Famous economists are often remembered as adversarial eccentrics.
John Maynard Keynes is pictured as the government pump-primer who phoned his broker from bed, married a Russian ballerina and owned a Rolls-Royce. Joseph Schumpeter was the Austrian upstart who celebrated “creative destruction,” swanned around with prostitutes on his arm and lost millions in a stock-market crash.
For all their differences, though, these economists — along with Friedrich Hayek, Irving Fisher and others— shared a conviction that gained ground in Victorian Britain, as Sylvia Nasar argues in her absorbing book, “Grand Pursuit: The Story of Economic Genius.” They believed that mankind could improve the circumstances that long condemned nine out of 10 humans to grinding poverty. “Grand Pursuit” is narrative history at its finest. Told with vivid detail, it stretches from the days of Jane Austen through the collapse of the Soviet Union. James Pressley, Bloomberg News
