How the West was lost

• • John Vidal
  • The Guardian, Saturday 26 February 2011
  • Article history
Dambisa Moyo is a young Zambian-born economist who made her money at Goldman Sachs and her name with Dead Aid, a provocative book about western aid which claimed that rich countries only make things worse for the poor. On this basis she was picked by Time magazine to be one of its 100 most influential people in the world in 2010. That was absurd, and should have been enough to end any promising career, but she has soldiered on and has now written a post-wreck treatise examining how the US economy has collapsed. In its favour, How the West Was Lost is more interesting, wider in scale and more important than Dead Aid. It sketches how, in under 50 years, successive administrations have not just lost America's way but have wilfully handed leadership to the rest of the world in a series of flawed economic policies. Moyo shows well how fundamental economic liberalisation espoused by what she calls the profligate, greedy, self-interested west has come back to bite it.

She clearly despises western free market capitalism, whose economies, she says, are based on ruthlessness, self-interest, and an ability to exploit resources and people from other countries, but her fawning admiration for the state-sponsored Chinese version of capitalism wears thin. Guardian

Comment:  There are better boosk out there. The unbeatable classics on the errors of development were written by Peter Bauer. When it comes to understanding US economic decline a straight-foward analysis is provied my Peter Schiff's recent book on how an economy grows and why it crashes. In order to understand how developments happens, Schumpeter is still one of the best. For a modern analysis of economic growth based on Austrian economics see Petri Kajander's book on Finland.