Sunday, May 14, 2006

For more than half a century, Robert L. Heilbroner's "The Worldly Philosophers" has stood as the most concise and insightful history of economic thought. Heilbroner died last year, but were he alive, I'm sure he would consider David Warsh a worthy successor. In Knowledge and the Wealth of Nations (Norton), Warsh, a former economic columnist for the Boston Globe, has surveyed the complex economic breakthroughs of the past 20 years, put them in their historical context and distilled them into a compelling narrative. Warsh organizes his story around Paul Romer, the Stanford University professor whose pioneering and highly mathematical work on economic growth has been at the center of a generation of research into imperfect competition, network externalities, knowledge spillovers and increasing returns to scale. And if you don't have a clue what those expressions mean, don't worry -- the glory of this elegantly written book is that all you need to bring to it is your curiosity.

-- S.P.