Mainstream economics is a term used to refer to widely-accepted economics as taught across prominent universities, and in contrast to heterodox economics. It has been associated with neoclassical economics and with the neoclassical synthesis, which combines neoclassical methods and Keynesian approach macroeconomics.

Mainstream economists are not generally separated into schools, but two major contemporary orthodox economic schools of thought are the "saltwater and freshwater schools." The saltwater schools consist of the universities and other institutions located near the east and west coast of the United States, such as Berkeley, Harvard, Cornell, MIT, University of Pennsylvania, Princeton, Columbia, Duke, Stanford, and Yale. Freshwater schools include the University of Chicago, Carnegie Mellon University, the University of Rochester, and the University of Minnesota. They were referred to as the 'freshwater school' since Pittsburgh, Chicago, Rochester, and Minneapolis are located nearer to the Great Lakes. The Saltwater school is associated with Keynesian ideas of government intervention into the free market, while the Freshwater schools are skeptical of the benefits of the government. Mainstream economists do not, in general, identify themselves as members of a particular school; they may, however, be associated with approaches within a field such as the rational-expectations approach to macroeconomics.

Thomas James DiLorenzo (born August 8, 1954) is an American economics professor at Loyola University Maryland. He is an adherent of the Austrian School of Economics. He is a senior faculty member of the Ludwig von Mises Institute and an associated scholar of the Abbeville Institute. He was formerly an affiliated scholar of the League of the South Institute, the research arm of the pro-secession League of the South (though he has denied any lasting affiliation, noting that he only gave a few lectures there shortly after its founding). He holds a Ph.D. in Economics from Virginia Tech.

DiLorenzo has devoted much effort to scholarly historical revisionism, focusing on what has been called "the Lincoln Cult" as a political and historical phenomenon. In the same vein, he has spoken out in favor of the secession of the Confederate States of America, defending the right of these states to secede in a view similar to that of abolitionist Lysander Spooner. He has also criticized the crediting of the New Deal for ending the Great Depression.

Mark Thornton is an American economist of the Austrian School. Thornton has been described by the Advocates for Self-Government as "one of America's experts on the economics of illegal drugs." Thornton has written extensively on that topic, as well as on the economics of the American Civil War, economic bubbles, and public finance. He successfully predicted the housing bubble, the top in home builder stocks, the bust in housing and the world economic crisis.

Thornton received his B.S. from St. Bonaventure University (1982), and his Ph.D. from Auburn University (1989). Thornton taught economics at Auburn University for a number of years, additionally serving as founding faculty advisor for the Auburn University Libertarians. He also served on the faculty of Columbus State University, and is now a senior fellow and resident faculty member at the Ludwig von Mises Institute. He is currently the Book Review Editor for the Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics.

Libertarian organizations including the Independent Institute, the Cato Institute, and the Mises Institute have published Thornton's writings on drug prohibition and prohibition in general. Thornton contributed a chapter to Jefferson Fish's book How to Legalize Drugs. He has also been interviewed on the topic of prohibition by members of the mainstream press. His research and publications are the basis of the Iron Law of Prohibition which states that the enforcement of prohibition increases the potency and danger of consuming illegal drugs. Thornton's first book, The Economics of Prohibition, was praised by Murray Rothbard, who declared:

Ronald Ernest "Ron" Paul (born August 20, 1935) is an American politician who has been the U.S. Representative for Texas's 14th congressional district, which includes Galveston, since 1997, and a three-time candidate for President of the United States, as a Libertarian in 1988 and as a Republican in 2008 and currently 2012. He is an outspoken critic of American foreign and monetary policies, including the Military–industrial complex and the Federal Reserve, and is known for his libertarian-leaning views, often differing from his own party on certain issues.

A native of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Paul is a graduate of Gettysburg College and Duke University School of Medicine, where he earned his medical degree. He served as a medical officer in the United States Air Force from 1963 until 1968. He worked as an obstetrician-gynecologist from the 1960s to the 1980s, delivering more than 4,000 babies. He became the first Representative in history to serve concurrently with a child in the Senate when his son Rand Paul was elected to the United States Senate for Kentucky in 2010.

Steve Keen is a professor in economics and finance at the University of Western Sydney. He classes himself as a post-Keynesian, criticizing both modern neoclassical economics and Marxian economics as inconsistent, unscientific and empirically unsupported. The major influences on Keen's thinking about economics include John Maynard Keynes, Hyman Minsky, Piero Sraffa, Joseph Alois Schumpeter, and François Quesnay. His recent work mostly concentrates on mathematical modeling and simulation of financial instability. He is a Fellow at the Centre for Policy Development.

Most of Steve Keen's recent work focuses on modeling Hyman Minsky's financial instability hypothesis and Irving Fisher's debt deflation. The hypothesis predicts that an overly large debt to GDP ratio can cause deflation and depression. Here, the falling of the price level results in a continually rising real quantity of outstanding debt. Moreover, the continued deleveraging of outstanding debts increases the rate of deflation. Thus, debt and deflation act on and react to one another, resulting in a debt-deflation spiral. The outcome is a depression. Steve Keen argues that the current global economic crisis is the result of too much debt.