Book Reviews

A Stroll in the Past

Grand Pursuit

The Story of Economic Genius

Simon & Schuster, New York, 2011, 558 pp., $35 (cloth).

A Beautiful Mind, the biography of Nobel Prize–winning economist John Nash, Sylvia Nasar achieved a brilliant integration of life and thought, as well as offering an absorbing study of the fragile nature of genius. Grand Pursuit, in which intellectual history is told through group biography, is less successful. Nasar tells the story of a dozen or so economic “geniuses” ranging from Karl Marx to Paul Samuelson and Amartya Sen. She offers a “life and times” for each and an accessible and accurate account of their main ideas.Â

But the canvas is too large, and the pace too breathless, for proper integration of the main elements. The links between lives, times, and ideas sometimes seem artificial, and Nasar eschews the use of generalizing summaries, which might have made sense of them. Some connections are not made at all: for example, there is no mention of Knut Wicksell and the Swedish contribution to modern economics. The result has a flavor of intellectual and historical tourism. It is a most enjoyable read, but the formula, so successful in the earlier book, does not quite come off.Â

The grand pursuit of the title was, it turns out, inspired by the “idea that humanity could turn the tables on economic necessity, mastering rather than being enslaved by material circumstances.” Economics, as Nasar tells it, was invented largely to free people from poverty. The do-gooder element was there from the start but, in a secular age, it required a scientific, rather than theological, basis. (Nasar might have drawn attention to the number of early economists profiled in this volume, including Irving Fisher, John Maynard Keynes, Alfred Marshall, and Joan Robinson, who came from clerical backgrounds.)

Nasar’s implicit claim is that the advance of economics led to improvement in material conditions. The divisions in economics that most interest her are between those who believed in progress through laissez-faire and those who believed in progress through government action. Presumably, it was as a representative of the latter tendency that Beatrice Webb, who was not an economist even in the elastic 19th century sense of the term, merits inclusion in the book.Â

A central feature of the epoch covered by Nasar is the business cycle, and the doctrines of her great economists can almost be read as their responses to these violent oscillations in economic activity. Joseph Schumpeter—in some ways the idiosyncratic hero of this bookmdashhere—believed that slumps were a necessary part of progress and should be endured. Friedrich Hayek believed they were unnecessary but should nevertheless be endured. Keynes believed they were both unnecessary and should not be endured.Â

In this classification, Keynes’s views seem closest to those of Fisher and Milton Friedman, who believed appropriate monetary policy could both prevent and remedy slumps. But Keynes thought monetary policy was not enough: fiscal policy was necessary as well.

If Keynes, Fisher, and Friedman have one kind of family resemblance...