David Warsh, a journalist and author, is proprieter of www.economicprincipals.com, an independent Web-based weekly. For more than 20 years, he covered economics for The Boston Globe. Before that he reported on business for Forbes and The Wall Street Journal, and, from Vietnam, for Pacific Stars and Stripes and Newsweek. A two-time winner of financial journalism’s Loeb Award, he was a Fellow of the American Academy in Berlin in 2004. He is the author of two other books: The Idea of Economic Complexity (Viking, 1984) and Economic Principals: Masters and Mavericks of Modern Economics (The Free Press, 1993), a collection of his newspaper columns.