💱The Greats

Ricardo was a loan contractor for the British government's war debt, and his 1815 syndicate held large positions in government stock when news of Waterloo arrived. The victory sent prices surging and completed the fortune of a man who had started with a few hundred pounds after his family cut him off in 1793. Contemporaries marveled that he then walked away from the market at its feet, bought a country estate and a seat in Parliament, and spent his remaining years arguing about the theory of rent and currency.

In 1872 the Russian imperial censorship committee approved the first foreign translation of Das Kapital, reasoning in its report that the book was a "strictly scientific" work that few in Russia would read and fewer would understand. The Russian edition of 3,000 copies sold out faster than the German original had, and Russia became the unlikely first stronghold of Marx's readership — the censors' confident forecast standing as one of history's worst risk assessments.

Attached to the British delegation at the 1919 Paris peace conference, Keynes resigned in disgust that June and, in a matter of weeks, wrote The Economic Consequences of the Peace, predicting that the reparations imposed on Germany would wreck Europe's economy and its peace. The book sold on the order of a hundred thousand copies within months, was translated across Europe, and made the 36-year-old Treasury official world-famous — while shutting him out of official British policy circles for years.

In 1975 — International Women's Year — Business Week ran a piece effectively predicting Robinson would win that year's economics Nobel, and much of the profession agreed she was overdue. The committee instead honored Kantorovich and Koopmans for allocation theory, and Robinson, by then famous for her combative heterodoxy and her provocations about Maoist China, was never chosen before her death in 1983. The snub is still cited whenever the prize's politics are debated.

In his December 1967 presidential address to the American Economic Association, Friedman argued that the Phillips-curve trade-off between inflation and unemployment was an illusion that would break down if exploited: expectations would adjust, leaving both inflation and unemployment high. The stagflation of the 1970s delivered his prediction almost exactly, vindicating a claim that had contradicted the profession's reigning consensus — and it stands among the most cited successful predictions in the discipline's history.

Sen has often retold a scene from his childhood in Dhaka during the Hindu-Muslim riots of the 1940s: a Muslim day-laborer named Kader Mia staggered into the family garden, knifed for working in a hostile neighborhood, and explained before he died that his family's hunger had left him no choice but to seek work there. Sen cites the memory — economic unfreedom costing a man his life — as the origin of a career spent measuring deprivation in terms of what people are actually free to do.

In Udaipur district, Rajasthan, Duflo and Banerjee's team randomized immunization delivery across villages: reliable monthly camps alone raised full immunization modestly, but adding a small incentive — a kilogram of lentils per visit — lifted full immunization from around 6 percent to 39 percent, and cut the cost per immunized child because the nurses' fixed costs spread over far more children. Published in the BMJ in 2010, the lentil trial became the signature demonstration that small, tested nudges can outperform grand programs.