The Great Global Transformation - by Branko Milanovic (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

From the essential chronicler of the world economy, a portrait of the Great Powers in transition.

The world's two great economic powers are on opposite trajectories. In the United States, decades of neoliberal policies produced a small class of rich elites and gutted the middle class. In China, the same global forces have created a massive new upper class. The result is the greatest reshuffling of global incomes since the Industrial Revolution--a dramatic shakeup of each country's political order. As the two powers retreat from one another, the implications for their futures, and for the world economy, are uncertain.

In The Great Global Transformation, acclaimed economist Branko Milanovic draws on original research to chart how these seismic shifts will shape the next century of the global economy. As both the US and China retreat into protectionism, Milanovic shows how a new and multipolar world order will follow--and how rising nationalism will have dramatically different effects on the two countries. And he shows us the fight ahead: as plutocracy returns, global war threatens, and a new system silently shapes our nations, driving populist discontent to the breaking point.

A worthy successor to Capitalism, Alone and his other landmark works, Milanovic's new book announces the arrival of a new era he terms "national market liberalism," in which liberalism survives in domestic economies, but not necessarily in the social arena. The Great Global Transformation is Milanovic's indispensable account of the new twenty-first century now underway.

Review Quotes

"With compelling evidence and lucid analysis, Branko Milanovic illuminates how neoliberal globalization since the 1980s produced both the rise of super-rich oligarchs in the West and the rise of China. These twin transformations, he argues, ultimately undermined the neoliberal globalization project by fueling nationalist, anti-establishment backlashes across the developed world. This book is essential reading for anyone seeking to grasp and solve the global crisis of our time."--Ho-fung Hung, author of The China Boom: Why China Will not Rule the World

"A provocative tour-de-force, with panoramic sweep and profound insight into the US-China rivalry. Branko Milanovic reshapes how we think about inequality within and among countries and shows how economic power drives the geopolitics of our emerging multipolar world."--Julian Gewirtz, former White House Senior Director for China and Taiwan Affairs and author of Never Turn Back: China and the Forbidden History of the 1980s

"Everyone today--from thinkers, to policy-makers, to citizens and workers--knows that something is happening to the global order, but no one has been able to understand what it is. Now, Branko Milanovic's profound book explains this great global transformation. Simultaneously panoramic and telescopic, Milanovic's explanation ranges across history, philosophy, economics, and politics to illuminate the fortunes of entire nations and of the individual people in them. There is no better account of how we have got to where we are, and no clearer-eyed analysis of where we might go next."
--Daniel Markovits, author of The Meritocracy Trap

"In this incisive new book, Branko Milanovic draws on his unique combination of empirical rigor, philosophical depth, and sharp commentary to illuminate the forces behind the great transformations of our time. Anyone who wants to understand the issues that will decide our future should read it."--Fritz Bartel, author of The Triumph of Broken Promises: The End of the Cold War and the Rise of Neoliberalism

"In this masterful account of The Great Global Transformation, Branko Milanovic combines his deep knowledge of political economy and philosophy and mastery of distributional statistics to the utmost limits of their ability to explain the rise of Asia and the corresponding decline of the West."--James K. Galbraith, The University of Texas at Austin and author, Entropy Economics: The Living Basis of Value and Production

"More than anyone alive, Branko Milanovic was likely to propound a grand theory of our perplexing global moment, rooted in data and facts. With brilliance, panache, and reliability, he has done it in this stellar book. The rise of China has prompted comparable developments across opposed states, as the neoliberal politics of monied elites continue to stoke rage. No one knows what comes next, but no one more than Milanovic has seen more persuasively where we are."--Peter Turchin, author of End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites, and the Path of Political Disintegration

"No one describes better and quantifies with such precision the global transformations now underway than Branco Milanovic. This is a must-read for anyone concerned about the future of the world order."--Gordon Brown, Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

"This latest grand narrative from Blanko Milanovich vividly captures a world at another crossroads, caught in shifting geopolitical and ideological megatrends marked by the phenomenal rise of China and the rise of Nationalism in the West in the last two decades. Liberal democracy is under siege even in the West and in retreat elsewhere. With eloquence, humour, astuteness, and magisterial presentation of quantitative data, Milanovich offers a penetrating tale of how we arrived here in the last fifty years and, most importantly, some critical insights on where we might be heading."--Debin Ma, coeditor The Cambridge Economic History of China

About the Author

Branko Milanovic is research professor and a senior scholar at the Stone Center on Socio-Economic Inequality, City University of New York, as well as visiting professor at the International Inequalities Institute at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He is the author of numerous books, including Visions of Inequality; Capitalism, Alone; and Global Inequality.