Knowledge and the wealth of nations : a story of economic discovery
Giving a glimpse of the essential science of economics, this book tells the story of what has come to be called the new growth theory: the paradox identified by Adam Smith, its disappearance and occasional resurfacing in the nineteenth century, and the development of various technical tools in the twentieth century.
History
xxii, 426 pages : illustrations ; 25 cm
9780393059960, 0393059960
69169431
The discipline
"It tells you where to carve the joints"
What is a model? How does it work?
The invisible hand and the pin factory
How the dismal science got its name
The underground river
Spillovers and other accommodations
The Keynesian revolution and the modern movement
"Mathematics is a language"
When economics went high-tech
The residual and its critics
The infinite-dimensional spreadsheet
In which economists turn to rocket science, and "model" becomes a verb
New departures
"That's stupid!"
In Hyde Park
The U-turn
The keyboard, the city, and the world
Recombinations
Crazy explanations
At the ski lift
"Endogenous technological change"
Conjectures and refutations
A short history of the cost of lighting
The ultimate pin factory
The invisible revolution
Teaching economics