In Ms. Nasar’s view the story of economics over the last century and a half is a story about great thinkers devising tools of analysis, ideas that would give mankind at least some level of mastery over conditions of misery and want once thought to be immutable and “utterly beyond human control or influence.”

“Economic calamities — financial panics, hyperinflations, depressions, social conflicts and wars — have always triggered crises of confidence, but they have not come close to wiping out the cumulative gains in average living standards,” she writes. After World War II, she goes on, “growth rebounded and living standards shot up” and “history has been dominated by the escape of more and more of the world’s population from abject poverty.”

In 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.

Ms. Nasar gives us Belle Époque Vienna — infatuated with modernity and challenging London in the race to electrify with new telephone service, state-of-the-art factories and power-driven trams — and then a devastating picture of Vienna at the end of World War I: war veterans loitering outside restaurants waiting for scraps, and desperate members of a middle class that saw inflation wipe out all its savings trading a piano for a sack of flour, a gold watch chain for a few sacks of potatoes.

She conjures the heady, intellectual world of Cambridge in the 1930s, when Keynes’s disciples orbited him like planets around the Sun, and she captures the air of intrigue that surrounded the 1944 Bretton Woods conference, which created a global interventionist framework centered around the World Bank and International Monetary Fund: the “slightly seedy” New Hampshire resort packed with 730 delegates from 44 Allied countries and “crawling with spies.”

In the course of the book the reader gets a vague sense of how the horrors of World War I, the Depression and World War II taught economists practical lessons about the functioning of fiscal policy and relationships among countries.

The great innovation of the 1920s and ’30s “taught that what was good for one nation might easily be bad for all. Devaluing one’s currency, erecting trade barriers and clamping controls on capital outflows might be effective for reducing balance-of-payment deficits, stopping the outflow of gold and pumping up government revenues,” Ms. Nasar writes. “But if everybody adopted the same tactics, the eventual result would be universal impoverishment and unemployment.”

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=887ff523af2a9af66607850f7630247e