20th-century economists

Robert Bernard Reich (born June 24, 1946) is an American economic advisor, professor, author, and political commentator. He served in the administrations of Presidents Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, and Bill Clinton. He was Secretary of Labor from 1993 to 1997. He was a member of President Barack Obama's economic transition advisory board.

Barack Hussein Obama Sr. (18 June 1934 – 24 November 1982) was a Kenyan senior governmental economist and the father of Barack Obama, the 44th president of the United States. He is a central figure of his son's memoir, Dreams from My Father (1995). Obama married in 1954 and had two children with his first wife, Kezia. He was selected for a special program to attend college in the United States and studied at the University of Hawaii where he met Stanley Ann Dunham, whom he married in 1961. They had a son, Barack II. Dunham divorced Obama three years later. The elder Obama later went to Harvard University for graduate school, where he earned an M.A. in economics, and returned to Kenya in 1964. He saw his son Barack once more, when he was about 10.

Diosdado Pangan Macapagal Sr. (September 28, 1910 – April 21, 1997) was the ninth President of the Philippines, serving from 1961 to 1965, and the sixth Vice-President, serving from 1957 to 1961. He also served as a member of the House of Representatives, and headed the Constitutional Convention of 1970. He was the father of Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, who followed his path as President of the Philippines from 2001 to 2010.

Alan Greenspan (born March 6, 1926) is an American economist who served five terms as the 13th Chair of the Federal Reserve of the United States from 1987 to 2006. He works as a private adviser and provides consulting for firms through his company, Greenspan Associates LLC. First appointed Federal Reserve chairman by President Ronald Reagan in August 1987, he was reappointed at successive four-year intervals until retiring on January 31, 2006, after the second-longest tenure in the position (behind William McChesney Martin).

John Dierkes (February 10, 1905 – January 8, 1975) was an American actor who appeared in a number of classic Hollywood films. Before becoming an actor, he had been an economist.

Ioannis "Yanis" Varoufakis (Greek: Ιωάννης Γεωργίου "Γιάνης" Βαρουφάκης, Ioánnis Georgíou "Giánis" Varoufákis, born 24 March 1961) is a Greek economist, academic, philosopher and politician. He has been Secretary-General of MeRA25, a left-wing political party, since he founded it in 2018. A former member of Syriza, he served as Minister of Finance from January to July 2015 under Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras. Varoufakis was a member of the Hellenic Parliament for Athens B from January to September 2015; he regained a parliamentary seat in July 2019.

José Encarnación Jr. (November 17, 1928 in Manila – July 5, 1998 in Quezon City) was professor of economics at the University of the Philippines Diliman, where he served as dean of the School of Economics from 1974 until his retirement in 1994. Encarnación was educated at UP Diliman (PhB, MA Philosophy) and at Princeton University (PhD Economics). He was a member of the Upsilon Sigma Phi fraternity.

Julian Heward Bell (4 February 1908 – 18 July 1937) was an English poet, and the son of Clive and Vanessa Bell (who was the elder sister of Virginia Woolf). The writer Quentin Bell was his younger brother and the writer and painter Angelica Garnett was his half-sister. His relationship with his mother is explored in Susan Sellers' novel Vanessa and Virginia.

John Maynard Keynes, 1st Baron Keynes CB FBA ( KAYNZ; 5 June 1883 – 21 April 1946), was a British economist, whose ideas fundamentally changed the theory and practice of macroeconomics and the economic policies of governments. Originally trained in mathematics, he built on and greatly refined earlier work on the causes of business cycles, and was one of the most influential economists of the 20th century. His ideas are the basis for the school of thought known as Keynesian economics, and its various offshoots.

Dag Hjalmar Agne Carl Hammarskjöld ( HAM-ər-shuuld, 29 July 1905 – 18 September 1961) was a Swedish economist and diplomat who served as the second Secretary-General of the United Nations. As of 2020, Hammarskjöld remains the youngest person to have held the Secretary-General post, having been only 47 years old when he was appointed in 1953. His second term was cut short when he died in the crash of his DC-6 airplane in Northern Rhodesia while en route to cease-fire negotiations during the Congo Crisis. He is the only person in history to be awarded a Nobel Peace Prize posthumously.