Chase Alumni Association

Not Dismal at All

Sylvia Nasar's Grand Pursuit:
The Story of Economic Genius

In Grand Pursuit: The Story of Economic Genius, Sylvia Nasar does not write an economic history or, even necessarily, a history of economics so much as a biographical history of economists. The book provides lively, color commentary on the lives, loves and times of the economists who, beginning in the Victorian era, developed and pursued economic theories within what Nasar calls a revolutionary notion: that humanity could use economics to “turn tables on economic necessity – mastering rather than being enslaved by material circumstances," to escape brutal poverty and drudgery.

In an era when we turn to the Fed and other central bankers, academic economists and economic think tanks to help the world regain its economic steam and allow prosperity to be shared, Grand Pursuit is an enlightening read: It sets forth the economic conditions and actions that prompted breakthroughs in economic theory and the principal players who, in formulating those theories, changed the goals of economics over the last 150 or so years.  In reading of those conditions and theorists, one is simultaneously struck by the incredible novelty of thought and the feeling that when it comes to misery or the need for self-promotion (even among economists), there is nothing new under the sun.

A former business reporter for The New York Times and currently a professor at the Columbia University School of Journalism, Nasar’s last blockbuster was A Brilliant Mind, the story of John Nash, which was made into a film.

Any one of the sagas in Grand Pursuit could make a grand biopic, if there were an audience for the lives of Alfred Marshall, Marx and Engels, Beatrice and Sidney Webb (with supporting roles for George Bernard Shaw and H.G. Wells), Irving Fisher (See him invent the rolodex! the consumer price index! the economic forecast!), Joseph Alois Schumpeter, Friedrich von Hayek (no relation to Salma), John Maynard Keynes (okay, I already know someone writing a Bretton Woods musical), Joan Robinson (that could be a movie), Milton Friedman, Paul Samuelson or Amartya Sen.

Actually, by humanizing the economists and only summarizing the economic theories, Nasar makes economics seem anything but the “dismal science”. Indeed, the lives of the great economists are, for the whole, highly entertaining, particularly as Nasar sets them in their historic contexts and, from her vast reading of existing biographies and histories as well as original source material, recalls the individuals’ most quixotic and idiomatic characteristics.