Grand pursuit : the story of economic genius

 by Sylvia Nasar. The historical transformation of economics from laissez-faire into a. instrument of master. (Nasar's phrase) thematically presides over these biographical sketches of some of those who were instrumental in the process. Showing them all wrestling in some way with the causes of poverty and prosperity, Nasar opens with Marx and his habit of supporting himself on cadged capital while he wrote Das Kapital. Indeed, the way Nasar's subjects dealt with their own funds enlivens her presentations of what they advised businesses, banks, and governments to do with theirs. In Nasar's time frame, about 1870-1960, the booms and busts her economists lived through affected their wallets as much as their theorizing. Though few of her subjects besides Marx, Keynes, and Milton Friedman will be familiar to many readers, such figures as Irving Fisher, inventor of the Rolodex, and Joan Robinson, a British economist with a colorful background, become supremely interesting in her hands. Also including sketches of socialist Beatrice Webb, conservative icon F. W. Hayek, and developmental economist Amartya Sen, Nasar creatively deploys lives-and-times to show the evolution of economics from an explanation of fate into an application of policy. . HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Sylvia Nasar's A Beautiful Mind (1998), a biography of schizophrenic mathematician-economist John Nash, was converted into an Academy Award-winning movie starring Russell Crowe, priming above-average awareness of this author and interest in her sequel about economists. --Booklist (Check Catalog)