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"What The Double Helix did for biology, David Warsh's Knowledge and the Wealth of Nations does for economics."—Boston Globe
A stimulating and inviting tour of modern economics centered on the story of one of its most important breakthroughs. In 1980, the twenty-four-year-old graduate student Paul Romer tackled one of the oldest puzzles in economics. Eight years later he solved it. This book tells the story of what has come to be called the new growth theory: the paradox identified by Adam Smith more than two hundred years earlier, its disappearance and occasional resurfacing in the nineteenth century, the development of new technical tools in the twentieth century, and finally the student who could see further than his teachers.
Fascinating in its own right, new growth theory helps to explain dominant first-mover firms like IBM or Microsoft, underscores the value of intellectual property, and provides essential advice to those concerned with the expansion of the economy. Like James Gleick's Chaos or Brian Greene's The Elegant Universe, this revealing book takes us to the frontlines of scientific research; not since Robert Heilbroner's classic work The Worldly Philosophers have we had as attractive a glimpse of the essential science of economics.
| 1 | The discipline | 3 |
| 2 | "It tells you where to carve the joints" | 9 |
| 3 | What is a model? how does it work? | 28 |
| 4 | The invisible hand and the pin factory | 37 |
| 5 | How the dismal science got its name | 48 |
| 6 | The underground river | 61 |
| 7 | Spillovers and other accommodations | 72 |
| 8 | The Keynesian revolution and the modern movement | 88 |
| 9 | "Mathematics is a language" | 108 |
| 10 | When economics went high-tech | 126 |
| 11 | The residual and its critics | 140 |
| 12 | The infinite-dimensional spreadsheet | 158 |
| 13 | Economists turn to rocket science, and "model" becomes a verb | 166 |
| 14 | New departures | 179 |
| 15 | "That's stupid!" | 195 |
| 16 | In Hyde Park | 203 |
| 17 | The u-turn | 214 |
| 18 | The keyboard, the city, and the world | 228 |
| 19 | Recombinations | 249 |
| 20 | Crazy explanations | 261 |
| 21 | At the ski lift | 276 |
| 22 | "Endogenous technological change" | 289 |
| 23 | Conjectures and refutations | 305 |
| 24 | A short history of the cost of lighting | 327 |
| 25 | The ultimate pin factory | 343 |
| 26 | The invisible revolution | 370 |
| 27 | Teaching economics | 382 |
Anonymous
Posted March 18, 2010
No text was provided for this review.
Overview
"What The Double Helix did for biology, David Warsh's Knowledge and the Wealth of Nations does for economics."—Boston Globe
A stimulating and inviting tour of modern economics centered on the story of one of its most important breakthroughs. In 1980, the twenty-four-year-old graduate student Paul Romer tackled one of the oldest puzzles in economics. Eight years later he solved it. This book tells the story of what has come to be called the new growth theory: the paradox ...