Bill Gates's Five Books for Summer Reading 2019
From world-renowned economist Paul Collier, a candid diagnosis of the
failures of capitalism and a pragmatic and realistic vision for how we
can repair it.
Deep new rifts are tearing apart the fabric of the United States and
other Western societies: thriving cities versus rural counties, the
highly skilled elite versus the less educated, wealthy versus developing
countries. As these divides deepen, we have lost the sense of ethical
obligation to others that was crucial to the rise of post-war social
democracy. So far these rifts have been answered only by the revivalist
ideologies of populism and socialism, leading to the seismic upheavals
of Trump, Brexit, and the return of the far-right in Germany. We have
heard many critiques of capitalism but no one has laid out a realistic
way to fix it, until now.
In a passionate and polemical book, celebrated economist Paul Collier
outlines brilliantly original and ethical ways of healing these
rifts--economic, social and cultural--with the cool head of pragmatism,
rather than the fervor of ideological revivalism. He reveals how he has
personally lived across these three divides, moving from working-class
Sheffield to hyper-competitive Oxford, and working between Britain and
Africa, and acknowledges some of the failings of his profession.
Drawing on his own solutions as well as ideas from some of the world's
most distinguished social scientists, he shows us how to save capitalism
from itself--and free ourselves from the intellectual baggage of the
twentieth century.
