the Coase theorem while at Chicago.Glenn Loury b. 1948Scholars & Public IntellectualsBrown University economist whose work on race, inequality, and social policy bridges left and right.Hyman Minsky 1919–1996Scholars & Public IntellectualsFormulated the financial instability hypothesis explaining how stability breeds speculative crises.