A leading liberal economist’s latest book. The wrong assumption, and not hardly questioned by the reviewer, is that socialism and communism existed in modern times. “ Capitalism, Alone demonstrates the limits of studying capitalism’s empirical effects without a theory of how the system actually works—or especially, how it doesn’t.” Surely, without (referring to) theory–the Marxist tenets and analysis–then our description of the socio-economic system that existed in the Soviet Union, would be the mainstream one: socialist/communist. A fundamental pillar of capitalism is the rate of profit, not just profit-making. This also has not been even hinted at. How any form of capitalism that is dominated by private capital invests and therefore achieves growth is determined by the rate of return. “ Where the globalization literature of the 2000s was exultant with promise, Milanovic’s book frankly admits the limitations of actually existing capitalism and resigns itself to making the best of th
“The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion (to which few members of other civilizations were converted) but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.” —Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilisation and the Remaking of the World Order, 1996, p. 51