The Names Behind the Ideas: Six Economists This Atlas Was Missing

Simon Kuznets: built the modern concept of GDP for a 1934 report to Congress, and spent the rest of his career warning it should not be mistaken for a measure of welfare.

Gross Domestic Product: the measure Kuznets built, and the headline number every economy in this atlas gets judged by.

Vilfredo Pareto: an Italian engineer turned economist whose 1906 Manual of Political Economy formalized what "efficient" means in welfare economics.

Pareto Efficiency: an allocation nobody can be made better off from without making someone else worse off, deliberately silent on whether it is fair.

Jean-Baptiste Say: French classical economist who argued a general glut of all goods at once cannot occur, in a 1803 book most people know only through a slogan he never actually wrote.

Say's Law: the doctrine Keynesian economics was built to reject.

Joseph Schumpeter: taught at Harvard from 1932, and argued capitalism advances through waves of entrepreneurial disruption, not gentle equilibrium.

Creative Destruction: Schumpeter's name for that disruption, and "the essential fact about capitalism" in his own words.

Richard Kahn: Keynes's student and collaborator at Cambridge, and the actual author of the multiplier argument that made Keynes's case for public works.

The Fiscal Multiplier: Kahn's 1931 result, still debated today mainly over its exact size.

Ragnar Nurkse: Estonian-American economist who helped found development economics as its own field, distinct from theory built around already-industrialized economies.

The Poverty Trap: Nurkse's 1953 "vicious circle of poverty," the trail's closing stop and the concept that started this whole wave of research.