Corporate DispatchPro PETER THAL LARSEN VIA REUTERS BREAKINGVIEWS
The false economy of simple solutions What went wrong? Many books have attempted to tackle that question since 2016, when the Brexit referendum and Donald Trump’s U.S. presidential victory threatened to upend the global economic order. Replies tend to fall into two broad categories. One is hand-wringing by anxious liberals, who lament the unravelling of a system that has brought so much peace and prosperity. The other is hand-waving by more conservative writers, who welcome electoral revolts as an overdue reassertion of national sovereignty.
Two new books take a more forensic approach. Martin Sandbu’s “The Economics of Belonging” and “Angrynomics”, by Eric Lonergan and Mark Blyth, offer a clear-eyed analysis of the origins of the malaise. As the titles suggest, the focus is on the economic roots of the upheaval. But the authors are alert to the dismal science’s limitations in explaining why advanced societies left so many people behind. Both books offer detailed and practical ideas for fixing the problem. They are also mercifully short, cramming a wealth of analysis and insight into a few hundred pages each. Most of “Angrynomics” consists of a dialogue between Lonergan, a macro hedge fund manager, and Blyth, a professor of international political economy at Brown University. The conceit keeps the reader’s attention as the authors race through decades of economic history. The main objective of “The Economics of Belonging” is to defend globalisation, which even many liberals now blame for the political backlash. In a style that will be familiar to readers of his Financial Times columns, Sandbu dismantles the conventional view, arguing that the hollowing out of manufacturing jobs owes more to 35
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