As a literary technique, an author surrogate is a fictional character who expresses the ideas, questions, personality and morality of the author. On occasion, authors insert themselves under their own name into their works, typically for humorous or surrealistic effect.

Frequently, the author surrogate is the same as the main character and/or the protagonist, and is also often the narrator. As an example, the author surrogate may be the one who delivers political diatribe, expressing the author's beliefs at an appropriate time, or expound on the strengths and weakness of other characters, thereby communicating directly the author's opinion on the characters in question. Philosophers may use author-surrogates to express their personal positions, especially if these are unpopular or run counter to established views. British writer David Hume used the author-surrogate 'Philo' in the Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion. Michael Crichton used his character Ian Malcolm to express views on catastrophic system failure in his novel Jurassic Park. Perhaps the best-known philosophical author-surrogate is Socrates in the writings of Plato.

Paul Robin Krugman ( /ˈkruːɡmən/; born February 28, 1953) is an American economist, Professor of Economics and International Affairs at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University, Centenary Professor at the London School of Economics, and an op-ed columnist for The New York Times. In 2008, Krugman won the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences (informally the Nobel Prize in Economics) for his contributions to New Trade Theory and New Economic Geography. According to the Nobel Prize Committee, the prize was given for Krugman's work explaining the patterns of international trade and the geographic concentration of wealth, by examining the impact of economies of scale and of consumer preferences for diverse goods and services.

Krugman is known in academia for his work on international economics (including trade theory, economic geography, and international finance),liquidity traps and currency crises. He is the 17th most widely cited economist in the world today and is ranked among the most influential academic thinkers in the US.

Robert Wexler (born January 2, 1961) is the president of the Washington-based S. Daniel Abraham Center for Middle East Peace.

Wexler was a Democratic member of the U.S. House of Representatives, representing Florida's 19th congressional district, from 1997 until his resignation on January 3, 2010.

Wexler was born in Queens, New York to Sonny and Sandra Wexler. He and his family moved to South Florida when he was ten. Wexler graduated from Hollywood Hills High School in Hollywood, Florida and later attended Emory University for a year. He transferred to the University of Florida, where he received his Bachelor of Arts degree in political science in 1982. Wexler received his law degree from The George Washington University Law School in 1985 and was a lawyer in private practice with Shutts & Bowen before serving in the House.

Wexler served in the Florida Senate from 1990 to 1996 before being elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in the 1996 election, filling the open seat vacated by fellow Democrat Harry Johnston. He has been reelected five times, never facing serious opposition in one of the most Democratic districts in Florida. On January 3, 2010, he resigned to become executive director of the Center for Middle East Peace and Economic Cooperation, a Washington-based think-tank.

Michael J. Sandel (born March 5, 1953) is an American political philosopher and a professor at Harvard University. He is best known for the Harvard course 'Justice', which is available to view online, and for his critique of John Rawls' A Theory of Justice in his Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (1982). He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2002.

Born in Minneapolis to a Jewish family, which moved to Los Angeles when he was thirteen. A high achiever, he was the President of his senior class at Palisades High School (1971), graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Brandeis University (1975), and received his doctorate from Balliol College, Oxford, as a Rhodes Scholar, where he studied under philosopher Charles Taylor.

Sandel subscribes to a certain version of communitarianism (although he is uncomfortable with the label), and in this vein he is perhaps best known for his critique of John Rawls's A Theory of Justice. Rawls' argument depends on the assumption of the veil of ignorance, which he claims allows us to become "unencumbered selves".

Bernard Lietaer (born in 1942 in Lauwe, Belgium) is a civil engineer, economist, author and professor. He studies monetary systems and promotes the idea that communities can benefit from creating their own local or complementary currency, which circulate parallel with national currencies.

Bernard Lietaer, the author of "The Future of Money: Beyond Greed and Scarcity" and the forthcoming "Of Human Wealth," has been active in the realm of money systems for close to 40 years in a wide variety of functions. With the publication of his post-graduate thesis at MIT in 1971 (which included a description of "floating exchanges") and the Nixon Shock of that same year which eradicated the Bretton Woods system by unhinging the US dollar value from its gold standard and inaugurated the new era of universal floating exchanges (previous to that time the only "floating exchanges" involved some exotic currencies in Latin America), the fledgling management consultant suddenly found himself to be at the center of the financial world's attention. The techniques that he had developed for those marginal Latin American currencies were overnight the only systematic research which could be used to deal with all of the major currencies of the world. A major US bank negotiated exclusive rights to his approach which required that he begin another career. While at the Central Bank in Belgium (National Bank of Belgium) he implemented the convergence mechanism (ECU) to the single European currency system. During that period, he also served as President of Belgium’s Electronic Payment System. His consultant experience in monetary aspects on four continents ranges from multinational corporations to developing countries.