William MacAskill
I'm Will MacAskill, an Associate Professor in Philosophy at Lincoln College, Oxford, and author of Doing Good Better (Gotham Books, 2015). I've also cofounded two non-profits: 80,000 Hours, which provides research and advice on how you can best make a difference through your career, and Giving What We Can, which encourages people to commit to give at least 10% of their income to the most effective charities. These organisations helped to spark the effective altruism movement.
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Stewart Brand
Stewart Brand was a pioneer in the environmental movement in the 60s – his Whole Earth Catalog became the Bible for sustainable living, selling more than 10 million copies worldwide. Brand is President of The Long Now Foundation and chairs the foundation's Seminars About Long-term Thinking.
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Melanie Joy
Melanie Joy is an award-winning psychologist, bestselling author, and internationally recognized voice on the psychology of social transformation, relationships, and emotional resilience. She’s written seven nonfiction books, which have been published or contracted in 23 languages, and she’s the eighth recipient of the Ahimsa Award—previously given to the Dalai Lama and Nelson Mandela—for her work on global nonviolence.
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With her trademark blend of intellect, heart, and humor, she brings a fresh perspective to fiction in her new book, "A Half-Hearted Death Wish"—a bighearted, quirky, and thought-provoking debut novel.
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Steven Pinker
Steven Arthur Pinker is a prominent Canadian-American experimental psychologist, cognitive scientist, and author of popular science. Pinker is known for his wide-ranging explorations of human nature and its relevance to language, history, morality, politics, and everyday life. He conducts research on language and cognition, writes for publications such as the New York Times, Time, and The New Republic, and is the author of numerous books, including The Language Instinct, How the Mind Works, Words and Rules, The Blank Slate, The Stuff of Thought, The Better Angels of Our Nature, The Sense of Style, and most recently, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress.
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He was born in Canada and graduated from Montreal's Da -
Peter Singer
Peter Singer is sometimes called "the world’s most influential living philosopher" although he thinks that if that is true, it doesn't say much for all the other living philosophers around today. He has also been called the father (or grandfather?) of the modern animal rights movement, even though he doesn't base his philosophical views on rights, either for humans or for animals.
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In 2005 Time magazine named Singer one of the 100 most influential people in the world, and the Gottlieb Duttweiler Institute ranked him 3rd among Global Thought Leaders for 2013. (He has since slipped to 36th.) He is known especially for his work on the ethics of our treatment of animals, for his controversial critique of the sanctity of life doctrine in bioethic -
Derek Parfit
Derek Parfit was a British Professor of Philosophy at Oxford University specializing in personal identity, rationality, ethics, and the relations between them.
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Michael Malice
Michael Malice is the author of The White Pill, The New Right, The Anarchist Handbook, and Dear Reader: The Unauthorized Autobiography of Kim Jong Il.
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Marcel Proust
Marcel Proust was a French novelist, best known for his 3000 page masterpiece À la recherche du temps perdu (Remembrance of Things Past or In Search of Lost Time), a pseudo-autobiographical novel told mostly in a stream-of-consciousness style.
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Born in the first year of the Third Republic, the young Marcel, like his narrator, was a delicate child from a bourgeois family. He was active in Parisian high society during the 80s and 90s, welcomed in the most fashionable and exclusive salons of his day. However, his position there was also one of an outsider, due to his Jewishness and homosexuality. Towards the end of 1890s Proust began to withdraw more and more from society, and although he was never entirely reclusive, as is sometimes made out, -
Bryan Caplan
Bryan Caplan is a professor of economics at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia. He received his B.S. in economics from University of California, Berkeley and his Ph.D. from Princeton University. His professional work has been devoted to the philosophies of libertarianism and free-market capitalism and anarchism. (He is the author of the Anarchist Theory FAQ.) He has published in American Economic Review, Public Choice, and the Journal of Law and Economics, among others. He is a blogger at the EconLog blog along with Arnold Kling, and occasionally has been a guest blogger at Marginal Revolution with two of his colleagues at George Mason, Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok. He is an adjunct scholar of the Cato Institute in Washington, D.
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Nick Bostrom
Nick Bostrom is Professor at Oxford University, where he is the founding Director of the Future of Humanity Institute. He also directs the Strategic Artificial Intelligence Research Center. He is the author of some 200 publications, including Anthropic Bias (Routledge, 2002), Global Catastrophic Risks (ed., OUP, 2008), Human Enhancement (ed., OUP, 2009), and Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies (OUP, 2014), a New York Times bestseller.
