"Practical men who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence are usually the slaves of some defunct economist," John Maynard Keynes warned long ago. Though Keynes may now be defunct himself, his statement still stands-as Alfred L. Malabre, Jr. illustrates in this probing account of the world's best-known economists, their ideas, and their influence on our world. From the Mt. Washington Hotel at Bretton Woods, New Hampshire to the Phoenix, Arizona Biltmore to Manhattan's Michael One restaurant, Malabre charts the rise and fall of economic thought-and the people who brought these ideas into the policy-making arena. Captivating anecdotes about the leading economists of our time-from Samuelson to Burns to Friedman to Greenspan-provide an arresting, behind-the-scenes look at how our lives have been shaped by practitioners of the "dismal science."