It's The Economy,Stupid

OK. Here is today's economic question - who is receiving more Google hits - Leonardo DiCaprio or John Maynard Keynes? Well, if you answered Mr. Keynes give yourself an A+ in economics. "For someone who has been dead for 65 years, John Maynard Keynes is certainly in the news," says award-winning author, former economics writer for the New York Times, and current professor at The Columbia Graduate School of Journalism Sylvia Nasar.

Keynes, an extremely (some might argue the most) influential economist of the 20th Century, looms large in Nasar's new book Grand Pursuit: The Story of Economic Genius, which begins in the London of Charles Dickens and follows the making of modern economics to India of the late 1970s.

So with the current fears that the American Dream is dead and economic Armageddon is upon us, what would Keynes, known for "radiating optimism when things look the bleakest," do about current conditions, Nasar, whose previous book A Beautiful Mind won the National Book Critics Award for Biography, was asked at her appearance at the Politics and Prose bookstore here in DC.

"I suspect he would go shopping," she said.

Nasar said her years as an economic correspondent and all her research for her new book, has lead her to believe that America will weather this current economic unraveling. "If what is happening now is a Category 1 (hurricane), then The Great Depression was a Category 5," Nasar said, noting that there was full recovery from that dark period.

But Nasar acknowledged that with so many out of work, with so many suffering, with fears so high, faith is difficult to come by. "With so many scared in the middle of the night, it's hard to believe that the nightmare will pass with the morning," she said.

Travelers' Tip:
One of he great things about traveling is you get to meet people who you would never otherwise encounter. So with Sylvia Nasar in front of me last night, I just had to ask her a question, a question which turned out to be the last one of the forum. "Your book is about economists. And our son is an Economics Professor. Now I don't understand what it is that he does. So here are my questions: a) will your book tell me exactly what it is that he does? and b) how come we will still pay when we go out somewhere?" Laughing and explaining that she was answering as the mother of 3 adult children, Nasar said "maybe yes to the first, but no to the second."