Bloomberg Businessweek
Go To Businessweek.com
During the past 20 years, the author has watch China move from being a developing country into an industrial superpower
Money Moves, 5/24: Chocomize Co-Founder Fabian Kaempfer talks with Bloomberg’s Deirdre Bolton about the business of customizing chocolate
The president's campaign has a new rule—no cell phones allowed
In honor of remote control inventor Eugene Polley, we recognize other influential but neglected inventors who have felt the sting of stolen glory
Adam Johnson talks about what trading vehicles can help you earn more money per trade
The Italian automaker and others are adding hybrid technology to elite cars
The storied bridge that links San Francisco and Marin County changed the face of California
Schools cultivate ties with startups before they're big successes
Dave McClure's traveling venture capital show scours the world for promising startups
Marx never visited a working factory, preferring the "wet woolens and warm beer" of cafes. Without Keynes, would Bush-Paulson or Obama-Geithner have any clue what to do? Illustrations by Topos Graphics; Getty Images; Corbis
Editor's Rating: 
Grand Pursuit:
The Story of Economic Genius
By Sylvia Nasar
Simon & Schuster; 576 pp; $35.00
It’s a dubious hour to proclaim the triumph (much less the genius) of the “dismal science.” Western economies are a wreck, the U.S. is suffering 9.1 percent unemployment, and Europe is teetering on the abyss of default. The economics profession bears no small measure of blame—first for inventing or adopting modern risk management, which failed so spectacularly during the financial crisis, and second for believing that central bankers had unlocked the key to managing growth. In the U.S., politicians have been reenacting a tired budget deficit debate from the 1930s. Whatever economics we may have learned, we seem determined to forget.
Yet proclaim a triumph is precisely what Sylvia Nasar, author of the acclaimed A Beautiful Mind, sets out to do. Nasar has written a compelling history of modern economics, a story of the theorists as well as of their theories. Grand Pursuit retraces much of the same ground as Robert L. Heilbroner’s 1953 classic The Worldly Philosophers—which is to say, Nasar gives us Karl and Jenny Marx in their crowded London flat, Joseph Schumpeter, and, of course, John Maynard Keynes. Nasar is more idiosyncratic in her choice of subjects; she omits Adam Smith, almost entirely. On the other hand, she reclaims the lesser-known Beatrice Webb, a richly interesting and path-breaking Victorian who founded the London School of Economics and sold none other than Winston Churchill on the need for a welfare state. Similarly, Nasar glosses over the Great Depression but lingers on the less familiar crisis in post-World War I Vienna because, well, Schumpeter happened to be there and was enlisted by the Socialist government to help stave off mass starvation and communist rebellion, none of which interfered with his conspicuous pursuit of women and Thoroughbred horses.
Nasar’s story is centered in London, and its appeal is enhanced by the inclusion of literary masters such as Charles Dickens, who was, she points out, obsessed by the great Victorian issue of eradicating poverty. Although not quite framed in these terms, Nasar’s narrative encompasses, I think, two motifs. The first is how economists came to decipher that capitalism is, ultimately, an engine of progress rather than despair. To focus on just one sequence within this theme, she starts with the Reverend Thomas Robert Malthus and his dire thesis that the sex drive condemns the masses to live at the edge of starvation.
Marx is similarly pessimistic, if for different reasons. He sees society and the Industrial Revolution, rather than nature, as the agent of human misery. “Poverty was not, of course, new,” Nasar writes, which the would-be revolutionary readily acknowledged. But the juxtaposition of poverty amid rising wealth made poverty seem “manmade, almost gratuitous.” Marx’s explanation was that the competition for profits impels factory owners to steadily reduce wages, leading to a downward spiral in living standards. That the emigré Marx never bothered to visit an actual factory, or even to learn English well, is one of the human failings Nasar engagingly brings to the surface. The great revolutionary was too busy holding forth at cafes, soused in an atmosphere of “wet woolens and warm beer,” to notice that living standards were rising. Marx comes off badly, yet his conclusion that society offered the masses little hope (short of revolution) was widely accepted. Only in a novel such as Great Expectations might the orphan Pip vault to the middle class; for the real-life masses, such advancement was “the stuff of pure fantasy.”
This is Nasar’s setup for Alfred Marshall, who, though trained as a mathematician, was inspired by both Dickens and Marx to study how companies actually operated. “He did not doubt that the chief cause of poverty was low wages, but what caused wages to be low?” Marshall, who began his work in the 1860s, noticed a dynamic that Marx hadn’t: “Competition forced owners and managers to constantly make small changes to improve their products, manufacturing techniques,” and so forth. Over time, the improvements wrought greater productivity and higher wages. The significance of this idea for human progress cannot be overstated. The historian Arnold J. Toynbee later called it “the first great hope which [wage analysis] opens out to the laborer.”
