An Economics Masterpiece You Should Be Reading Now
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Dec. 19 (Bloomberg) -- The most valuable new book I’ve readthis year is Justin Yifu Lin’s “The Quest for Prosperity.”George Akerlof, a Nobel laureate in economics and a man notgiven to reckless overstatement, calls it “a masterpiece.” I’dsay that’s right.
Lin is an interesting man. In 1979, as an officer inTaiwan’s army on the fast track to the elite, he defected to thePeople’s Republic of China by swimming the channel between aTaiwanese island and Xiamen on the mainland. He continued hisstudies in economics, became a leading scholar, and was anobserver and participant in China’s economic miracle. From 2008until earlier this year, he was the World Bank’s chiefeconomist. Today he’s back in China, at Peking University.