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Text I.

John Bates Clark

John Bates Clark (26 January 1847 – 21 March 1938) was an American neo-classical economist. He was one of the pioneers of the marginalist revolution and opponent to the Institutionalist school of economics, and spent most of his career as a teacher of Columbia University.

Clark was born and raised in Providence, R. I. and graduated from Amherst College in Massachusetts at the age of 25. From 1872 to 1875 he attended the University of Zurich where he studied under Karl Knies (a leader of the German Historical School). Early in his career Clark's writings reflected his German Socialist background and showed him as a critic of capitalism. Upon his return to the United States, Clark taught economics, history and a whole series of other subjects.

In The Philosophy of Wealth (1886), Clark presented an original version of marginal utility theory, a decade and a half after the simultaneous discovery of this principle by Jevons, Menger, and Walras. Clark is famous for his use of marginal productivity which explains the distribution of income. In his 1848 Principles of Political Economy, John Stuart Mill asserted that production and distribution were two distinct spheres. While production was the result of physical principles, such as the Law of Diminishing Returns, distribution was the result of social and political choice. Clark theorized that with homogeneous labor, perfectly competitive firms, and diminishing marginal products, firms hired labor up to the point where the real wage was equal to the marginal product of labor. Thus he showed the intimate connection of production and distribution. This idea is now in virtually all modern microeconomics texts as the explanation for the demand for labor.

Clark writes in the preface to The Distribution of Wealth that His countryman Henry George primarily inspired Clark in his work.

However, both Clark's son, John Maurice Clark, and John Henry both contend that Clark developed the theory as a response to Karl Marx, who claimed that the surplus value the workers created exploited them. It is possible that Clark had both Henry George and Karl Marx in mind.

The John Bates Clark Medal, one of the most prestigious awards in the field of economics, is named after him.

J. B. Clark was the father of John Maurice Clark, who did not follow his father's conservative footsteps -- instead, he became a leading Institutionalist.

Text II.

Charles Kennedy (economist)

Charles Kennedy (1923 – November 4, 1997) was a Scottish economist, one of the finest theorists of his generation.

He was born into a large family, the youngest of five sons; he was the son of George Kennedy, an architect, and grandson of the painter Charles Napier Kennedy. A gifted child, he got education at Gordonstoun, and entered Balliol College, Oxford at the age of seventeen. His tutor there was Thomas Balogh. Within two years he graduated with first-class honours in Philosophy, Politics and Economics, and they immediately recruited him into Lord Cherwell's statistical research group for the duration of World War II.

After the War he re-entered academia, he lectured in Economics for a year at Imperial College London and another at Balliol. In 1948 they elected him as Fellow of Economics at Queens College, Oxford, and in 1950 he gained a University lectureship. In 1955, he travelled to the West Indies, where he spent a large amount of time painting; six years later, fond memories persuaded him to leave Oxford and take up a Chair in Economics at the University of the West Indies in 1961, shortly after his marriage.

During his time in the West Indies, he wrote prolifically - at least by his standards - and briefly served as Deputy Vice-Chancellor of the university, as well as a Director of the Bank of Jamaica. Due to political events, however, he decided to return to the UK, and took the Chair of Economic Theory at the University of Kent in Canterbury in 1966. He formally retired four years later, at the young age of 48, but continued teaching part-time (as the Honorary Professor of Economic Theory) until 1984. For his services to the University, he got a great award in 1984.

Kennedy was mildly eccentric; he had a phobia of libraries, and never entered one if nobody accompanied him. He was not a prolific writer - he only published around fifty papers - but his writing was of a high calibre; of those papers, sixty percent he published in the Economic Journal, Oxford Economic Papers, or the Review of Economic Studies.

Text III.

Robert C. Merton

Robert Cox Merton (born July 31, 1944), is a leading scholar in the field of finance and was one of three men who, in the early 1970s, developed the mathematics of financial options.

Merton was born in New York, New York and received his Bachelor of Science degree in Engineering Mathematics from the School of Engineering and Applied Science of Columbia University.

Currently, Merton is a professor at the Harvard Business School; he also holds the rank of University Professor, which is the highest professorial rank at Harvard University.

Merton is also the son of Robert K. Merton, an outstanding sociologist at Columbia University.

Merton resides in both Cambridge, MA and New York, NY. He has three children.

Merton studied the options pricing model. He then applied optimal control theory in order to derive consumption and portfolio allocation. His work paved the way for the now flourishing field of financial engineering, and quantitative finance which applies his methods to calculate prices for exotic derivatives with arbitrary payoffs.

In 1969 Merton published groundbreaking work on a dilemma that all investors face. Merton's portfolio problem enables people to decide how much of their income they can consume now and of the rest income, how much of it should be allocated between stocks and bonds to maximize the usefulness of that income.

In 1970 Merton introduced a structural credit risk model. The 'Merton Model' refers to a model that treats equity as an option on the firm's assets. The reduced form default probabilities that stem from Merton's insights were introduced commercially by Kamakura Corporation, where Robert Jarrow is director of research, in 2002.

