Robert Giffen, 1837-1910, was a Scottish economist and statistician who also had a great reputation in the fields of finance and taxation. He also participated in the editing process in numerous publication, such as the Daily News, The Economist and The Times. However, Robert Giffen is mostly known for giving name to the concept Giffen goods.

It was Alfred Marshall who, in the third edition of his “Principles of Economics”,1895, wrote:

“As Mr. Giffen has pointed out, a rise in the price of bread makes so large a drain on the resources of the poorer labouring families and raises so much the marginal utility of money to them, that they are forced to curtail their consumption of meat and the more expensive farinaceous foods: and, bread being still the cheapest food which they can get and will take, they consume more, and not less of it.”

In other words, Giffen goods are those inferior goods whose demand moves in the same direction as the price variation. This meaning, raising the price of the good will increase its demand.

Abram Bergson, 1914-2003, was an American economist that worked for many governmental and federal agencies including the Russian Economic subdivision of the Office of Strategic Services. He was also a professor at Columbia University, Texas and Harvard. His main area of research was welfare economics but he also provided a lot of research and studies of the Soviet Union economy, marked by a combination of encyclopaedic knowledge of Soviet statistics, theoretical analysis and immense industry knowledge.

Concerning welfare economics, in Bergson’s famous paper “A Reformulation of Certain Aspects of Welfare Economics”, 1938, he defined and discussed the concept of an individualistic social welfare function. This function enables the necessary conditions for an economic optimum to be calculated without the assumption of cardinal utility. Furthermore, the function is used as a way to prioritise and establish an order of preference between different situations that meet the requirements of Vilfredo Pareto for social optima. Bergson postulated the need to explicitly accept judgments of value as a way to develop indifference functions. This concept was subsequently utilised and developed by Paul Samuelson and became an integral part of the welfare economics literature.

Roy Forbes Harrod, 1900-1978, was an English economist, friend and a follower of John Maynard Keynes. He published a wide variety of economic papers, many of which were on economic growth, but he also conducted research on currency and inflation. In addition, he also wrote about memory and the theory of knowledge, reflecting on probability as a limitation to induction. Through his works underlines a dynamic view of the economy, more sophisticated and realistic, therefore, than the static view of most theorists.

However, Harrod is best known for his work “The life of John Maynard Keynes”, 1951, a biography of his fellow. He is also known for developing what is nowadays known as the Harrod–Domar model that was initially proposed by him in 1939 and later developed independently by Evsey Domar. This theory was a pioneering mathematical model about the dynamics of economic growth that laid the foundations of the economic growth theory after World War II.