Marshall made it just short of 82.

One more: Leonid Hurwicz, winner of the 2007 Nobel Prize for Economics, lived to be 90.

Poor Keynes? He lived to 63, the same age my parents were when they died. And my mother was an economist. Imagine how young she would have died had she stuck with chemistry.

Maybe Keynes would have laster longer if not for credit negotiations between the UK and the US; having Harry Dexter White beat the crap out of him every couple of months took its toll.

Paul McCracken (currently 94). Chairman of the CEA under Nixon and a professor at the University of Michigan.

The effect of Status on longevity appears to be real. Check this paper out for the difference between winning and 'merely' being nominated for the nobel prize.

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/B6V8K-4SRCJHY-1/2/4f450b0f1484e88d721ce39f0979e6f7

It seems to be a bit of an overstatement to say Keynesian economics became something of a backburner. There aren't that many brands of economics that are identified with their instigator's name.

Keynes had long standing health issues and worked himself into fatal decline. His father John Neville Keynes (also an economist, who formulated the "positive economics/normative economics" distinction) outlived famous Keynes and lived to be 97.

Status and life span, yes. Economists and life span, not so much.

Most economists would say something like "selection bias" here. To become famous as an economist you need to live a long time so that you´ve trained lots of other economists who thus make you famous perhaps?

We're talking about the difference between an unremarkable lifespan of, say, 77, and a remarkable lifespan of 90. How many students does the average academic economist take on in his eighties, compared to the number he taught earlier in life? Plus, many of them were renowned long before their last cohorts of students had even left university. Galbraith only died in 2006 but his reputation was established well before that.

No, what's more likely is that men from the upper middle classes who make it to middle age in a Western nation and have a job that isn't too physically demanding or too stressful simply tend to live a long time. In Britain right now, a 65 year old man has an average life expectancy of 81; and prosperous, successful middle-class men will have an average well above that. I'd guess you'd see something similar for other academics - historians, say.

Maybe that's why our insurance rates are so low.

Leave it to economists to really prove the axiom of "publish or perish."

But it calls to mind the joke about lawyers; you want a heart transplant from a lawyer because it's been used so little. Do famous economists live long because they put so few stresses on their hearts????

As a counterexample, I'd cite David Gordon. He died relatively young at 51 from heart failure. He was as rigorous as anyone in his economic research, and as dedicated as anyone in mentoring the next generation. But he also never ignored the real world consequences of what economists did.

It's a lot more stressful to actually care about eliminating poverty than to just theorize about it.

Alas for David Gordon! We need him now more than ever. Who are his closest followers today?