Once upon a time it was the 1980’s, when Drexel Burnham roamed the earth, Apple actually fired Steve Jobs, and magazines actually made money and actually paid that money people to write for them. Sylvia Nasar and I were two of those people. I was writing plays, but paying my rent writing for Forbes. (ALL playwrights—and I mean ALL as in, “every single last one in the entire world that doesn’t have a trust fund” —must have a day job. And, “yes,” teaching and writing movies and for TV and putting on a Humanities Festival is a day job.) Nasar had a graduate degree in economics and was at Fortune and U.S. News (which actually was at one time a magazine and not a simply a list of colleges) and everybody was having a great time. I cannot actually remember how we met—Sylvia, do you remember? But it was a pretty small world—Forbes, Fortune, Business Week, NY Times and Wall Street Journal reporters. Not as small as it was going to get, but small nonetheless. Everybody knew everybody and read each other’s stories, and talked to the same sources, and talked on the phone and switched jobs, and freelanced, and went to parties and press events and ate free food.
Certainly from the time I knew her, Sylvia had the “A” game: she was a great writer, with a great sense for a story, and most importantly, she had the intelligence and analytic ability to understand what was actually going on. As an editor of mine used to say, “If sports reporters had the knowledge of, say baseball, that business reporters have of business, we would open the back of the New York Post and read ‘Jones swung an object which is shaped much like an elongated wine bottle and appeared to be made of wood, at a taut leather sack, hurled by a man on small hill . . .’.”
Although Sylvia specialized in serious economics reporting, she did other things too. Here’s a fun profile of and up-and-coming playwright (me) written by her for The New York Times in 1993. You will notice that I’d now left the world of business journalism for a more lucrative day job. Did I mention that ALL playwrights need day jobs?
During much of the 1990’s Sylvia and I talked regularly because I was part of some pretty heavy-duty economics research efforts at consulting behemoth McKinsey and Company and Sylvia was the best economics reporter pretty much anywhere. We always thought she was the best person to write about our work. Here’s a great example of what she was writing back then.
Then John Forbes Nash won the Nobel Prize in economics in 1994 and everything changed. It winds up that not long after Nash devised game theory, he suffered a severe psychotic breakdown, and then roamed the Princeton campus wraithlike for decades, a creepy legend among students. Sylvia wrote an unusually wonderful story about Nash for the Times.
For Sylvia, the fun was just beginning. Most wonderful stories are not optioned as books. This one was. Most books based on wonderful stories are not themselves wonderful. This one was. Most wonderful books are not optioned as films. This one was. Most wonderful books optioned as films are not actually made into films. This one was. Most films, even those (especially those?) made from wonderful books aren’t themselves wonderful. This one was. Most wonderful films, once made, languish unappreciated. This one didn’t. And so on. You get the point. With A Beautiful Mind, Sylvia scored big. As big as you can score. Hooray!
She is now a journalism professor at Columbia University, teaching a new generation of writers how to write about business and economics with the skill, smarts, and panache that she has always brought to the task.
Her new book and wonderful book, Grand Pursuit, is a sort economic intellectual history of the last two centuries told through the personal stories of its major figures: Marx, Schumpeter, Keynes, Friedman, etc. Sylvia argues that the whole field of economics is animated by the revolutionary idea that “humanity could turn tables on economic necessity—mastering rather than being enslaved by material circumstances."
I’m seeing James Franco playing the role of all the economists!
He wears a beard for Marx,
a skinhead for Schumpeter and Friedman,
and lifts in his shoes and a mustache for Keynes (that’s him on the right).
I think I read somewhere that Franco was going to get a PhD in Economics after he finished his MFA, his English PhD, and his monograph on wound care during the Franco-Prussian war. I think he’d be great.
Casting issues aside, Grand Pursuit is an elegant and unique book: economics seen as part of the humanities. It’s a perfect fit for the Festival. And it’s an honor to host Sylvia in Chicago.
408: Sat, Nov. 5 1:00-2:00 PM
Tags: Sylvia Nasar, Stuart Flack, economics, business, journalism, Nash, Beautiful Mind, Grand Pursuit, James Franco, Marx, Schumpeter, Friedman, Keynes, movie
