What Would the Great Economists Do?
How Twelve Brilliant Minds Would Solve Today's Biggest Problems
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
A Newsweek "Best 50 Books of the Year (So Far)" Pick
"What Would the Great Economists Do? comes at the right time: a highly accessible and acute guide to thinking and learning from the men and woman whose work can inform and ultimately aid us in understanding the great national and global crises we're living through." --Nouriel Roubini, author of the New York Times bestselling Crisis Economics: A Crash Course in the Future of Finance
A timely exploration of the life and work of world-changing thinkers—from Adam Smith to John Maynard Keynes—and how their ideas would solve the great economic problems we face today.
Since the days of Adam Smith, economists have grappled with a series of familiar problems – but often their ideas are hard to digest, even before we try to apply them to today's issues. Linda Yueh is renowned for her combination of erudition, as an accomplished economist herself, and accessibility, as a leading writer and broadcaster in this field. In What Would the Great Economists Do? she explains the key thoughts of history's greatest economists, how our lives have been influenced by their ideas and how they could help us with the policy challenges that we face today.
In the light of current economic problems, and in particular economic growth, Yueh explores the thoughts of economists from Adam Smith and David Ricardo to contemporary academics Douglass North and Robert Solow. Along the way, she asks, for example, what do the ideas of Karl Marx tell us about the likely future for the Chinese economy? How do the ideas of John Maynard Keynes, who argued for government spending to create full employment, help us think about state intervention? And with globalization in trouble, what can we learn about handling Brexit and Trumpism?
What Would the Great Economists Do? includes:
Adam Smith
David Ricardo
Karl Marx
Alfred Marshall
Irving Fisher
John Maynard Keynes
Joseph Schumpeter
Friedrich Hayek
Joan Robinson
Milton Friedman
Douglass North
Robert Solow
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
An appealing thought experiment what if the great economic thinkers of the past took on today's most intractable problems supplies the premise for this provocative work from economist Yueh (China's Growth). Unfortunately, Yueh's answers are less stirring than the question, principally because her subjects' work has already been absorbed into mainstream economic thinking. She devotes much of the book to profiles of her "great economists," among whom she includes Milton Friedman, John Maynard Keynes, Karl Marx, and Adam Smith, and while the compressed biographies are sometimes helpful with understanding their ideas, they more often distract from the book's exploration of contemporary issues like income inequality and the role of central banks. Elsewhere, Yueh is more on point, as in the chapter on Joan Robinson (an overlooked female economist), who studied why wages do not necessarily rise in economic recoveries. The epilogue addresses the future of globalization and invokes the thoughts of the greats (largely arguments for free trade), but feels tired and less than revelatory, suggesting that the modern world would be better served by looking for the next great economist than by looking to the past.
