There is no agreed-upon definition of power in economics. At least five definitions of power have been used:

In general, those with more power also have more freedom than others and may be able to exploit others in society and/or cause some sort of market failure.

It is worth noting that information is also a form of power, in the case of two agents entering into a contract; if one agent knows that their deal with turn out significantly better, or worse, than the other suspects, then they are exercising a form of informational economic power (see information asymmetry).

Niall Campbell Douglas Ferguson (born 18 April 1964) is a British historian. His speciality is financial and economic history, particularly hyperinflation and the bond markets, as well as the history of colonialism.

Ferguson, who was born in Glasgow, is the Laurence A. Tisch Professor of History at Harvard University. He was educated at the private Glasgow Academy in Scotland, and at Magdalen College, Oxford.

Ferguson's books include Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World, The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World and Civilization: The West and the Rest, all of which he has also presented as Channel 4 television series.

In 2004 he was named as one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time magazine. He is currently^[when?] a contributing editor for Bloomberg Television and a columnist for Newsweek. He is currently^[when?] working on the official biography of Henry Kissinger to whom he has been granted unprecedented access.

Ferguson was born the son of a doctor father and a physics teacher mother in Glasgow on 18 April 1964, and lived for a time near Ibrox Park. He attended The Glasgow Academy.^{[citation needed]}

Naomi Klein (born May 8, 1970) is a Canadian author and social activist known for her political analyses and criticism of corporate globalization.

Klein was born in Montreal, Quebec, and brought up in a Jewish family with a history of peace activism. Her parents had moved to Montreal from the U.S. in 1967 as war resisters to the Vietnam War. Her mother, documentary film-maker Bonnie Sherr Klein, is best known for her anti-pornography film Not a Love Story. Her father, Michael Klein, is a physician and a member of Physicians for Social Responsibility. Her brother, Seth Klein, is director of the British Columbia office of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives.

Her paternal grandparents were communists who began to turn against the Soviet Union after the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and had abandoned communism by 1956. In 1942 her grandfather Phil Klein, an animator at Disney, was fired after the Disney animators' strike, and went to work at a shipyard instead. Klein's father grew up surrounded by ideas of social justice and racial equality, but found it "difficult and frightening to be the child of Communists", a so-called red diaper baby.

Joseph Eugene Stiglitz, ForMemRS, FBA, (born February 9, 1943) is an American economist and a professor at Columbia University. He is a recipient of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences (2001) and the John Bates Clark Medal (1979). He is also the former Senior Vice President and Chief Economist of the World Bank. He is known for his critical view of the management of globalization, free-market economists (whom he calls "free market fundamentalists") and some international institutions like the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.

In 2000, Stiglitz founded the Initiative for Policy Dialogue (IPD), a think tank on international development based at Columbia University. Since 2001, he has been a member of the Columbia faculty, and has been a University Professor since 2003. He also chairs the University of Manchester's Brooks World Poverty Institute and is a member of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences. Stiglitz is an honorary doctor of Durham Business School, an honorary doctor at the Charles University, an honorary professor at Tsinghua University School of Public Policy and Management and a member of the Executive and Supervisory Committee (ESC) of CERGE-EI in Prague. Stiglitz is one of the most frequently cited economists in the world.

The term black people is used in some socially-based systems of racial classification for humans of a dark-skinned phenotype, relative to other racial groups represented in a particular social context. Different societies apply different criteria regarding who is classified as "black", and often social variables such as class and socio-economic status also play a role, so that relatively dark-skinned people can be classified as white if they fulfill other social criteria of "whiteness" and relatively light-skinned people can be classified as black if they fulfill the social criteria for "blackness" in a particular setting.

As a biological phenotype being "black" is often associated with the very dark skin colors of some people who are classified as "black". But, particularly in the United States, the racial or ethnic classification also refers to people with all possible kinds of skin pigmentation from the darkest through to the very lightest skin colors, including albinos, if they are believed by others to have African ancestry, or to exhibit cultural traits associated with being "African-American". As a result, in the United States the term "black people" is not an indicator of skin color but of socially based racial classification.