Economic Policy

Download How the West Was Lost: Fifty Years of Economic Folly - And by Dambisa Moyo PDF

By Dambisa Moyo

In How the West used to be Lost, the New York Times bestselling writer Dambisa Moyo deals a daring account of the decline of the West's monetary supremacy. She examines how the West's mistaken monetary judgements have ended in an monetary and geopolitical seesaw that's now poised to tip in want of the rising international, particularly China.

Amid the hype of China's upward thrust, notwithstanding, crucial tale of our iteration is being brushed off: the US is not only in monetary decline, yet on the right track to develop into the most important welfare nation within the background of the West. the true risk is a thome, Moyo claims. whereas a few international locations – resembling Germany and Sweden – have intentionally engineered and financed welfare states, the us dangers turning itself right into a bloated welfare kingdom no longer as a result of ideology or a bigger imaginative and prescient of financial justice, yet out of monetary desperation and short-sighted policymaking. How the West used to be Lost finds not just the industrial myopia of the West but in addition the novel options that it must undertake for you to assert itself as an international fiscal energy as soon as again.

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Extra info for How the West Was Lost: Fifty Years of Economic Folly - And the Stark Choices Ahead

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As an economy India too was surprisingly buoyant during the early 1800s. Although the Indian economy had declined from its position in 1700, when its share of world GDP matched both China’s and Europe’s (at around 23 per cent), by 1820 it still had a dominant position with a share of 16 per cent thanks to a healthy export base of tea, cotton and spices and to the rapidly expanding opium trade. And, indeed, from 1870 to 1913 nearly 50,000 kilometres (31,250 miles) of new railway lines were laid down – roughly ten times the distance between New York and the coast of California.

But, politically, militarily and economically America won hands down. The war was, in the most perverse sense, a resounding success. America came out of the Second World War hugely rich. ’ By the middle of the 1950s America was financing the rebuilding of post-war Europe and beyond, while at the same time establishing itself as the foremost exporter of cultural norms and technological know-how. It was going to be America’s century, and indeed it was. Not only had the USA avoided direct collateral damage on its own soil (saving the outlay of potentially billions of dollars to rebuild its own infrastructure), the very fact that America could win the war, bankroll its allies during the war and institute the Marshall Plan (aid to Europe worth US$100bn in today’s terms, which was around 5 per cent of the 1948 US GDP) demonstrates just how enormously wealthy the country had become.

But there is a bigger story to be told. It is a mistake to view what happened as an isolated and relatively contained episode. 2 For many a political scientist, this shift has troubling hegemonic consequences. To them, whether we live in a uni-polar world (for example, where the US dominates), a bi-polar world of, say, the Cold War era, or a multi-polar world governed by a multiplicity of states with differing political ideologies, is a matter of supreme importance. But viewed through the narrow utilitarian prism of an economist, what matters most is economic prosperity (for the West, coupled with freedoms), rather than who ultimately rules the world.

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