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Bostrom holds bachelor degrees in artificial intelligence, philosophy, mathematics and logic followed by master’s degrees in philosophy, physics and computational neuroscience. In 2000, he was awarded a PhD in Philosophy from the London School of Economics.
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Stuart Russell
Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name. See this thread for more information.
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Nate Silver
Nathaniel Read “Nate” Silver (born January 13, 1978) is an American statistician and writer who analyzes baseball and elections. He is currently the editor-in-chief of ESPN’s FiveThirtyEight blog and a Special Correspondent for ABC News. Silver first gained public recognition for developing PECOTA, a system for forecasting the performance and career development of Major League Baseball players, which he sold to and then managed for Baseball Prospectus from 2003 to 2009.
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In 2007, writing under the pseudonym “Poblano”, Silver began to publish analyses and predictions related to the 2008 United States presidential election. At first this work appeared on the political blog Daily Kos, but in March 2008 Silver established his own website, FiveThi -
Brian Christian
Brian Christian is an acclaimed author and researcher whose work explores the human implications of computer science. He is known for his bestselling series of books:
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The Most Human Human (2011) uses his experience as a human “confederate” in the Turing test to examine what chatbots reveal about the nature of language and communication. It was named a Wall Street Journal bestseller, a New York Times Editors’ Choice, and a New Yorker favorite book of the year.
Algorithms to Live By (2016), co-authored with Tom Griffiths, applies computational principles to everyday human decision making, painting a counterintuitively human picture of rationality. It was named a #1 Audible bestseller, Amazon best science book of the year, and MIT Technology Rev -
Thomas S. Kuhn
American historian and philosopher of science, a leading contributor to the change of focus in the philosophy and sociology of science in the 1960s. Thomas Samuel Kuhn was born in Cincinnati, Ohio. He received a doctorate in theoretical physics from Harvard University in 1949. But he later shifted his interest to the history and philosophy of science, which he taught at Harvard, the University of California at Berkeley, Princeton University, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
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In 1962, Kuhn published The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, which depicted the development of the basic natural sciences in an innovative way. According to Kuhn, the sciences do not uniformly progress strictly by scientific method. Rather, there are t -
Rutger Bregman
Rutger Bregman (born April 26, 1988) is a Dutch historian and author. His books Humankind: A Hopeful History (2020) and Utopia for Realists: How We Can Build the Ideal World (2017) were both Sunday Times and New York Times Best Sellers and have been translated in 46 languages.
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In 2024, he co-founded The School for Moral Ambition, a non-profit organization inspired by his latest book Moral Ambition (2025) that wants to help as many people as possible to take the step towards a job with a positive impact. -
Kevin Simler
Kevin Simler is a writer and software engineer currently living in Brooklyn, NY. He's worked for ten years as a programmer, product designer, and engineering director, and continues to advise startups about technology, leadership, and recruiting.
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Brian Klaas
Brian Paul Klaas is an American political scientist, a contributing writer at The Atlantic, and an associate professor in global politics at University College London.
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Tobias Leenaert
Tobias Leenaert is the author of How to Create a Vegan World: a Pragmatic Approach (published in 12 languages) and blogs at www.veganstrategist.org. He is a longtime speaker and strategist, giving talks and trainings all over the world. He is also co-founder of ProVeg International and was previously director of Proveg Belgium for fifteen years. Tobias is keen on thinking out of the box, building bridges between different groups, and practicing what he calls "slow opinion".
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He is currently working on his first novel. -
Julia Galef
Julia Galef is co-founder of the Center for Applied Rationality. She hosts Rationally Speaking, the official podcast of New York City Skeptics, which she has done since its inception in 2010, sharing the show with co-host and philosopher Massimo Pigliucci until 2015.
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Emilia A. Leese
Emilia A. Leese, writes essays on life, travel and veganism for a variety of online publications and is closely involved in a rewilding project in the Scottish Highlands. She regularly hosts benefit supper clubs and is a speaker on vegan ethics at a variety of events. She also developed life skills and ethics workshops for underserved youth. She has been a corporate finance lawyer for over twenty years. She and her husband Roger, who is also vegan, live in London and the Highlands. Follow her work on Emisgoodeating.com and BirchfieldHighlands.org
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Melanie Joy
Melanie Joy is an award-winning psychologist, bestselling author, and internationally recognized voice on the psychology of social transformation, relationships, and emotional resilience. She’s written seven nonfiction books, which have been published or contracted in 23 languages, and she’s the eighth recipient of the Ahimsa Award—previously given to the Dalai Lama and Nelson Mandela—for her work on global nonviolence.
