Who is the best economist?

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The only thing is that this destroys potential wealth creation though. The more people there are the more wealth that can be created from existing wealth. Not only that but with this type of argument you could also argue that every general is a good psychologist as well. The simple fact of the matter is that this does not show a person to necessarily have a broad understanding of the field or to do anything meaningfully to it. Genghis Khan's logistics has more to do with management than it does with economics as he didn't have to do many micro-economic calculations. The best way to find the best economist is to look at the field and pick the person with better ideas. I know that Genghis Khan was devil's advocating as the man was very clearly not an economist. I am not sure that I necessarily agree with your last statement though because just about any mind with clear ideas can become a very notable economist by writing down crap. I'd sooner say that nobody knows it because of the subjective evaluations of people and the fact that nobody has created a perfect theory on economic phenomena.

I love a good debate.

Potential wealth creation is nothing if the wealth isn't allocated efficiently. There is a point where every extra unit/person just becomes a burden, I believe this is called the law of diminishing returns. Currently, I think the world is at that point.

Genghis Khan was not just a general, he was a king, and he obviously had some natural mental gifts and an intuitive understanding of concepts that weren't as widely circulated in his time. I didn't say anything about all generals being like this.

If we knew the best way to find the best economist we wouldn't have this question in the first place.

There are so many branches of economic theory and so many different notable economists it would take a ridiculous amount of research to properly identify who is the "best" and even then it would be too subjective to end debate (the reason this is such a good topic for debate).

I would like to see some of my own socioeconomic ideas have widespread adoption. Even if I became famous for developing them, I would have to admit that I stand on the shoulders of giants in not just the domain of economics but the domains of psychology, sociology, and political science.

I think Adam Smith is the most famous economist, although I could be wrong.

The only thing is that the world back then wasn't operating under negative returns per person. People still did help create growth. Khan didn't do much to really make wealth allocation efficient. One might argue that by gathering the good artisans he created more inefficiency to only aggrandize himself.
That is true. I am not arguing that all generals are like this, however, those talents do not make him an economist.

It is subjective, and it doesn't take a lot of research. Many of the more notable economists pop up due to the number of good contributions made. Really though, the entire point of this question is subjectivity.


Right, well, I think we all would like to have our ideas rise to popularity.

Adam Smith is most likely the most famous. However, is Adam Smith the best?

Well, I guess it depends on how you define "economist." I mean, John Nash won the Nobel Prize in Economics for developing an equation that some math nerd used in economics----Nash himself didn't set out to apply it to the field of economic science. I would take a more philosophical approach, and say that every person is an economist, just without that degree telling the world that it is so, which means that the average joe has an intuitive grasp of "economics," but that economists make the field so unbelievably incomprehensible and confusing and COUNTERINTUITIVE that it makes everyone outside the field look upon them with awe. So I would say yes, Genghis Khan is an economist.

If, however, you are looking for someone who writes books or papers on economic science, and has a degree or two after his name, then no, Genghis Khan is not technically an "economist." I don't know who I would name is the greatest economist. I am beginning to think that maybe Smith was wrong and really kind of set the study of economics back a few steps. (Heretical, I know.) Also, you would need to specify if by great you mean he has lots of influence in the world, in which case Marx definitely qualifies even though I think he is a grossly incompetent economist, not to mention a complete idiot. (My opinion.)

Also, are you excluding people in the fields of finance? Because I think that a lot of what is being passed as economics these days is actually just financial analysis disguised as something different, and Mandelbrot is utilizing his fractal geometry to minimize risk in financial (i.e. market) analysis.

Personally, I think there are too many people, too many ideas that build off each other for there to be one clear "best" economist.

I would define an economist as someone who studies economic things. Nash found an equation that could be applied to economics, he did not study the economics himself and most would only call him a mathematician. You are right that all human beings can be described as economists on some level, however, most of them cannot be considered great economists though because of their lack of full comprehension and rigor and they definitely tend not to have good ideas in such a field. I would not really call Genghis Khan an economist though as that was not his focus. Definitely not a great economist, I did mention that he did know some good things but really the entire suggestion is more of a joke or thing of that manner.

I do mean something mostly subjective in defining a great economist. However, this person must be more of a serious admission to this than one made more jokingly. GoatOnFire did not suggest Genghis Khan in any serious manner as I suspected from the very start. "I said Genghis Khan mostly being the devil's advocate anyway." This means that you can claim Marx was a great economist, or Adam Smith, or ignore both and pick someone else.

