JEWS IN ECONOMICS
Apart from Adam Smith, the greatest of the classical economists was David Ricardo, who is regarded by many to be the founder of economics as a science involving analytical modeling and mathematical analysis. According to John Maynard Keynes, "Ricardo's mind was the greatest that ever addressed itself to economics."1 Ricardo formulated the famous laws of comparative advantage and of diminishing returns (the latter also discovered by Malthus). Moreover, Ricardo's principled arguments for non-inflationary monetary policy and for free trade were instrumental in gaining passage of the Peel Act and repeal of the Corn Laws in England, which played a major role in unleashing the full potential of the industrial revolution. Other major Jewish figures in the history of economic thought include Karl Marx, Ludwig von Mises, Paul Samuelson, Kenneth Arrow, Milton Friedman, Gary Becker, and John von Neumann.2 Milton Friedman is widely considered to have been the most influential economist of the second half of the twentieth century and, along with Keynes, one of the two most influential of the twentieth century as a whole.3
Jews currently constitute over 40% of the membership of the economic sciences division of the US National Academy of Sciences. Contained below are links to lists of prominent Jewish economists and of the Jewish recipients of several of the highest honors in the field.
- Jewish Economists
- Jewish Recipients of the Nobel Prize in Economics (40% of recipients)
- Jewish Recipients of the John Bates Clark Medal in Economics (50% of recipients)
- Jewish Recipients of the Erwin Plein Nemmers Prize in Economics (50% of recipients)
- Jewish Recipients of the John von Neumann Award in the Exact Social Sciences (40% of recipients)
- Jewish Membership in the Hall of Fame of the International Federation of Operations Research Societies (52% of members)
NOTES
1. Quoted in The Making of Modern Economics: The Lives and Ideas of the Great Thinkers, by Mark Skousen (M. E. Sharpe, NY, 2001, p.95).
2. In addition to inventing mathematical game theory, von Neumann is considered to be one of the three inventors (along with the Jewish mathematicians George B. Dantzig and Leonid Kantorovich) of linear programming. This technique is probably the single most widely employed mathematical method in the world today. The late Eugene Lawler of Berkeley characterized linear programming as follows: "It is used to allocate resources, plan production, schedule workers, plan investment portfolios, and formulate marketing (and military) strategies. The versatility and economic impact of linear programming in today's industrial world is truly awesome"; see http://www.stanford.edu/group/SOL/dantzig.html. For more on von Neumann's contributions to economics, see http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/bios/Neumann.html.
3. According to The Economist (23 November 2006), e.g., Friedman was "the most influential economist of the second half of the 20th century (Keynes died in 1946), possibly of all of it."
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