One day, on his way to school, Tabibian noticed in a bookstore window a thick new book for sale titled “Economics.” It was a word he had never heard before. Tabibian asked his literature teacher what it meant. “He said it meant using your money wisely,” Tabibian told me. “I thought the phrase he expressed was more often true by default. Everybody knows how to use their money wisely if they’ve got some.” When he went home that night, Tabibian put the question to his father, who said he wasn’t sure but he thought that economics had something to do with the creation of wealth.

The next day, Tabibian went to the bookstore and pulled the book from the shelf. “It was full of graphs, tables, formulas, and lengthy arguments,” he said. “I noticed that the subject of creation and distribution of wealth is no simple matter. I thought, That is what I need to learn.”

Tabibian later realize that the book was a translation of the 1948 introductory economics textbook by the American neoclassical economist Paul Samuelson.

That’s the New Yorker’s engaging, if somewhat hagiographic, profile of an Iranian economic reformer. Interesting throughout.