How The West Was Lost: Fifty Years of Economic Folly – and the Stark Choices Ahead, by Dambisa Moyo
In her new book, How the West was Lost, economist Dambisa Moyo nearly pulls off one of the more difficult tricks in non-fiction: She almost convinced to me stop holding a position that both she and I correctly hold.
Her argument, which is also mine, is that China, India and the rest of the developing economies are on a rapid rise. At the same time, developed economies are slowing, in part because of size, in part because of debt and demographics, with the result being a steady shift in global economic leadership, with Brazil and China ascendant, and the United States and Europe declining.
This argument has become, of course, full-employment fodder for the econo-speaker circuit. The rise of East and decline of the West is all the rage at Davos and the like. More important, it's a proved path to Niall Fergusonian $80,000 speaking gigs. It's newly good to be an international economist.
Enter Dambiso Moyo. She is an Oxford-educated PhD in economics, ex-Goldman Sachs, African and comely, making her a quintuple threat in pop econo-circles. She has the background and smarts to opine smartly on this rise/fall subject. Sadly, however, judging by her new book, she is bored by logic, incapable of writing an interesting sentence, and lazy.
It's too bad, because this is an important subject. Developing markets (China, Russia, India, Brazil) have more people and are growing quickly; developed markets (the United States, Europe) have fewer people and are growing slowly. It is, therefore, simple math that, all else being equal (or ceteris paribus, as the never-met-a-Latinate-expression-she-didn't-overuse Moyo would write) that developing market economies will catch up with developed markets. How the developed world will respond to declining economic dominance is one of the more important questions of the 21st century.
Most non-partisan economists think that the rise of the East will be good for the West – a rising tide lifts all boats, as Moyo might write. But she isn't convinced it will be that neat. She thinks that trade tensions will rise further, that resource scarcity is going to create Malthusian scares and, most important, that the West – okay, the United States – has forgotten how to dig deep and compete. Its education system is failing; it wants to have Sweden's social safety net while paying Hong Kong's personal taxes. She's not wrong, even if her gong-ringing, sandwich-board-wearing approach to making her case becomes like a five-hour flight beside someone with their iPod on too loud.
Where Moyo toddles off from here, however, is into a padded room of her own writing. She bounces from topic to topic, pops off contradictions, and slaps Post-it notes on her own forehead. Say this! Be sure to say that too! Oh, don't forget to insert that point! This book, in its incoherence, reads less like a book than like a first-year MBA's study notes for the next day's case class on international economics.
I'll give an example, so you get a flavour. Moyo makes a relentless case through two-thirds of the book for China's eventual economic dominance. It has more people. It's more determined. Its government is more able to get things done. Then she does a complete flip-flop, warning that democracies are actually much more effective than economies like China's. Which is it? It's not clear that she has decided, or that she even reads what she writes, so she flits back and forth between both, like a hummingbird with attention deficit disorder.
Examples of this sort of rhetorical pastiche are legion. Moyo will take a position from the Niall Ferguson column, another from the Milton Friedman column, connect them up, race off to The Economist or Wikipedia for a few examples, and there you have it: Just add over-used verbiage and you've got another chapter in this brief book done. And that is a big part of the problem – it feels less written than assembled.
And the problems are compounded by her writing style. The book slams together clichés and MBA-class abbreviations like so many railway cars on a siding: Bam! Bam! BATNA! Next thing you know we have sentences where there is a "tide of drugs" being "parcelled-out" at "knock-down prices." Did she even read this while she was writing it? Because reading it made me consider taking out cognitive disability insurance, not to mention making me feel terrible for agreeing with her about pretty much anything.
I blame Niall Ferguson for this. In the same way the Freakonomics books convinced a generation of economists to write books about the "Economics of XYZ," Ferguson's success writing for a popular audience about the confluence of history, politics and economics has apparently convinced every economist alive to write about the decline of the West. They don't really want you to read the books, of course. They just want to have written them, so that they, like Ferguson, can get some of that speaking-gig action. This book is Moyo saying, "Pick me." I hope no one does.
Paul Kedrosky is a senior fellow at the Kauffman Foundation and editor of Infectious Greed, a popular financial blog.