Billionaire Backlash is the work of two authors, one on each side of the Atlantic and both distinguished academics. Its bold aim is to tackle ‘the biggest question facing our politics today’: whether the rules in modern democracies are made by big corporations owned by billionaires – or politicians. It tackles a series of corporate scandals and the extent to which public outrage led to change and government action. The book does not always hang comfortably together.

There are plenty of tales of misdeeds, from the United States, Europe, China and South Korea. Goldman Sachs profited during the 2008 banking crisis when many financial institutions had to be bailed out. It earned fees from a portfolio of relatively risky derivatives that were deliberately sold to less sophisticated clients. The Dieselgate story, which broke about ten years ago, involved the discovery by an American engineer that Volkswagen had developed a ‘defeat device’, allowing its ‘clean diesel’ cars to cheat emissions tests. They turned out to be emitting up to thirty-five times more pollution than was permitted under American law. The exposé had a devastating impact on Germany’s reputation for engineering. In China, as a tale of contaminated baby milk shows, the government’s instinct is not to protect the customers: ‘The government fired officials, imprisoned company executives and even executed a dairy farmer and a formula salesman, but it did not allow itself to be held accountable for the failures revealed.’

The birth of the online world has dramatically expanded the scope for abuse. Not surprisingly, governments on both sides of the Atlantic have struggled to curb the power of Big Tech to invade or exploit users’ privacy. Europe’s efforts led to the adoption (in spite of furious lobbying by the