Given that finance is a part of economics and that the efficient market hypothesis and that of behavioral markets are economic theories on some level. I would claim that you could make a decent argument for a finance expert to be an economist.

There are quite a few different economists and thinkers and all of that and too many to come to an objective claim, however, one can come to a relatively subjective one based upon the data of the discoveries of a person. I think that thus far we only have a few candidates: Hans Hermann Hoppe, who is noted for writing about economics, Adam Smith(taking a comment earlier on fame as an admission of greatest), and Genghis Khan(which was more of a devil's advocating measure than anything else). Really though, we all have the thinker and the theorist that we tend to like the best.

It is debatable that the world wasn't operating under negative returns even back then. The methods for producing goods were so much slower back then that they may still have been working under negative returns per person. Theoretically the human race reproduces until it passes this point so it is always on the cusp. Self-aggrandizement is the cornerstone of capitalism, that puts Genghis Khan well ahead of his time.



I'm not sure if there are any professional economists that have a full comprehension of economics. There is just so much.



Just because I was playing the devil's advocate doesn't mean that I was necessarily joking. I play the devil's advocate to start the fire. Genghis Khan is perfect as a firestarter for this debate because he would be very controversial to proclaim as the greatest economist, but the argument can be made. If I was joking I would have said something like "John Galbraith was the greatest economist because he was the greatest in stature."

Adam Smith definitely was a very influential economist. His theories were mostly sound, too. Some of his theories about international trade have proven to be a little off but all considered he did do a very good job with the Wealth of Nations.

There were methods for producing good that are slow, however, back in those days there were very little safety nets or anything of that nature so there would be no need for war to end lives as those deaths would have come somewhat naturally. I claim that there were no negative returns because of the need for more people in order for various tasks such as defense, agriculture, and other methods of production and acquisition of more resources. The world was quite resource rich. Individual action is the cornerstone of capitalism, self-aggrandizement is simply an action between actors but is not a necessity nor is it a cornerstone.

I do not mean the absolute general theory of all economic action but rather a broad understanding of the economy. There is a lot, and I do admit that, but Genghis Khan did not see economies of actors so much as he saw soldiers on the battlefield. In fact, I would argue that most generals are not actually great economists in all seriousness. A good number of them seem to see the world as zero-sum relations where as economists stress mutual gain.

Ah, but you weren't being entirely serious either. You selected a man because of motives that were not based entirely on his economic ideas. I will not claim that you were absolutely joking, however, you were not acting in absolute seriousness either. Your ideas were based more upon ideas of what you could get away with more so than what is the best economist.

I dunno, where was he off on international trade? Was it merely a matter of simplicity? Or do you consider the entire free trade model wrong? I can vigorously defend free trade with comments by noted economists on this element of the economy. I mean, free trade is one of the most defended things by the economics profession with super duper majorities claiming that we should have free trade and that we shouldn't mind outsourcing.

Capitalism is designed to be competitive so naturally the objective for the members of the capitalist society is to self-aggrandize. As Winston Churchill said "capitalism is a terrible system, but it's better than all of the others out there."



I don't have very much time today so I'll have to give a simplified version of the mistake Adam Smith made in the Wealth of Nations. The mistake he made was that he said that if there are two countries producing two goods and one country is more efficient at makig both goods than the other country, then the more efficient country shouldn't bother to trade with the inefficient country because that would be inefficient. That is not true. If those are the only two countries in the world they can both still benefit from trade. Each country should specialize in the good that they have the lowest opportunity cost in. By this I mean how much of the other good(s) they give up to make 1 unit of a good.

I don't have the time to go very in depth with the math, if someone else knows it, feel free to provide a better more in depth explanation.

Country A can make 50 Xs an hour or 40 Ys an hour.
Country B can make 30 Xs an hour or 20 Ys an hour.

Country B should specialize in making Xs. Country A should specialize in making Ys. This is because when Country A makes an X they give up the chance to make .8 Ys, but when Country B makes an X they only give up .67 potential Ys. When Country A makes a Y they give up the chance to make 1.2 Xs, but Country B gives up the chance to make 1.5 Xs every time they make a Y. I know this is overly simplistic and didn't fully cover it but that's all I currently have time for. Happy Easter.

Karl Marx!

