Dambisa Moyo, Farrar, Straus & Giroux (226 pages, $25)
Dambisa Moyo, a former Goldman Sachs analyst with a doctorate from Oxford, offers up a well-reasoned look at how the world’s most advanced nations are squandering their economic lead — and how they might survive by fighting Chinese fire with fire. Some of Moyo’s proposals are, by her own admission, drastic. The U.S. could, she says, opt for “nuclear options,” protectionist measures including a debt default.
Moyo doesn’t lay all the blame on China. Far from it. The backbone of this book, and the best reason for reading it, is her examination of how the U.S. has lost economic ground by grossly misallocating capital, labor and technology.
Moyo walks the reader through the troubling evidence of America’s slide and China’s ascent.The book offers Western politicians a prescription for stopping the rot. Yet something tells me that they’ll just keep temporizing until the next financial crisis boils up. James Pressley, Bloomberg News
