BOARD OF ADVISORS
By: Bria P.
Adam Smith
Adam Smith was a Scottish philosopher and economist who wrote "The Wealth of Nations" and achieved the first comprehensive system of political economy. After toiling for 9 years, he published "An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations". Economics in 1776 were dominated by idea that a country's wealth was best measured by gold and silver. Smith proposed that a nation's wealth should be judged by the total of its production and commerce. Smith's ideas reflect on economics in light of the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, and he stated that free-market economies are the most productive and beneficial to societies.
Milton Friedman
Milton Friedman was the twentieth century’s most prominent advocate of free markets. Milton Friedman strongly opposed the views of Keynesian economists, encouraging governments to minimize their involvement in the economy by reducing taxes and ceasing inflationary policies. Friedman was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1976 and later the National Medal of Science for his development of the permanent income model of consumption and for his work on monetary history and policy. His seminal theory on consumption—that individuals spend and consume based on expectations of earnings over their lifetime, not just current income—is the precursor to modern models of consumption-savings decisions relevant for both macroeconomics and microeconomics.
Friedrich Hayek
He made fundamental contributions in political theory, psychology, and economics. In a field in which the relevance of ideas often is eclipsed by expansions on an initial theory, many of his contributions are so remarkable that people still read them more than fifty years after they were written. Many graduate economics students today, for example, study his articles from the 1930s and 1940s on economics and knowledge, deriving insights that some of their elders in the economics profession still do not totally understand. It would not be surprising if a substantial minority of economists still read and learn from his articles in the year 2050. In his book Commanding Heights, Daniel Yergin called Hayek the “preeminent” economist of the last half of the twentieth century.
John Maynard Keynes
British economist whose ideas have fundamentally affected the theory and practice of modern macroeconomics, and informed the economic policies of governments. He built on and greatly refined earlier work on the causes of business cycles, and is widely considered to be one of the founders of modern macroeconomics and the most influential economist of the 20th century. His ideas are the basis for the school of thought known as Keynesian economics.