Microeconomics For Dummies

Chapter 20

Meeting Ten Great Microeconomists

In This Chapter

Paying tribute to some great thinkers

Realizing that microeconomics is the result of many great thinkers

In this chapter we introduce you to some great economists who inspired us to discover microeconomics. Microeconomics has become a broad and deep subject, and although we can’t possibly do justice to all their work, we want to give you a flavor of some of their important results.

Many microeconomists have also made contributions to other subjects: macroeconomics, mathematics, sociology, law, and history being the most common. In fact, some people say that no such thing as a pure microeconomist exists! We have some agreement with that view, given the areas into which some of these greats have moved.

So what follows is a — perhaps slightly eccentric — list of inspiring and challenging thinkers. But they’re just the tip of a huge iceberg, and we apologize — in some cases, sadly, posthumously — to all those we leave out. This job was as difficult as picking an all-time Fantasy Football team or the top ten greatest singles. We hope that given the scarcity of available places, you’ll forgive the omissions.

Alfred Marshall (1842–1924)

The approach to microeconomics that we pursue in this book — which is the mainstream approach ...