John Maynard Keynes (pronounced canes) was born in Cambridge, England in 1883, the year Karl Marx died. He earned a mathematics degree at Kings College Cambridge in 1905. He represented the British Treasury at the Paris Peace Conference of 1918-1919. In The Economic Consequences of Peace, he chastised Woodrow Wilson and others for their harsh treatment of Germany, and he predicted the political and economic instability that led to World War II. In 1936, in The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, he declared that full employment could be maintained only with government spending and that the government must run deficits, invest in public works, and hire the unemployed. In 1934, Keynes came to the White House and urged F.D.R. to try deficit spending. Four years passed before F.D.R. finally succumbed. By 1944, output almost doubled and unemployment fell from more than 17% to just over 1%. Keynes' deficit spending theory received credit for this, even though the real cause was the country's World War II mobilization. Since then, the United States has continuously maintained the deficit that was urged upon it by Keynes, "The Father of Deficit Spending."

Adam Smith was born in Scotland in 1723 and educated at the University of Glasgow and Oxford. He taught Logic and Moral Philosophy at Glasgow. The Wealth of Nations, his ground-breaking five-book series, was published in 1776. It soon became the basis for classical economics. Smith believed that rational self-interest in a free market would lead to economic well-being, and that one who earns money benefits society by producing something that others value. He asserted that economic development thrives on free competition operating within natural laws, and differences in work, such as unsafe or odious conditions, should result in differences in pay. Smith was a strong proponent of ethics and charity. He believed that sympathy and self-interest should co-exist in an economic setting, although charity could not and should not provide the essentials for living. As for government, it should only enforce contracts, grant patents and copyrights, and provide public works.

Milton Friedman is the 20th century's most prominent advocate of free markets. He was born in 1912 in New York City. He received his bachelor's degree from Rutgers, his master's from the University of Chicago, and his doctorate from Columbia. He was a faculty member at the University of Chicago until 1977, and thereafter taught at Stanford. He was an Economic Advisor to President Richard Nixon. He started out as a Keynesian economist and was a supporter of the New Deal, but between 1956 and 1963 he began to challenge Keynesian thinking, largely because he was convinced that the right monetary policy could have prevented the Great Depression. He determined that large-scale deficit spending was not needed to fight mass unemployment. In his opinion, price level depended on the money supply, and a steady expansion of the money supply was the only wise policy. In the 1960s, he made his case for free markets in Capitalism and Freedom. In 1967, he was elected President of the American Economic Association. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in economics in 1976. His ideas spread worldwide with the publication of Free to Choose, the best-selling nonfiction book of 1980.

Paul Volker was born in 1927. He graduated from Princeton in 1949 and from Harvard School of Public Administration in 1951, and he did postgraduate work at the London School of Economics. He joined the Federal Reserve Bank of New York as an economist in 1952, but left there for Chase Manhattan in 1957. In 1969, he was appointed Under-Secretary of the U.S. Treasury for Monetary Affairs, and remained there until 1974. After a brief stint as a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton, in 1975 he became President of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. In 1979, President Jimmy Carter appointed Volker Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board. Inflation was at 13-plus percent, and the value of the dollar was falling. This led to the worst recession in 40 years. Between 1980 and 1982 the Prime Rate peaked at 21.5 percent and unemployment reached 10.7 percent. In 1983, Volker was reappointed as Fed Chairman by President Reagan. Between then and 1987 the economy turned around. Double-digit inflation ended, and Volker received much of the credit. He is currently an economic advisor to President Obama, heading the President's Economic Recovery Advisory Board.