ECONOMIC Systems
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Robert L. Heilbroner (March 24, 1919 - January 4, 2005) was an American economist and historian of economic thought.
He was born in 1919 in New York to a wealthy German Jewish family. His father, Louis Heilbroner, was a businessman who founded the men's clothing retailer Weber & Heilbroner.
Robert graduated from Harvard University in 1940 with a Summa cum laude degree in philosophy, government, and economics. During World War II, he served in the United States Army and worked at the Office of Price Administration under John Kenneth Galbraith, the most famous and controversial institutional economist.
Published in 1953, "The Worldly Philosophers" sold nearly four million copies, making it the second best-selling economics text of all time (the first being Paul Samuelson's economics, a university textbook).
Werner Sombart (January 19, 1863 - May 18, 1941) was a German historical economist who incorporated Marxist principles and Nazi theories into his writings on capitalism.
The son of a wealthy landowner and politician, Sombart was educated in Berlin, Pisa, and Rome, earning his doctorate from the University of Berlin in 1888. He taught at the University of Breslau (1890-1906) and later returned to teach at the University of Berlin.
"The Jew and Modern Capitalism" (1911) rejects Max Weber's theory of the Protestant ethic, arguing that Jews introduced the spirit of capitalism to Northern Europe after being dispersed by the Inquisition.
At that time, he regarded Jews as a positive economic force, but his later writings reflect the antisemitism of the Nazi regime.
János Kornai (January 21, 1928 - October 18, 2021), Hungarian planning economist. Between the 1960s and 1980s, János Kornai was perhaps one of the most well-known economists of the Eastern bloc.
He was the son of a well-to-do Hungarian bourgeois family, whose destiny was derailed during the Nazi occupation of Hungary.
After leaving the newspaper and enrolling at the Institute of Economics at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in Budapest, János Kornai remained associated with this institution for decades, serving as a professor, researcher, and eventually, from 1967, as director. Kornai's thesis from 1957 was one of the first books to detail the problems of socialist central planning.
Kornai helped introduce modern mathematical programming methods into socialist planning in the 1960s, most famously the "two-level" planning (Kornai-Liptak), breaking down a large linear programming problem into sub-problems. Kornai was also an early advocate for the introduction of decentralization and the use of market forces in socialist economies.
Since 1986, Kornai was appointed professor of economics at Harvard. In the post-communist era, Kornai transitioned into a specialist in post-socialist transition economies. He died on October 18, 2021.
Fritjof Capra is a physicist and systems theorist known for exploring the philosophical and social implications of contemporary science. He is the founder of the Center for Ecoliteracy in Berkeley, California, and a fellow of Schumacher College in the United Kingdom.
Capra is the author of several popular books, including "The Tao of Physics," "The Web of Life," and "The Science of Leonardo."
Capra was the founding director (1995–2020) of the Berkeley-based Center for Ecoliteracy, which is dedicated to advancing ecological and systems thinking in primary and secondary education, and serves on the faculty of the Amana-Key Executive Education Program in São Paulo, Brazil.
He was a fellow of Schumacher College,an international center for ecological studies in the United Kingdom, and serves on the Board of Earth Charter International.
Walter Eucken (January 17, 1891 - March 20, 1950), the German economist and father of ordoliberalism. His name is closely linked to the development of the "social market economy."
Ordoliberalism is a German variant of neoliberalism that emphasizes the need for the state to ensure that the free market produces results close to its theoretical potential. Walter Eucken is the son of the philosopher Rudolf Eucken, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1908.
Walter Eucken received his doctorate in 1914, shortly before he was required to serve as an officer on the front lines of World War I. In 1927, he moved to Freiburg, where he was a professor of economics until his death. During the Nazi period, Eucken was associated with the resistance movement
He died on March 20, 1950, during a series of lectures at the London School of Economics, United Kingdom.
The Walter Eucken Institute was founded four years after his death.
Alfred Marshall (July 26, 1842 - July 13, 1924) was an English economist, representative of neoclassicism.
Alfred Marshall was born in England in 1842 and is the one who applied marginal analysis in the clearest way; he is the founder of the marginal tradition that dominates microeconomic science today.
Once he chose economics as his calling, Marshall dedicated himself completely to it, fighting for economics to be treated as a separate field from history and moral sciences. In this sense, Marshall is the one who formulated concepts such as: marginal utility, the law of demand, the law of supply, marginal cost, and elasticity.
Marshall showed economists that they must combine theory with practice, for a well-developed theoretical model may be convincing on paper but is useless when applied in practice. First published in 1890, his "Principles" have remained relevant for so long that modern economics textbooks still rely on his work.