Grand Pursuit: The Story of Economic Genius by Sylvia Nasar
The study of economics may have underpinned human development, but does it really have to be so dull?
As it happens, the lives and struggles of the intellectuals who pioneered the field turn out to be rather more lively than the drab theorems they inspired.
Such is the premise of Grand Pursuit: The Story of Economic Genius, a non-fiction work by Sylvia Nasar, who seeks to coax economics out of its ivory tower and plant its practitioners at the centre of our understanding of modern history.
The author of A Beautiful Mind writes a timely reminder of the importance of the so-called dismal science, at a time when its modern adherents are under fire for not having foreseen our current economic predicament.
Written almost as a novel and aimed at those without a background in economics, the book charts capitalism's evolution through the eyes of the people who invented it, as the great thinkers of the field totter through Victorian London, Vienna between the World Wars, and 1940s Washington. The arguments that became economic dogma are thrashed out and reworked in light of world events, such as Germany's reparations for the First World War and the onset of the Great Depression.
The development of monetary policy to combat recessions, for example, is set against a backdrop of the intellectual fight against fascism and communism, and then its more literal and bloody successor.
But the book's ambition falls slightly short.
Ms Nasar ends around 1960, ignoring the rise of neoliberalism and an era of deregulation, to which many have linked the world economy's current convulsions.
The book's most gnawing failure is that it skirts around the by-products of capitalism.
Ms Nasar does little to address levels of inequality between rich and poor, and environmental decay, other than with the unspoken reminder that these are, on the whole, better outcomes than mass starvation and world war.
That may be true, but it is on this point that the book's hero-worship for the great economists shines through, leaving a pervasive sense of misplaced capitalist triumphalism. It is compellingly written, full of detail and vivid anecdotes, and with a refreshing focus on people rather than prices.
But if the author set out to address the most pressing questions of contemporary economics, many remain squarely within her blind spot.
The Quote: “The idea that humanity could turn tables on economic necessity – mastering rather than being enslaved by material circumstances – is so new that Jane Austen never entertained it.” Sylvia Nasar, author of A Beautiful Mind and Grand Pursuit.