The Beautiful Minds That Created Modern Economics: Sylvia Nasar

For the bottom nine-tenths of humanity, the world has changed more in the last century and a half than in the 20 centuries before.

The idea that mankind could master its material circumstances was born in Charles Dickens’s London. Over the next century and a half, the grand pursuit of economic thinkers was to overcome scarcity, to loosen the grip of iron necessity on ordinary lives and minds. The new way of thinking spread outward from mid-Victorian London like ripples in a pond until it transformed the lives of every person on the planet.