Branko Milanovic, Capitalism Alone: The Future of the System that Rules the World

Excerpt

Branco Milanovic cannot be accused of being an unthinking cheerleader of Washington-Consensus-style economic moralizing. While working for the World Bank, he stood out as someone who worried about inequality well before this was either profitable or popular. And so it is noteworthy that he should have written this book, published in 2019, which has as its topic the near-universal triumph of the capitalist system. Milanovic is an economist unusually familiar with the classics, including but not limited to Marx, and that knowledge is on display in this volume. The economic and social theorists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries with whom he engages here not only analysed capitalism, but speculated about, predicted, longed for, or worried about its eventual demise. Accordingly, it is doubly noteworthy that at no point in this book does Milanovic seriously contemplate the possibility that capitalism will eventually be done away with. Rather, his focus is on varieties of capitalism, the problems inherent in them, and their future prospects. The impression that one is left with is that while it may evolve in the future as it has done in the past, global capitalism is here to stay. …