Grand Pursuit: The Story of Economic Genius

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.

"Nasar's A Beautiful Mind mined a rich dramatic vein in the story of a solitary mathematical genius. Her new work looks to a broad sweep of modern economic history for similar magic — with mixed results. While the author rightly sees a vital and indeed dramatic core to the 'dismal science,' the narrative can feel desultory at times. Tracing the accompanying rise of economic theory in the development of global capitalism, Nasar's cast of (mostly) famous men and women seeks to tackle the increasingly disconcerting problem of widespread want in the midst of enormous concentrations of wealth. Her chronological narrative emphasizes a key tension between antistatist laissez faire ideas and the logic of the modern welfare state. A final chapter on Indian economist Amartya Sen takes us beyond the West briefly, but the book concentrates overwhelmingly on the centers of capitalist power up through WWII. The attempt to squeeze a good story from her subjects can encourage a lopsided accounting, where Marx, for example, becomes a clownish personal figure whose economic ideas are all the easier to dismiss while the contributions of Alfred Marshall are arguably overemphasized. Historiographically thin, the book serves best as a curiosity-piquing introduction to figures and basic themes in modern economic history rather than a definitive study. (Sept.)" Publishers Weekly Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

"Deeply interesting and extraordinarily moving." Oliver Sacks

"A Beautiful Mind tells a moving story and offers a remarkable look into the arcane world of mathematics and the tragedy of madness." The New York Times Book Review

"A fascinating account of creativity barely under control, of a mathematical genius who was driven by — and eventually overwhelmed by — his own inner demons. A staggering feat of writing and reporting." Business Week

"A fascinating overview of [John Nash's] life and the intellectual history of his times...a wonderfully absorbing puzzle." Washington Post Book World

"[This] is the story of the evolution of a radical, planet-reshaping idea....The canvas is epic....The details are fresh, at times startling....At the same time, gnarly but critical concepts...shine through in all their richness and complexity. If only Econ 101 had been this interesting!" Fortune

"Grand Pursuit is a worthy successor to Robert Heilbroner's The Worldly Philosophers....Nasar's aim is 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." The Washington Post

"Nasar is a superb writer....The book is a kind of portrait gallery of economic thinkers, each artfully set down in his or her time and place....You can't help becoming engrossed in their lives." The Wall Street Journal

"Grand Pursuit is a history of economics which is full of flesh, bloom and warmth. The author demonstrates that there is far more to economics than Thomas Carlyle's 'dismal science'. And she does so with all the style and panache that you would expect from the author of the 1998 bestseller, A Beautiful Mind....A wonderful book. Grand Pursuit deserves a place not only in every economist's study but also on every serious reader's bedside table." The Economist

"One of the many wonderful things about Nasar's book is that in it, economic genius isn't limited to the usual suspects....Even when exploring famous economic minds, Nasar brings out the humanity in the dismal science by showing their ideas are nearly always rooted in formative experiences." Time magazine

"Nasar has written a compelling history of modern economics, a story of the theorists as well as of their theories....Grand Pursuit is artfully rendered and a delight to read....One suspects that future economics textbooks will warrant some revisions. All the same, their authors would profit from consulting Grand Pursuit." Bloomberg BusinessWeek, Starred Review

"A timely reminder of the importance of the so-called dismal science....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....It is compellingly written, full of detail and vivid anecdotes, and with a refreshing focus on people rather than prices." The Nation

"Nasar brilliantly brings to life game-changing economists from Marx to Hayek and from Sidney Webb to Milton Friedman, tracing the evolution of modern economic thinking through the richly detailed stories of the men and woman who reshaped how we think of life's possibilities....This is an utterly fascinating book on many levels....A Beautiful Mind, Nasar's previous book, was about an economist named John Nash, but Nasar's mind is pretty good, too. No lesser mind could have written a book so rich, so compelling, so important, and so much fun." The Boston Globe

"A fascinating excursion into the economic ideas and personalities that have deposited most of us at a standard of living unparalleled in human history...engrossing....Nasar, who wrote A Beautiful Mind...is drawn to intellectual giants. They stomp across the idiosyncratic and readable pages of Grand Pursuit, which unfurls with a David McCullough-like knack for telling popular history....On these pages, the dismal science shines." Cleveland Plain Dealer

From the author of A Beautiful Mind, a sweeping history of the invention of modern economics that takes you from Dickens' London to modern Calcutta.

Sylvia Nasar is the author of the bestselling A Beautiful Mind, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for biography. She is the John S. and James. L Knight Professor at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism.