Sylvia Nasar

Sylvia Nasar talks about the birth of modern economics, and how it rescued mankind from squalor and deprivation. In Grand Pursuit: The Story of Economic Genius Nasar looks at the role of Charles Dickens and Henry Mayhew in bringing to light the conditions of the poor majority in mid-19th-century London, the richest city in the world. She describes how activist thinkers—from Marx, Engels, Alfred Marshall, Beatrice and Sydney Webb, and the American Irving Fisher to John Maynard Keynes and American economists Paul Samuelson and Milton Freedman to India’s Amartya Sen—transformed the world.