I owe Roman Krznaric – his brilliant 2008 paper How Change Happens, written as input to a long-forgotten Oxfam book called ‘From Poverty to Power’, got me thinking about change as a process, a thing in itself. Eight years later (my brain takes its time) I nicked his title for a book. In the intervening years, Roman has become a

I sat down (via Zoom) this week with one of the most interesting observers of China, Yuen Yuen Ang. Her ground-breaking new book, China’s Gilded Age (see my review here), discusses the links between corruption and China’s stellar rise – and the real history of corruption and capitalism. DG: China disproves everything we hear from Western political scientists. People like

A new book from Yuen Yuen Ang is always a cause for celebration. How China Escaped the Poverty Trap, is a brilliant application of systems thinking to the biggest development story of the last half century (review and podcast if you haven’t already digested it). Now she’s turned her attention to a massive conundrum and gaping hole in a lot

I recently skyped Deepak Nayyar, Professor of Economics at India’s Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) to discuss his new book, Resurgent Asia You start with an economist called Gunnar Myrdal, who 50 years ago wrote a book saying that Asia was doomed! Myrdal had a European perspective of Asia, with almost no history. For him, Asia began really at the end of

If you want to step back and think more broadly about Coronavirus, the Universe and Everything, you could do worse than start with Plagues and the Paradox of Progress, by Thomas Bollyky, which combined a ‘germ’s eye view’ of human history with some powerful reflections on the challenges that face us over the coming decades. First the history. The book

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Some books engage and challenge you both emotionally and intellectually, making you feel uncomfortable. You end up arguing with them in your head. A lot. From What is to What If is just such a book, and I really benefited from the argument. In 180 sweetly written pages, Rob Hopkins, environmentalist and founder of the Transition Town movement, makes the

Stop Press: Please take the new FP2P reader survey – we really need your feedback to get new ideas and keep on improving! 2 minutes max (honest). Loved the idea of this Open Access book from the moment I saw the subtitle: ‘Or, A Tale About Why It’s Amazing That Governments Get So Little Credit for Their Many Everyday and

I wrote this before interviewing Branko for yesterday’s podcast, but thought I’d put it up anyway as a companion piece Full disclosure, I am a huge fan of Branko Milanovic, both because of his brilliant analysis of inequality (think Elephant Graph), but also because of his style – a formidable old-school Serbian public intellectual, never happier than when browsing St

I recently sat down with inequality guru Branko Milanovic to discuss his path-breaking work on inequality, and his new book, Capitalism Alone (review follows tomorrow). Here are a few highlights of the 25m conversation (but if you can, listen to the full thing). Inequality: I was not a guru [in the early 2000s], just someone toiling away in the bowels

Lant Pritchett once likened Randomized Controlled Trials (RCTs) to flared jeans. On the way out and soon we’d be wondering what on earth we’d seen in them. Not so fast. Yesterday, three of the leading ‘Randomistas’ won the Nobel economics prize (before the pedants jump in, strictly speaking it’s the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred

Eric Meade consults to nonprofits, foundations, and NGOs and teaches at American University’s School of International Service in Washington, DC. His book, Reframing Poverty: New Thinking and Feeling About Humanity’s Greatest Challenge, invites readers to explore how their emotions about poverty shape their responses to it. We do not like to see other humans suffer. There could be several reasons