LOUIS ORTH KELSO (December 4, 1913 - February 17, 1991) was a political economist in the classical tradition of Smith, Marx and Keynes. He was also a corporate and financial lawyer, author, lecturer and merchant banker who is chiefly remembered today as the inventor and pioneer of the employee stock ownership plan (ESOP), invented to enable working people without savings to buy stock in their employer company and pay for it out of its future dividend yield.
Born in Denver, Colorado, Kelso graduated from the University of Colorado at Boulder in 1937 with a B.S. degree in business administration and finance. He went on to law school in Boulder, receiving a J.D. in 1938. He then joined a Denver law firm, Pershing, Bosworth, Dick & Dawson from 1938-1942.
After the war, Kelso taught constitutional law at Boulder and then moved to San Francisco, California, where he became a law partner with Kelso, Cotton, Seligman & Ray.
He died in 1991 at the age of 77.
MORTIMER JEROME ADLER (December 28, 1902 - June 28, 2001) was an American philosopher, where he worked within the Aristotelian and Thomistic traditions, as well as an educator and popular author.
Born in New York City to Jewish immigrants, he received a doctorate in psychology from Columbia University and joined their law school faculty in 1930. He also taught philosophy to business executives at the Aspen Institute.
He founded and served as director of the Institute for Philosophical Research in 1952 and served on the Board of Editors of Encyclopædia Britannica from its inception in 1949. He also founded the Paideia Program, a grade-school curriculum centered around guided reading and discussion of difficult works, and the Center for the Study of The Great Ideas in 1990 in Chicago.
Adler died in 2001 at the age of 98.