Grand pursuit : the story of economic genius / Sylvia Nasar.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Nasar, Sylvia.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Economics--History.

Economics.

History.

Economists.

Economic history.

Physical Description:

xv, 558 pages, 16 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations ; 25 cm

Edition:

First Simon and Schuster hardcover edition.

Place of Publication:

New York : Simon & Schuster, 2011.

Summary:

The epic story of the making of modern economics, and of how economics rescued mankind from squalor and deprivation by placing its material fate in its own hands rather than in fate. Nasar's account begins with Charles Dickens and Henry Mayhew observing the condition of the poor majority in mid-nineteenth-century London, the richest place in the world. She describes the often heroic efforts of Marx and others to put those insights into action, with revolutionary consequences. From John Maynard Keynes to India's Nobel Prize winner Amartya Sen, she shows how the insights of these activist thinkers transformed the world--from one city, London, to the developed nations in Europe and America, and now the entire planet. In Nasar's dramatic narrative we witness men and women responding to personal crises, world wars, revolutions, economic upheavals, and each other's ideas to turn back Malthus and transform the "dismal science" into a triumph over mankind's hitherto age-old destiny of misery.

Contents:

Perfectly new: Engels and Karl Marx in the age of miracles

Must there be a proletariat? Alfred Marshall's patron saint

Miss Potter's profession: Beatrice Webb and the housekeeping state

Empire of energy: Irving Fisher and the cross of gold

Creative destruction: Joseph Schumpeter and economic evolution

The last days of mankind: Schumpeter in Vienna

"Europe is dying" : Maynard Keynes at Versailles

The joyless street: Schumpeter and Hayek in Vienna

Immaterial mechanisms of the mind: Keynes and Fisher in the 1920s

Starter trouble: the Great Depression

Searching: Webb and Robinson in the 1930s

Economists' war: Keynes and Friedman in WWII

Exile: Schumpeter and Hayek in WWII

Past and future: Keynes at Bretton Woods

Road from serfdom: Hayek and the German miracle

Paul Samuelson goes to Washington

Inventing the future: Robinson in Moscow and Beijing

Tryst with destiny.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 467-526) and index.

ISBN:

9780684872988

0684872986

9780684872995

0684872994

9781439198612

1439198616

OCLC:

646113144