The Invisible Heart: An Economic Romance

Russel Roberts is a successful economist and professor. He received his PhD in Economics from the University of Chicago in 1981 and has taught at multiple universities including George Mason and Stanford. Unlike many economists in the early 1990s , Roberts’s primary goal was “to become an economic communicator” and demystify economic principles for a broad audience (Kopf, Dan. “Russ Roberts and the Quest to Make Economics Interesting.” Priceonomics, 2016). His first book, The Choice: A Fable of Free Trade and Protectionism (1994) is, like The Invisible Heart, a novel designed to popularize the understanding of economics. In addition to The Choice and The Invisible Heart, Roberts has published one other novel in the same vein in 2008 and has three non-fiction books that also seek to apply economic principles to larger life questions and philosophical issues. Roberts’s largest claim to fame, however, is the rap video he created in 2010 using popular hip-hop musical styles to present the debate between F. A. Hayek’s Austrian model of economics and John Maynard Keynes’s boom and bust model of the economy.

Roberts’s goal of popularizing economics is particularly important to the structure and