The Great Economists

How Their Ideas Can Help Us Today

Since the days of Adam Smith, economists have grappled with a series of familiar problems - but often their ideas are hard to digest, even before we 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. In The Great Economists she explains the key thoughts of history's greatest economists, how our lives have been influenced by their ideas and how they could help us with the policy challenges that we face today.

In the light of current economic problems, and in particular growth, Yueh explores the thoughts of economists from Adam Smith and David Ricardo to recent academics Douglass North and Robert Solow. She asks, for example, what do the ideas of Karl Marx tell us about the likely future for the Chinese economy? How do the ideas of John Maynard Keynes, who argued for government spending to create full employment, help us think about state intervention? And with globalization in trouble, what can we learn about handling Brexit and Trumpism?

Are you looking to learn about the very greatest economists of all time? Linda Yueh's book is the best place to start, a modern-day version of Robert Heilbroner's classic The Worldly Philosophers.

Tyler Cowen, the Holbert L. Harris Chair of Economics at George Mason University, and author of The Complacent Class and The Great Stagnation

About Linda Yueh

Linda Yueh CBE is Fellow in Economics at St Edmund Hall, University of Oxford and Adjunct Professor of Economics at London Business School. She was Visiting Professor at LSE IDEAS and Visiting Professor of Economics at Peking University. The former Economics Editor at Bloomberg TV, she also hosted Talking Business with Linda Yueh as Chief Business Correspondent for BBC News. She writes for The Times, The New York Times, and the Financial Times and has advised the World Economic Forum in Davos, the World Bank, the European Commission and the Asian Development Bank. She has recently been appointed by HM Treasury to the Independent Review Panel on Ring-fencing and Proprietary Trading, to examine banking crises and advise the government on mitigating the next one. She is the author of two books; The Great Economists and The Great Crashes.
Details
  • Imprint: Penguin
  • ISBN: 9780241974483
  • Length: 368 pages
  • Price: £5.99
All editions