Paul Collier is the Professor of Economics and Public Policy at the Oxford Blavatnik School of Government. He is the author of The Bottom Billion, which won the Lionel Gelber Prize and the Arthur Ross Prize awarded by the Council on Foreign Relations, The Plundered Planet, Exodus and Refuge (with Alexander Betts). Collier has served as Director of the Research Department of the World Bank, and consults with the German and many other governments around the world.
Collier is one of the UK's most distinguished economists. In this important book, he analyses what has gone wrong with contemporary capitalism, focusing on the growing divide between the educated and the less educated and between booming metropolis and the declining provinces. Rejecting the illusions of the ideologues and the populists, he puts forward pragmatic, provocative and perceptive ways to deliver widely shared prosperity, by restoring an ethical basis to our national politics, companies and families. -- Martin Wolf, The Best Books of 2018 * Financial Times * I'm a big fan of Paul Collier. When I saw that The Future of Capitalism was about the polarization we're seeing in the U.S., Europe, and other places, I was eager to see what he had to say. I'm glad I did. The Future of Capitalism is an ambitious and thought-provoking book. . . . I think he is right more often than not. Ultimately, I agree with him that 'capitalism needs to be managed, not defeated.' -- Bill Gates, Summer Reading Recommendations 2019 These times are in desperate need of Paul Collier's insights. The Future of Capitalism restores common sense to our views of morality, as it also describes their critical role in what makes families, organizations, and nations work. It is the most revolutionary work of social science since Keynes. Let's hope it will also be the most influential -- George Akerlof, Nobel Laureate in Economics, 2001 For me the most gripping [2018 book on capitalism] was Paul Collier's The Future of Capitalism: a deep exploration of the ethical institutions underlying our market society -- and an impassioned argument about how to restore them. -- Jesse Norman * The New Statesman * Collier has set for himself [the task] to re-establish the ethical character of social democracy. This is an important book for anyone concerned at the state of modern politics and our liberal democracies. -- Jon Cruddas MP This book is not an easy read but it is an important one - the revenge of the clever provincial biting the metropolitan hand that has fed him so generously. -- David Goodhart * Evening Standard * In this bold work of intellectual trespass, Paul Collier, a distinguished economist, ventures onto the terrain of ethics to explain what's gone wrong with capitalism, and how to fix it. To heal the divide between metropolitan elites and the left-behind, he argues, we need to rediscover an ethic of belonging, patriotism, and reciprocity. Offering inventive solutions to our current impasse, Collier shows how economics at its best is inseparable from moral and political philosophy' -- Michael Sandel, author of What Money Can’t Buy and Justice For thirty years, the centre left of politics has been searching for a narrative that makes sense of the market economy. This book provides it -- John Kay, Fellow of St John's College, Oxford and the author of Obliquity and Other People's Money For well-to-do metropolitans, capitalism is the gift that goes on giving. For others, capitalism is not working. Paul Collier deploys passion, pragmatism and good economics in equal measure to chart an alternative to the divisions tearing apart so many western countries. -- Mervyn King, former Governor of the Bank of England