Art Laffer: Napkin Artist and Most Influential Economist of the ‘80s

Everyone hates taxes. Everyone who gets a paycheck, that is. There are few experiences as universally gut-wrenching as the disgust one feels when the government skims away income before it even sees a bank account. We know that the government has legitimate uses for our money, but, at the same time, we wish they could take less of it away from us. Fantastical as it might seem, a man named Art Laffer once proved how the government could do just that: take less of your money in taxes and still increase government revenue, and he did it using a napkin.

The story begins with Art Laffer studying mathematics at Yale in the 1960s. During the course of his studies, he took an opportunity to study abroad for a year in Germany at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, and while at LMU he took his first courses in economics. According to his grandson, Art Laffer, III, he immediately fell in love with economics and changed his major upon returning to Yale (Personal interview). He graduated with a B.A. from Yale in 1963 and continued to pursue economics at Stanford, where he focused on international economics (Encyclopaedia Britannica). Laffer continued in academia while pursuing a Ph.D, becoming a member of the faculty at the University of Chicago in 1967 and serving as an Associate Professor of Business Economics at the University of…