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With her trademark blend of intellect, heart, and humor, she brings a fresh perspective to fiction in her new book, "A Half-Hearted Death Wish"—a bighearted, quirky, and thought-provoking debut novel.
You can learn more about her at melaniejoy.org. -
Tobias Leenaert
Tobias Leenaert is the author of How to Create a Vegan World: a Pragmatic Approach (published in 12 languages) and blogs at www.veganstrategist.org. He is a longtime speaker and strategist, giving talks and trainings all over the world. He is also co-founder of ProVeg International and was previously director of Proveg Belgium for fifteen years. Tobias is keen on thinking out of the box, building bridges between different groups, and practicing what he calls "slow opinion".
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He is currently working on his first novel. -
Jaron Lanier
Jaron Lanier is a computer scientist, composer, visual artist, and author.
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In the sciences:
Jaron Lanier scientific interests include biomimetic information architectures, user interfaces, heterogeneous scientific simulations, advanced information systems for medicine, and computational approaches to the fundamentals of physics. He collaborates with a wide range of scientists in fields related to these interests.
Lanier's name is also often associated with Virtual Reality research. He either coined or popularized the term 'Virtual Reality' and in the early 1980s founded VPL Research, the first company to sell VR products. In the late 1980s he led the team that developed the first implementations of multi-person virtual worlds using head moun -
James M. Kouzes
Jim Kouzes has been thinking about leadership ever since he was one of only a dozen Eagle Scouts to be selected to serve in John F. Kennedy's honor guard when Kennedy was inaugurated President of the United States. Kennedy's inaugural call to action -- "Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country." -- inspired Jim to join the Peace Corps, and he taught school in Turkey for two years. That experience made Jim realize that he wanted a career that offered two things: the chance to teach and the opportunity to serve. It was in his first job back in the U.S. training community action agency managers that Jim found his calling, and he has devoted his life to leadership development ever since.
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Jim Kouzes is the -
William B. Irvine
William B Irvine is professor of philosophy at Wright State University. The author of seven books, including A Guide to the Good Life, he has also written for the Huffington Post, Salon, Time, and the BBC. He lives in Dayton, Ohio.
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Robert Lanza
ROBERT LANZA, MD, is one of the most respected scientists in the world. He is head of Astellas Global Regenerative Medicine, Chief Scientific Officer of the Astellas Institute for Regenerative Medicine, and adjunct professor at Wake Forest School of Medicine. TIME magazine recognized him as one of the “100 Most Influential People in the World,” and Prospect magazine named him one of the Top 50 “World Thinkers” in 2015. He is credited with several hundred publications and inventions, and more than 30 scientific books, including the definitive references in the field of stem cells and regenerative medicine. A former Fulbright Scholar, he studied with polio pioneer Jonas Salk and Nobel Laureates Gerald Edelman and Rodney Porter. Lanza was part
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Julia Galef
Julia Galef is co-founder of the Center for Applied Rationality. She hosts Rationally Speaking, the official podcast of New York City Skeptics, which she has done since its inception in 2010, sharing the show with co-host and philosopher Massimo Pigliucci until 2015.
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Dominic Frisby
Dominic Frisby is a comedian from London.
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But his first book, Life After The State, has nothing to do with comedy. It is a deadly serious dismantling of the way societies are run in the west, outlining the damage governments unknowingly do to their people, with simple suggestions about how things can be vastly improved.
Dominic writes an investment column for MoneyWeek and has written and produced numerous short films and videos, including the viral hit 'Debt Bomb'. His script-writing ranges from episodes of the kids' show 'Roary the Racing Car' to the feature documentary 'The Four Horsemen', about the global financial crisis. He is a frequent speaker on gold and money on television, radio and at conferences.
