The Great Economists
How Their Ideas Can Help Us Today
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The Great Economists
Buy Now for £12.99
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Narrated by:
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Linda Yueh
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By:
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Linda Yueh
About this listen
Penguin presents the audiobook edition of The Great Economists written and read by Linda Yueh.
What can the ideas of history's greatest economists tell us about the most important issues of our time?
Since the days of Adam Smith, economists have grappled with a series of familiar problems - but often their ideas are hard to digest, before we even 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; and in The Great Economists she explains the key thoughts of history's greatest economists, how their lives and times affected their ideas, how our lives have been influenced by their work, and how they could help 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 through Joan Robinson and Milton Friedman to 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 does the work of John Maynard Keynes, who argued for government spending to create full employment, help us think about state investment? And with globalization in trouble, what can we learn about handling Brexit and Trumpism?
'Economics students, like others, can learn a lot from this book' - Professor Paul Collier, author of The Bottom Billion
'Not only a great way to learn in an easily readable manner about some of the greatest economic influences of the past, but also a good way to test your own a priori assumptions about some of the big challenges of our time.' - Lord Jim O'Neill, former Chairman at Goldman Sachs Asset Management, former UK Treasury Minister, and author of The Growth Map
'An extremely engaging survey of the lifetimes and ideas of the great thinkers of economic history.' - Professor Kenneth Rogoff, author of The Curse of Cash and co-author of This Time is Different
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Critic reviews
The author’s second aim is to detail these economists’ major theories within the context of the times in which they lived. These passages struck me as the real meat of the book. I learned a lot about historical events and economic concepts which had previously been little more than names to me, and the chronological structure of the book made it interesting to see how various schools of thought had waxed and waned in influence across different generations of economists.
The third and final aspect of the book is what makes it more (and less) than just a history of economics, as the author attempts to apply each chosen economist’s theories to a current major world issue and so speculate as to what these figures from history might have had to say about our modern times. Unsurprisingly most of these sections focused on the 2007-8 financial crisis and its aftermath leading up to Brexit and Trump. Some of the author’s speculations felt dubious to me, especially since the historical passages made it obvious how much each economist had been shaped by their own particular times and how often they had changed their ideas when new events necessitated a fresh outlook. I also sometimes felt frustrated that each economist had effectively been allowed to comment on only a single aspect of modern finance - although this made the chapters more digestible, it had the effect of treating each issue in isolation rather than drawing a full range of connections between them. I wonder how it was decided which economist was most applicable to which issue, because at times the choices had the feel of recycled lecture notes, awkwardly cramming everything into a single syllabus.
The author reads the audiobook herself, which has both the pros and cons you’d expect - she obviously knows her material better than anyone, but also tends to be drily academic in style. On the whole this book was a mixed bag for me - I found my interest flagging in the later chapters, because by that point it felt like all the fundamental issues had already been covered and more recent economists were simply rehashing the same old debates. Ultimately I was left with the sense that even economists often understand very little about what might happen next in the economy, but are very good at retrospectively explaining why things went right or wrong.
Part History, Part Speculation
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Economics for all.!!!
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