The profit motive is the concept in economics that refers to individuals being provided incentive to relinquish something (e.g. capital, expertise, labour) for deployment to a productive purpose. If humans are rational and self-interested (see Homo economicus), then they should only divert some of their personal resource toward production for others in society (i.e. invest) if there is some payback for their self-sacrifice and risk. If there was no profit motive then the rational actor would merely conserve their resource for personal use and no investment would occur. The concept of profit motive was first raised by Adam Smith to explain why rational actors should invest their personal resources and why they needed to be provided a rent for use of that capital. Adam Smith also explained why the profit motive was an intrinsic enabler of the efficient utilisation of an economy's resources toward society's overall benefit.

Economies that are utilising their economic resource for maximum sustainable societal benefit need to be both profit efficient and productivity efficient (including labour efficiency, resource efficiency and sustainability). The profit motive must be sufficiently high to incentivise owners of capital to deploy their capital, but not so high as to extract too much rent from the productive capacity of the economy.

Milton Friedman (July 31, 1912 – November 16, 2006) was an American economist, statistician, and author who taught at the University of Chicago for more than three decades. He was a recipient of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, and is known for his research on consumption analysis, monetary history and theory, and the complexity of stabilization policy. As a leader of the Chicago school of economics, he influenced the research agenda of the economics profession. A survey of economists ranked Friedman as the second most popular economist of the twentieth century behind John Maynard Keynes, and The Economist described him as "the most influential economist of the second half of the 20th century…possibly of all of it."

Friedman's challenges to what he later called "naive Keynesian" (as opposed to New Keynesian) theory began with his 1950s reinterpretation of the consumption function, and he became the main advocate opposing activist Keynesian government policies. In the late 1960s he described his own approach (along with all of mainstream economics) as using "Keynesian language and apparatus" yet rejecting its "initial" conclusions. During the 1960s he promoted an alternative macroeconomic policy known as "monetarism". He theorized there existed a "natural" rate of unemployment, and argued that governments could increase employment above this rate (e.g., by increasing aggregate demand) only at the risk of causing inflation to accelerate. He argued that the Phillips curve was not stable and predicted what would come to be known as stagflation. Friedman argued that, given the existence of the Federal Reserve, a constant small expansion of the money supply was the only wise policy.

Gwendolyn "Gwen" Stacy appears as a supporting character in Marvel Comics' Spider-Man series. Created by writer Stan Lee and artist Steve Ditko, she first appeared in The Amazing Spider-Man #31 (December 1965).

A blonde college student, Gwen was originally the first love of Peter Parker (Spider-Man) before the introduction of Mary Jane Watson. The Green Goblin (Norman Osborn) killed Gwen in The Amazing Spider-Man #121 (June 1973). Both the decision to kill Gwen and the method in which Marvel implemented it remain controversial among fans, but the death became a pivotal point in both Spider-Man’s history and in American comic books in general. Many point to Gwen's death as the end of the so-called Silver Age of comics. Spider-Man writers and fans disagree about who is the character’s "one true love;" Gwen or his subsequent love-interest Mary Jane. The character was ranked 89th in Comics Buyer's Guide's "100 Sexiest Women in Comics" list.

In the 2007 feature film Spider-Man 3, Gwen is portrayed by Bryce Dallas Howard. In the upcoming reboot The Amazing Spider-Man she will be played by Emma Stone.

James Beeland Rogers, Jr. (born October 19, 1942) is an American investor and author. He is currently based in Singapore. Rogers is the Chairman of Rogers Holdings and Beeland Interests, Inc. He was the co-founder of the Quantum Fund with George Soros and creator of the Rogers International Commodities Index (RICI).

Rogers is an outspoken proponent of the free market, but he does not consider himself a member of any school of thought. Rogers acknowledged, however, that his views best fit the label of Austrian School of economics.

Rogers was born in Baltimore, Maryland and raised in Demopolis, Alabama. He started in business at the age of five by selling peanuts and by picking up empty bottles that fans left behind at baseball games. He got his first job on Wall Street, at Dominick & Dominick, after graduating with a bachelor's degree in History from Yale University in 1964. Rogers then acquired a second BA degree in Philosophy, Politics and Economics from Balliol College, Oxford University in 1966.