Frisby is also a comedian and act -
Magnus Vinding
Magnus Vinding is the author of Speciesism: Why It Is Wrong and the Implications of Rejecting It (2015), Reflections on Intelligence (2016), You Are Them (2017), Effective Altruism: How Can We Best Help Others? (2018), Suffering-Focused Ethics: Defense and Implications (2020), Reasoned Politics (2022), Essays on Suffering-Focused Ethics (2022), and Essays on UFOs and Related Conjectures (2024).
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His next book will be Compassionate Purpose: Personal Inspiration for a Better World. -
Derek Parfit
Derek Parfit was a British Professor of Philosophy at Oxford University specializing in personal identity, rationality, ethics, and the relations between them.
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Larissa MacFarquhar
Larissa MacFarquhar has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1998. Her Profile subjects have included John Ashbery, Barack Obama, Noam Chomsky, Hilary Mantel, Derek Parfit, David Chang, and Aaron Swartz, among many others. She is the author of “Strangers Drowning: Grappling with Impossible Idealism, Drastic Choices, and the Overpowering Urge to Help” (Penguin Press, 2015). Before joining the magazine, she was a senior editor at Lingua Franca and an advisory editor at The Paris Review, and wrote for Artforum, The Nation, The New Republic, the Times Book Review, Slate, and other publications. She has received two Front Page Awards from the Newswomen’s Club of New York, and her writing has appeared in The Best American Political Writing
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Peter Singer
Peter Singer is sometimes called "the world’s most influential living philosopher" although he thinks that if that is true, it doesn't say much for all the other living philosophers around today. He has also been called the father (or grandfather?) of the modern animal rights movement, even though he doesn't base his philosophical views on rights, either for humans or for animals.
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In 2005 Time magazine named Singer one of the 100 most influential people in the world, and the Gottlieb Duttweiler Institute ranked him 3rd among Global Thought Leaders for 2013. (He has since slipped to 36th.) He is known especially for his work on the ethics of our treatment of animals, for his controversial critique of the sanctity of life doctrine in bioethic -
Simon Blackburn
Librarian Note: There is more than one author by this name in the Goodreads database.
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Simon Blackburn FBA is an English academic philosopher known for his work in metaethics, where he defends quasi-realism, and in the philosophy of language; more recently, he has gained a large general audience from his efforts to popularise philosophy.
He retired as the professor of philosophy at the University of Cambridge in 2011, but remains a distinguished research professor of philosophy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, teaching every fall semester. He is also a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, and a member of the professoriate of New College of the Humanities. He was previously a Fellow of Pembroke College, Oxford and has also t -
Richard Holloway
Richard Holloway is a Scottish writer, broadcaster and cleric. He was the Bishop of Edinburgh from 1986 to 2000 and Primus of the Scottish Episcopal Church from 1992 to 2000.
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James Fulcher
My main interest has been in the comparative study of the development of societies. I first carried out a comparative study of the changing relationships between employers, unions, and the state in Britain and Sweden, from the nineteenth century onwards. I then became particularly interested in the distinctive features of Japanese society and the intriguing question of how the Japanese were able to beat the West at its own game by avoiding colonial domination, creating their own empire, and becoming first a military and then an economic superpower. Interest in these societies was linked to a broader concern with the development of capitalism, its stages of development, globalization, and different institutional forms. I have also been writi
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John Broome
Librarian note:
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There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name
John Broome s a British philosopher and economist. He was the White's Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Corpus Christi College, Oxford. -
Tyler Cowen
Tyler Cowen (born January 21, 1962) occupies the Holbert C. Harris Chair of economics as a professor at George Mason University and is co-author, with Alex Tabarrok, of the popular economics blog Marginal Revolution. He currently writes the "Economic Scene" column for the New York Times and writes for such magazines as The New Republic and The Wilson Quarterly.
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Cowen's primary research interest is the economics of culture. He has written books on fame (What Price Fame?), art (In Praise of Commercial Culture), and cultural trade (Creative Destruction: How Globalization is Changing the World's Cultures). In Markets and Cultural Voices, he relays how globalization is changing the world of three Mexican amate painters. Cowen argues that free mar -
Elizabeth Kolbert
Elizabeth Kolbert is a staff writer at The New Yorker. She is the author of Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change and The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History. She lives in Williamstown, Massachusetts, with her husband and children.
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Daniel Shapiro
There is more than one author by this name in the Goodreads data base.
