NY Times review - The Grand Pursuit

NY TimesIn her haphazard new book “Grand Pursuit,” Ms. Nasar says she set out to tell that story through the lives of “protagonists who were instrumental in turning economics into an instrument of mastery.” Unfortunately her selection of those people is so arbitrary— she says she “chose men and women with ‘cool heads but warm hearts’ ” whose “temperaments, experiences and genius led them, in response to their own times and places, to ask new questions and propose new answers” — that the book fails to give the lay reader an overarching understanding of how modern economic thinking has evolved, or how major schools of thought have fared in light of various political and fiscal developments.

Ms. Nasar spends a lot of space talking about Keynes and his disciples, for instance, but fails to put his views fully in context. There is little discussion of Adam Smith and his laissez-faire philosophy, which stands in such contrast to Keynes’s belief in the often necessary role of government. And while Milton Friedman’s early days as a Keynesian and supporter of the New Deal are mentioned, there is no real examination of his evolution into an influential champion of free markets.

What Ms. Nasar does brilliantly here — much as she did in “A Beautiful Mind,” her absorbing 1998 biography of the mathematician John Forbes Nash Jr. — is give us intimate portraits of her subjects, tracing the ways in which personal experiences informed their thinking. Ms. Nasar — a former economics correspondent for The New York Times who is now a professor at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism — writes with ease and authority about complicated economic matters, but shows even more fluency evoking the inner lives of her subjects and the social worlds they transited. . . . . Because of its discursive, disorganized structure, “Grand Pursuit” is read best not as a primer on the emergence of modern economics, but as a sort of Selected Lives of the Economists. Ms. Nasar introduces us to Alfred Marshall, whose own metamorphosis from scholarship boy to Cambridge don informed his “optimism about the improvability of man and his circumstances.” We meet Irving Fisher, the Yale economist, who argued, that “individual action would never give rise to a system of city parks, or even to any useful system of streets.” And Beatrice Webb, of whom Ms. Nasar writes: “No one had a greater claim to the invention of the idea of a government safety net — indeed, the modern welfare state” than she did.

Among the more compelling portraits in this volume is that of Joseph Alois Schumpeter, the brilliant European economist who argued that the distinctive feature of capitalism was “incessant innovation” — a “perennial gale of creative destruction” — and who identified the entrepreneur as the visionary who could “revolutionize the pattern of production by exploiting an invention” or “an untried technological possibility.”

Although Ms. Nasar does a concise job of explicating what her various subjects thought about the role government should play in regulating the markets — as well as their thoughts about the causes and possible solutions to problems like unemployment and inflation — she does little to show the reader how their theories might shed light on the current economic difficulties of the United States and Europe: another disappointment in this immensely gifted writer’s ungainly, though sometimes inspired, book.