Rightly or wrongly—and author Robert E. Litan insists it’s wrongly—the public’s esteem for economists plunged in the wake of their inability to forecast the 2008 stock market crash. In truth, Litan says, they are unsung heroes whose theories have driven improvements in daily business practices in areas ranging from investing, energy, air travel, and online dating, generating more than a trillion dollars worldwide.

Litan makes the case that economists are far more often effective innovators than hit-and-miss prognosticators in a discussion of his book Trillion Dollar Economists: How Economists and Their Ideas Have Transformed Business. A former vice president and director of research at the Kauffman Foundation, he currently is a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.