As a very partial list, Simon Kuznets, Richard Easterlin, Deidre McCloskey, and Joel Mokyr have all pointed to non-economic factors in explaining the causes of modern economic growth.

This was first noted, and named, by the economist Simon Kuznets, Nobel laureate and originator of the principles of national income and product accounting that measure the economic performance of countries (Kuznets, 1971).

Even Simon Kuznets, the creator of the national tallying system that led to GDP famously warned: "the welfare of a nation can scarcely be inferred from a measurement of national income." More recently, a commission chaired by Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz concluded that the system of national accounts should shift Its emphasis from measuring economic production to measuring people's wellbeing in the context of sustainability.

For a while, the Kuznets curve was the main model explaining inequality, but since inequality began rising again in the 1980s, Simon Kuznets's original model became less useful and relevant.

The EKC was popularized by Grossman and Krueger (1991) based on a hypothesis made by Simon Kuznets (1955).

This idea is the brainchild of Simon Kuznets in 1937 and intended to capture all economic production by individuals, companies, and the government in a single measure, which should rise in good times and fall in bad.

The starting point is the Kuznets curve, the 1950s idea from Simon Kuznets that economic growth first raises inequality, before causing it to fall.

In the 1950s, the Belarussian-born American economist Simon Kuznets hypothesized that income inequality as a nation industrializes can be shaped like an inverted U--it increases in the early stages of growth, reaches an apex, and then starts tapering down as the economy matures.The switch begins to happen after a critical mass of people abandon farm life for the big cities, where they obtain better education, benefit from economies of scale, and start agitating for policy changes.

Indeed, a footnote points to the work of Simon Kuznets, who forty years ago debunked the idea that antisemitic violence was the main spur to migration.