Knowledge and the Wealth of Nations

Knowledge and the Wealth of Nations by David Warsh is a fine read. It covers the history of economics from the point of view of interrelationship between economic growth and the advancement of knowledge. Apparently it was not until the early 1990's that the development of knowledge was explicitly modeled by economists as an important part of the real economy: prior to that, knowledge was outside of economic models (partially due to tractability of the models, I guess).

In any case, this book is an exciting intellectual tale of how economics developed; I recommend it highly.