Penguin How The West Was LO$T

How the West was Lost begins with a telling anecdote: a group of businessmen are presenting to a customer. One, a Westerner, spends twenty minutes extolling the technical sophistication, superb design and matchless reliability of her product. She sits down, and her place is taken by a Chinese businessman, who says simply: ‘We can do all this, for 40% of their price.’

It is difficult to be certain exactly when the West collectively decided to lie back, take things easy and hand supremacy to the emerging economies of the East, notably China. Perhaps it wasn’t a conscious decision – the West, after all, continues to delude itself about its technological, moral and cultural superiority over ‘the Rest’.

Dambisa Moyo, a Zambian-born, Western educated economist, is having none of this, arguing that the root of this shift of power lies in a series of political and economic choices made by Western governments, consumers and business people. These choices will, within the next 40 years, see the world dominated economically, politically and possibly militarily, by currently emerging economies.

How has this come about? In Moyo’s view, the West responded to globalisation and the emergence of new technologies after the Second World War by foregoing saving and investment to leverage for itself an elevated and unearned current standard of living instead. This was largely paid for by developing world savings, channelled through a series of real estate and increasingly unproductive investment bubbles.

Two things are lacking, however. First, is a political economy analysis of how and why this self-indulgent short-termism came to dominate public policy. Her answers to this question are mostly functionalist ones: because economic self-interest was subordinated to military and political grandstanding. And her solutions are occasionally alarming: at times suggesting that democracy should be abandoned so that policy can be implemented more efficiently without having to bother with tiresome things like public opinion. Also missing is a historical sense of how regimes inevitably rise and fall. Although she tries not to, Moyo seems to treat Western decline as absolute when it may just be relative and natural – such is the vehemence of her broadsides against its leaders.