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For the American poet, see Daniel Shapiro -
Nick Cooney
Nick Cooney is the founder and managing partner of venture capital firm Lever VC and the author of What We Don’t Do: Inaction in the Face of Suffering and the Drive to Do More (Regalo Press, 2025). His work has been covered in hundreds of media outlets including the Wall Street Journal, CNN, Bloomberg, Reuters, TIME, the Los Angeles Times, NBC, Forbes, and similar.
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Nick is also the founder and board chair of Lever Foundation, a non-profit focused on advancing a humane and sustainable food system, and previously founded and co-founded the non-profits The Humane League and the Good Food Institute. He is the author of several previous books on how to effectively carry out charity work, including How to Be Great at Doing Good and Change of Hear -
Heinrich Päs
Heinrich Päs is a professor of theoretical physics at TU Dortmund University in Germany. He has held positions at Vanderbilt University, the University of Alabama, and the University of Hawai'i and has conducted research visits at CERN and Fermilab. He lives in Bremen, Germany.
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Paul S. Boyer
Paul S. Boyer is a U.S. cultural and intellectual historian (Ph.D., Harvard University, 1966) and is Merle Curti Professor of History Emeritus and former director (1993-2001) of the Institute for Research in the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He has held visiting professorships at UCLA, Northwestern University, and William & Mary; has received Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundation Fellowships; and is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Society of American Historians, and the American Antiquarian Society. Before coming to Wisconsin in 1980, he taught at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst (1967-1980).
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Guy Standing
Guy Standing is a British professor of Development Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London, and co-founder of the Basic Income Earth Network (BIEN).
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Standing has written widely in the areas of labour economics, labour market policy, unemployment, labour market flexibility, structural adjustment policies and social protection. His recent work has concerned the emerging precariat class and the need to move towards unconditional basic income and deliberative democracy. -
Pietra Rivoli
Dr. Rivoli received her Ph.D. in finance and international economics from the University of Florida.
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Ryan A. Bourne
Ryan Bourne occupies the R. Evan Scharf Chair for the Public Understanding of Economics at the Cato Institute and is a weekly columnist for The Times (UK). He has written on a number of economic issues, including fiscal policy, inequality, price and wage controls, and infrastructure spending.
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His is the editor of a forthcoming multi-authored volume titled The War on Prices: How Popular Misconceptions about Inflation, Prices, and Value Create Bad Policy.
His first solo book, Economics In One Virus: An Introduction to Economic Reasoning through COVID-19, will be released in early 2021. He has contributed to numerous other books too, including: Flaws and Ceilings: Price Controls and the Damage they Cause; Taxation, Spending, and Economic Growth; -
Arnold Kling
American economist, scholar, and blogger. He is an Adjunct Scholar for the Cato Institute and a member of the Financial Markets Working Group at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. He teaches statistics and economics at the Berman Hebrew Academy in Rockville, Maryland.
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Kling received his Ph.D. in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1980. He was an economist on the staff of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System from 1980-1986. He was a senior economist at Freddie Mac from 1986-1994. -
Serge Lang
Serge Lang was an influential mathematician in the field of number theory. Algebra is his most famous book.
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Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name. See this thread for more information. -
Peter Schwartz
Peter is the author of Inevitable Surprises (2003), a provocative look at the dynamic forces at play in the world today and their implications for business and society. His first book, The Art of the Long View(1991), is considered a seminal publication on scenario planning and was recently voted the No. 1 futures book by the Association of Professional Futurists. He also co-authored The Long Boom (1999), a vision for the world characterized by global openness, prosperity, and discovery; When Good Companies Do Bad Things (1999), an examination of and argument for corporate social responsibility; and China’s Futures (2001), which describes very different scenarios for China. He publishes and lectures widely and served as a script consultant o
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Emmanuel Laroche
Award-wining author, born and raised in France, followed by a career in food in the U.S., Emmanuel Laroche has had access to some of the world’s best food, wine, and cocktails, and to the incredible people who created it all. Emmanuel went on to create his flavors unknown podcast, where for the last four years he has interviewed some of the most acclaimed chefs, pastry chefs, mixologists, and new culinary leaders in the U.S., about how they got their start, where their inspiration comes from, what their greatest challenges are, their leadership style, and much more.
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W. Brian Arthur
William Brian Arthur is an economist credited with developing the modern approach to increasing returns. He has lived and worked in Northern California for many years. He is an authority on economics in relation to complexity theory, technology and financial markets.
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