Dambisa Moyo brings an urgent call for economic reform with How the West Was Lost
The world financial crisis of 2008 has an almost unlimited number of commentators. Honestly, pretty much anyone who was breathing and older than a teenager in 2008 has an opinion on the subject. You might think Dambisa Moyo’s How The West Was Lost would be one of the most technical of the analyses, coming from an Oxford-trained economist. But instead it’s a clear and fairly elegant exploration of the most basic mistakes in thought that led to the catastrophe.
In her eyes, “The events of 2008 were the inevitable consequence of fault lines and shifts in economic tectonic plates that lay undetected under the seemingly calm financial waters upon which Western economies had sailed smoothly for the last half-century.”
It’s not that Moyo is saying anything earth-shaking, this isn’t a radical change in economic thinking or analysis. But she’s saying it well, with a concise, clear style that appeals. This is clearly not a book for other economists, but is for the intelligent layperson who can understand very basic mathematical examples. What Moyo does well is repetition of her primary points, and clearly dismantling and labelling the component parts of a financial crisis so that the astute reader can digest them. In broad strokes, it puts the financial crisis of 2008 in a terrifyingly simple light.
And what that light shines on most often, according to Moyo, is fundamental misunderstandings made by everyone involved in the modern system of finance, even down to the individual who misunderstands the difference between the things he controls through amassing debt and the things he actually owns.
The book places the American decline in a world perspective where poor economic choices were mirrored by careful strategies of economic gain by developing nations, namely China and India. She delves into some analyses of things like world energy supplies, overpopulation and political struggle, but these feel cursory, like paragraphs in a textbook. But simplicity is this book’s payoff, and so a little underrepresentation is a small price to pay in the end.
Moyo reads this Friday in Ottawa, another quality event from the International Writers Festival.
As published in the Ottawa XPress Feb 24, 2011: http://www.ottawaxpress.ca/books/books.aspx?iIDArticle=21292