In 1973 Merton introduced the Intertemporal Capital Asset Pricing Model known as ICAPM. ICAPM incorporates explicit hedges that investors make to protect themselves from savings shortfalls or changes in the investment opportunity set.

In 1999 Merton got the lifetime achievement award in mathematical finance.

In 2002 Merton threw himself into the public controversy over how corporations ought to account for the stock options they often award as parts of a compensation package.

In 2005 the Baker Library at Harvard University opened The Merton Exhibit to honor his lifelong achievements and inspire students to pursue academic careers.

Text IV.

Richard Posner

Richard Allen Posner (born January 11, 1939, in New York City) is currently a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit. He is one of the most influential legal theorists and a major voice in the law and economics movement, which he helped start while a professor at the University of Chicago Law School. He currently serves as a lecturer at the Law School. Judge Posner is the greatest American jurist who never served on the Supreme Court.

Posner is the author of nearly 40 books on jurisprudence, legal philosophy, and several other topics, such as The Problems of Jurisprudence; Sex and Reason; Overcoming Law; Law, Pragmatism and Democracy; and The Problematics of Moral and Legal Theory.

Posner graduated from Yale College and from Harvard Law School, where he was first in his class and president of the Harvard Law Review. In 1969, he joined the faculty of the University of Chicago Law School, where he remains a senior lecturer and where his son Eric Posner is Professor. He was an editor of the Journal of Legal Studies in 1972. President Ronald Reagan appointed Posner to the Seventh Circuit in 1981. He served as Chief Judge of that court from 1993 to 2000.

Posner is an unusual combination of a pragmatist in philosophy, a classical liberal in politics, and an economist in legal methodology. A 2004 poll by Legal Affairs magazine named Posner as one of the top twenty legal thinkers in the U.S He is a prolific author of articles and books on a wide range of topics which include the 2000 presidential election recount controversy, President Bill Clinton's scandalous affair with Monica Lewinsky and his impeachment procedure, and the 2003 invasion of Iraq. His analysis of the Lewinsky scandal cut across most party and ideological divisions. Posner's greatest influence is through his writings on law and economics—The New York Times called him "one of the most important antitrust scholars of the past half-century." In December 2004, Posner started a joint blog with Nobel Prize-winning economist Gary Becker.

He famously opposed the right of privacy in 1981. He argued that the kinds of interests protected under privacy are not distinctive. He contended that privacy is protected in ways that are economically inefficient.

He wrote several opinions sympathetic to abortion rights, including a decision holding "partial-birth abortion" constitutionally protected in some circumstances.

He wrote favorably of efficient breach of contracts. Breach often leads to a worse result for society: if a seller breaches a contract to deliver building materials, the buyer's workers might go idle while the buyer looks for a replacement.

Text V.

Herbert Simon

Herbert Alexander Simon (June 15, 1916 – February 9, 2001) was an American political scientist whose research ranged across the fields of cognitive psychology, computer science, public administration, economics, management, and philosophy of science sociology and was a professor, most notably, at Carnegie Mellon University. With almost a thousand, often very highly cited publications, he is one of the most influential social scientists of the 20th century.

Herbert Alexander Simon was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin on June 15, 1916. He was educated as a child in the public school system in Milwaukee where he developed an interest in science. In 1933, Simon entered the University of Chicago, and following those early influences, he studied the social sciences and mathematics. His most important mentor at the University was Henry Schultz who was an econometrician and mathematical economist. Eventually his studies led him to the field of organizational decision making which would become the subject of his doctoral dissertation.

From 1939 to 1942, Simon acted as director of a research group at the University of California, Berkeley. When the group’s grant was exhausted, he took a position in political science at the Illinois Institute of Technology. From 1950 to 1955, Simon studied mathematical economics.

Herbert Simon has been credited for revolutionary changes in microeconomics. He is responsible for the concept of organizational decision-making as it is known today. While this notion was not entirely new, Simon is best known for its origination. It was in this area that he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1978.

Simon’s main goal was to link economic theory to mathematics and statistics. His main contributions were to the fields of general equilibrium and econometrics.

Simon was known for his research on industrial organization. He determined that the internal organization of firms and the external business decisions thereof did not conform to the Neoclassical theories of “rational” decision-making. Simon wrote many articles on the topic over the course of his life mainly focusing on the issue of decision-making within the behavior of what he termed “bounded rationality.” The term bounded rationality is used to designate rational choice that takes into account the cognitive limitations of both knowledge and cognitive capacity. Bounded rationality is a central theme in behavioral economics. It is concerned with the ways in which the actual decision-making process influences decisions. Theories of bounded rationality relax one or more assumptions of standard expected utility theory”.

Simon's genius and influence is evidenced by the many top-level honors he received later in life. These include: the ACM's Turing Award for making "basic contributions to artificial intelligence, the psychology of human cognition, and list processing." (1975); the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics "for his pioneering research into the decision-making process within economic organizations" (1978); the National Medal of Science (1986); and the APA's Award for Outstanding Lifetime Contributions to Psychology (1993).