Left Behind
A New Economics for Neglected Places
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- 9,49 €
Descrizione dell’editore
A FINANCIAL TIMES BEST BOOK OF 2024
The world-renowned economist offers a ground-breaking new vision for inclusive prosperity
Left behind places can be found in prosperous countries—from South Yorkshire, integral to the industrial revolution and now England’s poorest county, to Barranquilla, once Colombia’s portal to the Caribbean and now struggling. More alarmingly, the poorest countries in the world are diverging further from the rest of humanity than they were at the start of this century. Why have these places fallen behind? And what can we do about it?
World-renowned development economist Paul Collier has spent his life working in neglected communities. In this book he offers his candid diagnosis of why some regions and countries are failing, and a new vision for how they can catch up. Collier lays the blame for widening inequality on stale economic orthodoxies that prioritize market forces to revive left behind regions, and on the arrogant, hands-off and one-size fits all approach of centralized bureaucracies like the UK Treasury. As a result, Collier argues, the UK has become the most unequal and unfair society in the western world.
Yet the core message of Left Behind is hopeful: bringing together encouraging case studies of recovery from around the world, Collier shows how renewal is achievable through a combination of collective learning, moral leadership and local agency. With keen insight, he draws lessons from such seemingly disparate fields as behavioural psychology, evolutionary biology and moral philosophy to share a bold, galvanizing vision for a more inclusive, prosperous world.
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In this stimulating inquiry, Collier (The Future of Capitalism), a public policy professor at Oxford University, explores how to turn around the fortunes of economically distressed regions. Cautioning against putting too much stock in any single approach, Collier argues that in the 1980s American and British legislators' unfounded confidence in Milton Friedman's monetary ideas caused currency appreciation that resulted in the deindustrialization of such steel towns as Pittsburgh and South Yorkshire. Instead, Collier encourages lawmakers to experiment with what strategies work for their locale, discussing how Chinese statesman Deng Xiaoping transformed his country's economy by assigning a party chief to each of China's 40 districts, requiring each chief to devise methods for meeting a variety of civic goals, and then spreading successful strategies to other districts (though it's an oversight that Collier doesn't discuss what some of those strategies were). Still, the case studies do a competent job of illuminating the myriad factors that contribute to a region's prosperity (or lack thereof), and the takeaways are relatively straightforward. For instance, Collier illustrates the big difference that "little platoons" can make by describing how a group of six people formed the Spanish worker cooperative Mondragon in 1956, which has since grown into a powerhouse that's transformed the Basque region's economy. It's a thought-provoking complement to Nick Romeo's The Alternative.
