Great thinkers and the 2008 crisis

The burden of the book is to examine how these economists would view the world of today - how they would have reacted to the policies adopted by governments and central banks to deal with the crisis

The Great Economists: How their ideas can help us today

Linda Yueh

Viking (Penguin)

357 pages; Rs 699

In the aftermath of the global financial crisis of 2008, there has been much soul searching among economists over why most of them failed to predict it. Since then, many books have attempted to trace the history of economic thought hoping to find answers to our current predicament.

One such attempt was that of Professor Meghnad Desai. In Hubris, Mr Desai traced the history of economic thought through the ages as he attempted to answer a simple question: Why did economists fail to foresee the crisis of 2008