I thought that the quote was Churchill on democracy. The competitive drive forces people to advertise but self-aggrandizement tends to indicate arrogant overstatement. Advertisers tend to want to be catchy and notable, self-aggrandizers want to see themselves as gods. Such a trait is really more found in a totalitarian society and the cult of personality found there.


I was not aware that he said that trade between 2 countries was unjustified if one was worse in absolute terms in every thing. I suppose it is hard to find quotes though, and I am not going to read through the 1000 page work just to find that kind of comment. That would be a glaring error though. I know of the benefits of trade and how that works. I was just more distrusting because one is usually more likely to hear someone argue against free trade being less beneficial than Adam Smith one is likely to argue the other way.

Actually come to think of it I think that quote was on democracy. In a totalitarian society only the elite worries about self aggrandizement because the hopes of the proletariat are completely dashed. In capitalist society the competition naturally causes most people to at least attempt a degree of self-aggrandizement. That's what "keeping up with the Joneses" is all about.



Well I am trusting my econ professor's judgement here. He told my class that Adam Smith said that and he continued to go on about why it was wrong. That would be very irresponsible of him if he wasn't correct in saying that.

Actually, this should be regarded as an aspect of freedom. Any society with wealth and uneven distribution will have those who gloat over others. Pride is a very noted human trait.


It is possible that Adam Smith did argue that. I was just mostly suspicious because I had never heard that and it is apparently not common knowledge.

I figured that you might like Marx, if only because he advocates the view on capitalism not being ideal that you have.

"If a foreign country can supply us with a commodity cheaper than we ourselves can make it, better buy it of them with some part of the produce of our own industry, employed in a way in which we have some advantage. " (Book IV, Section ii, 12)


If I were you, I would read Wealth of Nations before taking your professor's opinion/interpretation as absolute truth. That being said, however, Smith was intuitively defining absolute advantage. Some time after Smith came a dude named Ricardo with his example of COMPARATIVE advantage, an idea that seems counterintuitive at first, but after you think about it a bit, makes a lot of sense and doesn't really makes Smith wrong, so much as it makes Wealth of Nations not complete.

In his example Ricardo imagined two countries, England and Portugal, producing two goods, cloth and wine, using labor as the sole input in production. He assumed that the productivity of labor (i.e., the quantity of output produced per worker) varied between industries and across countries. However, instead of assuming, as Adam Smith did, that England is more productive in producing one good and Portugal is more productive in the other; Ricardo assumed that Portugal was more productive in both goods. Based on Smith's intuition, then, it would seem that trade could not be advantageous, at least for England.

However, Ricardo demonstrated numerically that if England specialized in producing one of the two goods, and if Portugal produced the other, then total world output of both goods could rise! If an appropriate terms of trade (i.e., amount of one good traded for another) were then chosen, both countries could end up with more of both goods after specialization and free trade then they each had before trade. This means that England may nevertheless benefit from free trade even though it is assumed to be technologically inferior to Portugal in the production of everything.

To identify a country's comparative advantage good requires a comparison of production costs across countries. However, one does not compare the monetary costs of production or even the resource costs (labor needed per unit of output) of production. Instead one must compare the opportunity costs of producing goods across countries.

Another way to define comparative advantage is by comparing productivities across industries and countries. Thus suppose, as before, that Portugal is more productive than England in the production of both cloth and wine. If Portugal is twice as productive in cloth production relative to England but three times as productive in wine, then Portugal's comparative advantage is in wine, the good in which its productivity advantage is greatest. Similarly, England's comparative advantage good is cloth, the good in which its productivity disadvantage is least. This implies that to benefit from specialization and free trade, Portugal should specialize and trade the good in which it is "most best" at producing, while England should specialize and trade the good in which it is "least worse" at producing.

Ok, right, the idea that Adam Smith argued against certain forms of trade seemed odd to me. He used concepts such as the invisible hand too much and on the importance of trade. Not only that but I would think that something like this tendency would stand out too much. I still do not like the Wealth of Nations much though as a book. It is very very long. Adam Smith's major error in my mind was in terms of conceiving value. He still held the labor theory of value, and he somehow thought that agriculture was higher than other forms of production. We cannot absolutely blame him for being wrong on such matters because he built on predecessors to some extent, especially with the agriculture aspect as the idea came from the physiocrats.

Maybe I should try to read Ricardo a little. I can likely find it on the internet on my own.