Political Economy

Where we live impacts our wellbeing - and so is a crucial element in public policy. This book provides an analysis of the research thus far and points to ways in which we can improve everyone's wellbeing through an awareness of the influence of geography.

Since the end of the Cold War, the world has been shaken to its core three times. September 11, 2001, the financial collapse of 2008 and - most of all - COVID-19. Each was an asymmetrical threat, different from anything the world had experienced before. Fareed Zakaria presents te...n surprising, hopeful and vital lessons for recovery in our age of asymmetry. He highlights the importance of investing in healthcare and education, harnessing technology and how to react to America's retreat from leadership on the world stage. COVID-19 has made the old categories of left vs right, democracy vs dictatorship and big vs small government obsolete and highlighted what should have always been the obvious challenge to populism - good government. Sheer competence made all the difference in those countries which dealt with the pandemic best. The future belongs to the smart state. Zakaria's final lesson is to accept the reality of globalization and acknowledge that global crises need international cooperation and global solutions. He passionately argues that we need to continue listening to experts and scientists to tackle climate change. We need to resist our nationalist and isolationist instincts to fight inequality and recognise that we actually have more in common than not. He believes that Aristotle was right - we are social beings with community embedded in our human nature. We want to gather and work, eat, pray, love and mourn together. More than anything we need to build a new world together.
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An analysis of the inescapable fact that Generation Y (and subsequent generations) will be poorer than their parents, and how we should pursue other economic paths.

The extraordinary efforts that took mankind to the moon 50 years ago were more than a scientific feat of aeronautics. They required new forms of collaboration between the public sector (notably, NASA) and private companies. This book asks: what if the same level of boldness - the... boldness that set inspirational goals, took risks and explicitly recognized that this requires large spending but will be worthwhile in terms of long-term growth - was applied to the biggest problems of our time, climate change, disease and inequality, to name only a few? Mariana Mazzucato argues that applying innovation to societal goals and structuring government budgets more explicitly to the long-term, as the moon programme did, we can do government differently.
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Disasters are by their very nature hard to predict. Pandemics, like earthquakes, wildfires, financial crises and wars, are not normally distributed; there is no cycle of history to help us anticipate the next catastrophe. But when disaster strikes, we ought to be better prepared ...than the Romans were when Vesuvius erupted or medieval Italians when the Black Death struck. We have science on our side, after all. Yet the responses of a number of devloped countries to a new pathogen from China were badly bungled. Why? The facile answer is to blame poor leadership. While populist rulers have certainly performed poorly in the face of the pandemic, more profund problems have been exposed by COVID-19. Only when we understand the central challenge posed by disaster in history can we see that this was also a failure of an administrative state and of economic elites that had grown myopic over much longer than just a few years. Why were so many Cassandras for so long ignored? Why did only some countries learn the right lessons from SARS and MERS? Why do appeals to 'the science' often turn out to be mere magical thinking? Drawing from multiple disciplines, including history, economics, public health and network science, Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe is a global post mortem for a plague year. Drawing on preoccupations that have shaped his books for some twenty years, Niall Ferguson describes the pathologies that have done us so much damage: from imperial hubris to bureaucratic sclerosis and online schism. COVID-19 was a test failed by countries who must learn some serious lessons from history if they are to avoid the doom of irreversible decline.
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