Left Behind: A New Economics for Neglected Places

In this stimulating inquiry, Collier (The Future of Capitalism), a public policy professor at Oxford University, explores how to turn around the fortunes of economically distressed regions. Cautioning against putting too much stock in any single approach, Collier argues that in the 1980s American and British legislators’ unfounded confidence in Milton Friedman’s monetary ideas caused currency appreciation that resulted in the deindustrialization of such steel towns as Pittsburgh and South Yorkshire. Instead, Collier encourages lawmakers to experiment with what strategies work for their locale, discussing how Chinese statesman Deng Xiaoping transformed his country’s economy by assigning a party chief to each of China’s 40 districts, requiring each chief to devise methods for meeting a variety of civic goals, and then spreading successful strategies to other districts (though it’s an oversight that Collier doesn’t discuss what some of those strategies were). Still, the case studies do a competent job of illuminating the myriad factors that contribute to a region’s prosperity (or lack thereof), and the takeaways are relatively straightforward. For instance, Collier illustrates the big difference that “little platoons” can make by describing how a group of six people formed the Spanish worker cooperative Mondragon in 1956, which has since grown into a powerhouse that’s transformed the Basque region’s economy. It’s a thought-provoking complement to Nick Romeo’s The Alternative. (Aug.)