Martin Vander Weyer
Shockingly Sensible
Edge of Chaos: Why Democracy is Failing to Deliver Economic Growth – and How to Fix It
By Dambisa Moyo
Little, Brown 294pp £20 order from our bookshop
‘Tell us why the world is such an unhappy place’ is a common instruction from publishers to economic pundits these days. The response has been shelves of books addressing the impact of globalisation, automation, executive greed, social media and all the other things that are perceived to have angered voters and led them to make quixotic voting choices: hence Donald Trump as US president and the UK leaving the European Union.
Naturally, some of those books are better than others, both in elucidating the problems and – the more difficult part of the task – in proposing original solutions. A recent example is Robert Peston’s WTF, a discursive trot around several of these fashionable themes that in the end tells us more about the author’s inner angst than it does about how the world might set itself on a fairer, more stable course.
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