The world has just learned that Robert Heilbroner, author of the
justly famous and best-selling The
Worldly Philosophers: The Lives, Times, and Ideas of the Great Economic
Thinkers, first published in 1953 and still in print, died
here in Manhattan last week at age 85. "Worldly
Philosophers," which I read as a teenager and which cemented
my fascination with economics, profiles, among others, Adam Smith,
Karl Marx, David Ricardo, and Joseph Schumpeter, but the operative
word here is "worldly"—what
Heilbroner cares about is the impact these men’s thoughts have on
our everyday lives. Those he profiles thought large thoughts
on a large stage, whereas, to me, far too many of today’s economists
think crabbed and impoverished thoughts on an intensely mathematically-driven
stage:
“The worldly philosophers,” Dr. Heilbroner said in a 1999
interview, “thought their task was to model all the complexities
of an economic system – the political, the sociological, the psychological,
the moral, the historical. And modern economists, au contraire, do
not want so complex a vision."
If you haven’t read it, a word of advice: Do.
