John Rae (1 June 1796, Footdee, Aberdeen – 12 July 1872, Staten Island, NY), was a Scottish/Canadian economist.
He moved with gold-miners to California in 1849, and a couple of years later, poor and sick with malaria, he found enough money to board a ship to the Kingdom of Hawaiʻi, where he worked in many different professions.
[2] Rae's most famous work was the Statement of Some New Principles on the Subject of Political Economy,[3] republished in 1905 as The Sociological Theory of Capital.
[4] Influenced by both Adam Smith and David Hume, his influence lingered all the way to the 20th century; so much so that economists Irving Fisher and Austrian economist Eugen Böhm von Bawerk prefaced their work with Rae's, thanking him for contributions to modern economics even when very few had heard of his work.
The prize has been named after John Rae (1796–1872) who did most of his work in Canada and was "a genuine precursor of endogenous growth theory.