First use of -nomics after a name

Several people have had -nomics added to their name to indicate their economic policies. For example, Rogernomics and Abenomics .

To whom was the first -nomics attached? Was it Ronald Reagan?

Wiktionary's entry on -nomics mentions that it's related to economics, and provides etymological information on that, but not on when it first got attached to people.


According to Wikipedia, the first U.S. President to receive the Surnamenomics treatment was Richard Nixon. A Google Books search finds mentions of Nixonomics going back to 1971. Martin Bronfenbrenner devoted an entire academic paper to "Nixonomics and Stagflation Reconsidered," in Michigan Business Papers, issue 57 (1971).

The possibility that Nixon was the first person of any public notoriety to have -nomics suffixed to his name is greatly increased, in my opinion, by the unusual suitability of the name Nixon to portmanteauing with economics. For one thing, the x sound in Nixon and the x sound in economics make a catchy pairing—but even better, the two words share an -on- term that effectively allows the first syllable Nix- in Nixon to replace the first syllable ec- in economics. This is the kind of fortuity that journalists (and business professors) can't resist exploiting. Keynesonomics and Marxonomics (for example) don't have the same cachet.


Research is ongoing: so far I've uncovered a February, 1970 reference to Nixonomics, which is undoubtedly a predecessor to Reaganonomics:

TIME, "Business: The Rising Attack on Nixonomics" ...

Later, after having exhausted the resources available to a lazy man: Although a source on the web claims that the term 'Nixonomics' was coined by Walter Heller for an eponymous speech given in October, 1969, William Safire stopped just short of suggesting in a 1982 New York Times article that he coined the term himself:

In the summer of 1969, I wrote a memorandum for my White House colleagues using the term Nixonomics to hail the ingenious replacement of the Democrats' ''new economics.'' About that time, columnists Evans and Novak were the first to use Nixonomics in print. Walter Heller, a father of the ''new economics,'' was quoted in Time magazine in November 1969, using Nixonomics disparagingly. Since that time, the term I used with such high hopes has fallen on hard times.

(From The New York Times, "ON LANGUAGE; THAT ICY TINGLE", By William Safire, November 7, 1982.)

Ten years later, in 1992, Safire backpedalled from his earlier suggestion by rather vaguely attributing the first uses of 'Nixonomics' to "some of us". He then parenthetically suggested that Nixon was the first to acquire the tag. Although Safire reasoned the suffix would've fit with Johnson also, because of the terminal en, he declared the suffix wasn't used for Johnson:

For the omics suffix to work, the President's name must end in an n. This all began when some of us in 1969 began pushing Nixonomics. (Although Johnsonomics would have been an effective neologism, it was not used, suggesting that Nixonomics was the form's first Presidential use.)

(From The New York Times, "ON LANGUAGE; Retronym Watch", by William Safire, November 1, 1992.)

Beyond and before presidential monickers: I speculate that the rather lax but simultaneously frenetic atmosphere of the late 1960s contributed to the coinage and acceptance of 'Nixonomics', which then spawned a plethora of similar coinages predicated on 'economics'. However, the suffix '-nomics' is a more general combinative form denoting

...the science or study of a subject specified by the first element.

(From the OED.)

In the more rigorous 1950s and before, I doubt such coinages would've met with general acceptance. However, I continued the search, looking for coinages based on economic luminaries such as Adam Smith and Karl Marx. Those searches were not productive.