Includes bibliographical references and index.

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 -- 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.

Examines the long-sought solution to the economic paradox of falling costs and chronicles the two-hundred-year struggle to solve the puzzle, discussing the roles of such figures as Adam Smith, Alfred Marshall, John Maynard Keynes, Robert Solow, Kenneth Arrow, Robert Lucas, and the man who did it, Paul Romer, who found that technological development and change must be internalized as a part of economic growth.

Adult