Perhaps nobody has turned theoretical economics into moving biography so masterfully as Sylvia Nasar did in “A Beautiful Mind,” the story of a brilliant but psychotic mathematician, John Nash, who eventually conquered his inner demons with the aid of a loving wife and nabbed a Nobel Prize for economics for his pioneering work in game theory. Nasar’s haunting, uplifting tale, based on years of research and interviews, made for not only splendid reading but also a wonderful movie starring Russell Crowe and Jennifer Connelly.
Now Nasar is at it again, not with the biography of an economic genius but an economic idea: that humankind is not condemned by God and nature to a life of grim subsistence, as seemed to be the case for several millennia, but has the capacity to organize its economic affairs to provide almost limitless possibilities for comfort and fulfillment. Although we take those possibilities for granted today, it was not always so. In “Grand Pursuit,” Nasar chronicles the development of economic thought from its pessimistic roots as the “dismal science” to the intellectual underpinnings of modern prosperity, social justice and individual liberty.
(Simon & Schuster) - ‘Grand Pursuit: The Story of Economic Genius’ by Sylvia Nasar
“Grand Pursuit” is a worthy successor to Robert Heilbroner’s “The Worldly Philosophers,” a staple of introductory courses in economics. Nasar’s aim, however, is not to write intellectual history but to put the reader into the lives of the characters of a sweeping historical drama that extends from Victorian England to modern-day India. That she largely succeeds reflects the depth and breadth of her research but also the elegance of her prose.
She divides her drama into three “acts”: Hope, Fear and Confidence. Her story starts with Charles Dickens and Thomas Carlyle and the intellectual ferment of a rapidly industrializing London in 1840, which for all its Oliver Twist-like poverty, soon put the lie to Thomas Malthus’s notion that population would inevitably outrun prosperity.
Nasar introduces us to the odd couple of the proletarian revolution: Friedrich Engels, the politically wayward son of a Manchester industrialist; and Karl Marx, an undisciplined German intellectual who, without ever having stepped inside a factory, summoned factory workers to take control of the means of production. Marx’s dislike of capitalism manifested itself in his prediction that it would collapse of its own weight, but also in a life filled with missed deadlines and unpaid bills. We learn that he got his wife’s maid pregnant and suffered from myopia, a disease that, Nasar quips, might explain why he failed to notice a prosperous middle class growing up all around him in London.
Ironically, it was a mathematician and Cambridge don, Alfred Marshall, who spent all his time in mills and foundries before hitting upon the essential truth of modern economics: that competition begets rising productivity and rising productivity begets wealth, not just for the factory owner but for the most skilled and productive workers. Marshall added human capital to the economic equation.
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