Grand Pursuit: The Story of Economic Genius Review

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(More customer reviews)In the Grand Pursuit, Sylvia Nasar, the widely acclaimed author of A Beautiful Mind, writes a sweeping history of the evolution of modern economics through the lens of the discipline's most famous scholars and theorists. It is ambitious in scope, based on some very solid research and often a compelling read. But at the same time it is overly broad and, ultimately, does not yield many new insights into its subject matter.
The author argues, rightly, that the idea that human prosperity could be created and managed is a relatively new one. Before the mid-nineteenth century most assumed that the vast bulk of humanity was destined to live in poverty and squalor and that there was not much that could be done about this. But during this era, a group of scholars including Marx, Engels, and Schumpeter emerged and contended that the lives of human beings could be improved through the proper management of the economy. Nasar retells how difficult economic circumstances have been at certain points in world history and looks at the efforts of leading economists to contribute to prosperity during their respective eras. In Nasar's broad survey we encounter many of the best-known economists of the past 150 years and learn about their personal lives, their contributions to the discipline, and how they tried to influence policy. Throughout her skillfully constructed narrative, Nasar demonstrates a remarkable grasp of the major ideas of almost every major economist that readers could think of. She describes the careers of John Maynard Keynes, Beatrice Potter Webb (the inventor of the idea of the welfare state), Milton Friedman and Amartya Sen among others both to the discipline of economics and to policy making. In this sense, the book is probably the most comprehensive history of its kind.
But the great breadth of the work can also at times be a weakness. Often, Nasar can only manage to introduce a key economist before she moves on to the next thinker. Moreover, the author rarely offers a new interpretation or critique of the many economists that she introduces. The relatively limited number of pages that she can devote to each of the scholars that she talks about more or less precludes this kind of detailed analysis that those with a more serious interest in the topic will crave.
For me, the most significant disappointment in this book is it's misleading title. It is not really a history of economic genius. We do not learn very much about what made the many economists that Nasar introduces us to geniuses. She does not really even attempt to show how their minds worked, how they came up with their theories, and what made their thinking unique. She focuses much more heavily on how these scholars interacted and how they tried to shape what the different governments were doing. In this sense, the book is far more conventional than Nasar's compelling biography of John Nash, to which The Grand Pursuit will inevitably be compared.
Nevertheless, if you are interested in a broad retelling of the history of modern economics, there are far worse places to start than Nasar's new book. It does provide an informative, readable summary of the careers and thinking of the most important economists of the nineteenth and twentieth century even if it does not tell us very much that is exciting or revelatory about them.

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In a sweeping narrative, the author of the megabestseller A Beautiful Mind takes us on a journey through modern history with the men and women who changed the lives of every single person on the planet. It's 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 and publishing the condition of the poor majority in mid-nineteenth-century London, the richest and most glittering place in the world. This was a new pursuit. She describes the often heroic efforts of Marx, Engels, Alfred Marshall, Beatrice and Sydney Webb, and the American Irving Fisher to put those insights into action—with revolutionary consequences for the world. From the great John Maynard Keynes to Schumpeter, Hayek, Keynes's disciple Joan Robinson, the influential American economists Paul Samuelson and Milton Freedman, and 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 to the entire planet. In Nasar's dramatic narrative of these discoverers 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 and early death. This idea, unimaginable less than 200 years ago, is a story of trial and error, but ultimately transcendent, as it is rendered here in a stunning and moving narrative.

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